That happened in the wealthy San Diego County enclave of Solana Beach, where the Pearl was cut from 18 apartments to 10 and its approval required an underground garage with 53 parking spots.<50cc scooters are subject to different -- usually lower -- registration, insurance, inspection, and licensing requirements than cars.
State-minimum insurance for my cheap (KBB ~$1000) used (+200K miles) car would be about $700/year. Similarly minimal insurance for a 2010 Honda Ruckus would be $100/year. (I just checked Geico.)
Small motorcycles consume a lot less gasoline than cars, especially old, cheap ones being driven in-city.
Spare parts for scooters can be purchased and shipped cheaply, and assembled in a minimum of space with cheap hand tools.
Scooters don't require a full parking space to store. They can be stashed against signs, at bike racks, next to doors, in tiny alleys, or any other free spot. Living with other people? You don't need to worry about blocking the driveway, or being blocked yourself. Work downtown? You can get away without buying a pass at a parking garage.
Truth be told I had a loud muffler back when I could barely afford my share of a three way apt rental. Nowadays I would find it hard to tolerate the noise I caused back then. But that was a diff neighborhood and it was accepted.
This won't work in the US for various reasons, but it may work in other places where they can move people accordingly.
I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's the common refrain yes.
https://goo.gl/maps/X1MN673Pwc57eS2C9
It's a tiny ( by CA standards ) town right on the beach and most non-service jobs are a crowded commute away. I don't object to having affordable housing everywhere, but if I wanted to build some in San Diego county, it's about the last place I would go.
It'd be the equivalent to trying to build affordable housing next to Central Park in NYC or Waikiki in Hawaii. Its great to try but don't make a big fuss when it is expensive.
A slight exaggeration. The Pearl site is only a 5-minute walk from the train station. Other than that yes, grossly uneconomical. As to your question "why": State of California mandate enforced on all incorporated cities, waste of money or no.
And this is why other ritzy areas have no interest in incorporating as cities proper. Rancho Santa Fe has a "Covenant" that performs usual city functions to the maximum extent legally possible e.g. private security guards, while dodging State mandates.
In addition to San Francisco I've lived in the US South, the Northeast an in Europe. And out of all those regions I feel the Bay Area has been the most conservative and discordant. It's really a shame how a combination of the Byzantine legal processes and small cadres who know and shape the system have created a tyranny of the minority in the Bay Area and San Francisco in particular.
This same distinction also applies to the type of startup that gets founded in each place. South Bay attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a technical change in the world - Google, Apple, Netflix, hardware companies like NVidia and Memorex, drone startups, large scale enterprise software like Cloudera or Palantir. San Francisco attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a social change: AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zynga, Bird, Lime, Twitter, Medium, etc. Notable exceptions are Facebook (social change but in the South Bay, though they've also built a top-notch technology org) and DropBox (technical, but in SF).
I'm genuinely curious how you are seeing Nextdoor activity outside of your own Nextdoor neighborhood, given that How Nextdoor limits participants by neighborhood and verifies addresses before you can even read postings. I can't even find an option to see other neighborhoods. As my mom was dying and I was helping to find resources and later sell her stuff, the only way I could get access was to register with her address and then wait for the coded postcard.
e: I can't get the direct link to work properly, but press the blue "Search lots of books" button and it will work.
I also think the common framing as freeways "cutting a path through neighborhoods" is exactly the wrong way to look at it. San Francisco's, for example, were based on this 1935 traffic study. The whole point was to get already-existing traffic up off the streets and keep neighborhoods livable: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5409261018/in/album-...
There's (unfortunately) a real-world example I can point to showing this still holds up in the 21st Century. The northernmost part of the Central Freeway carried more than 50% crosstown (non-neighborhood) traffic in San Francisco but was torn down in the very early 2000s and replaced with the horrible Octavia Blvd that keeps killing cyclists and has made neighborhood traffic worse in every way, even necessitating crosswalk closures. Here's the full study on before and after the "Freeway Removal" (now there's a dogwhistle for ya!) https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/Final%20Re...
"In the absence of meaningful improvements to travel improvements, the reduction in automobile capacity has not been accompanied by noticeable mode shift. Instead, the neighborhood has been challenged to effectively deal with high peak‐period traffic levels and resulting congestion"
1 - https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o.... (Proposed rail lines for BART, 1961)
that said, CEQA challenges have become a de facto tool in the nimby arsenal in CA.
http://www.sausalitohistoricalsociety.com/new-blog/2018/3/7/...
'The decisive blow against growth was initiated in 1971 with the issuance of a Marin Planning Department report that proposed preserving Marin's lands except along the Highway 101 corridor. Entitled "Can the Last Place Last?" the report took its theme from Lew Welch's 1969 poem "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings" The poem lamented the "hordes" that were "now piling up" and contained a refrain that captured perfectly the sentiment in Marin: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go."'
https://www.belle-aurore.com/mike/2013/05/bolinas-vigilante-...