That means more jobs open up and makes the place more lively. More desireable.
That means the house property value will go up.
They are thinking "will this make the property value go down in the next 5 years"? vs "will this make the property value skyrocket in the next 10 years".
We are catering to short-term gains at the expense of long-term.
Bay Area has plenty of this type. Many of them already have had property value skyrocket (50K -> 2M is not uncommon), so they can just have both (high property values, and preserve their neighborhood exactly as they want it).
I think they should be forced to choose one or the other. Keep their SFH and say no to FANG, or accept townhomes and condos to balance out the new jobs.
I think commercial property just doesn't burden the city. A Google office has private security, a fire suppression system, and doesn't house kids who need to attend the school district.
People essentially want to be surrounded by people of almost exactly their economic class to somewhat richer. To rich and stores they can’t afford to stay ie gentrification, to poor and you have to move ie white flight.
As to driving prices down, some houses in good condition are selling for ~25-50k which would be worth more basically anywhere else in the US.
The transition within a city is rarely about some specific employer shutting down. The more general case is homes age and different areas become attractive over time. You can find areas where nearly identical homes where build across a wide area, yet one community falls into disrepair while another becomes desirable simply based on school zoning.
A house that a doctor and a lawyer are competing to buy is going to be go for more than the one an auto mechanic and a fireman are competing for.
Every real estate website has school ratings for each house listing because it is such a sought after amenity.
I lived in an area that, for years, refused to let an old railroad track be converted into a trail because it would connect a working class area of the town to an upper middle class area via a miles-long footpath.
But, in existing zones? Maybe not - you'd have to convince people to change residential to commercial/retail. And changes to parking minimums, which always seem to screw up projects (they almost always require more parking than a "free market" would dictate).
Stop trying to tell people what they ought to want. Not everyone agrees.
But it feels like (in SF at least) we have people with conflicting goals: they want to live in a city, but they want their experience to be similar to suburbia.
I want to live in a city and for it to actually feel like an urban environment! I want to walk everywhere for my day-to-day needs, and take transit for everything else. I want to sell my car and rent one only for the times I want to leave the city. But we're in this weird middle state where that often doesn't work. My guess is that the only place in the US where it really does work is NYC, and then maybe even only really in Manhattan.
It's probably the case that it's the only place in the country where it's considered perfectly normal as an adult not to own a car even if you have plenty of money.
There are--especially given Zipcar/Uber/etc.--other cities where people can get buy without owning a car, especially if it's a young post-college lifestyle. But it probably requires organizing your life around not owning a car to a certain degree.
I have been told that central Washington D.C. and Chicago are also very transit and pedestrian friendly. It is not a requirement to own a car in those places.
Many jobs are in the suburban areas near metros rather than in metros themselves. SV is somewhat unusual in that a large swath of suburban area is as expensive or more expensive than in the city itself. This isn't the case with a lot of cities.
People tend to work away from where they live (at least for high paying jobs) and prefer having ample space at home therefore I don't think higher density would increase property value as you stated.
Once you get into the $500-$1MM range density falls again, as these are the McMansions in suburbia. Density keeps dropping as price goes down until you get into the slums territory, which are basically the pockets of urban blight that haven't been redeveloped yet.
Not even. Near here, there was a proposal from the city to increase middle-density housing.
They hired economic forecasters. Their projection, that property values would "decrease" from 13% YOY increases (we are in one of the highest increasing cities in the country) to 9% YOY.
In other words, you'd still see your home value _increasing_ 53% in five years (versus 84%), not decreasing...
... and people still acted like the city wanted to shoot their first-born in the streets.