Dumb rules prevent Silicon Valley from building needed houses and offices
slate.com
slate.com
The insanity runs deeper when matched to their obsession with having more people use public transit. Public transit doesn't work in a low-density suburb larger than some states in New England. In typical fashion, the left-hand bans all development that would allow public transit to be usable and the right-hand insists that people should stop driving and take public transit. This is just one example; Silicon Valley is full of fundamentally inconsistent bureaucratic mandates.
This is one of those classic denial-of-reality cases that give Americans their famously low opinion of government. In some cases, it is entrenched special interests demanding these things; the sum of these policies may be insane but the politicians do not care as long as the special interests are happy.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this amazingly focused and insightful comment you've written.
The article, and this response is very frustrating to me. The notion that the government is broken and that our policies are insane and that politicians don't care just does not match my personal experience. Yes, there are many, many problems -- from the garden variety to the wickedly complex. I can however comfortably say that Palo Alto is generally run by decent, intelligent people responsible to an engaged, accessible city council.
Available and affordable housing for example, is and has been part of the city plan, done in coordination with the Association of Bay Area Governments[1], who develop regional growth projections and plans[2] that cities are required to incorporate into their general plans. These plans are created in concert with regional transportation, environmental, etc. plans. How the growth is managed within each city is up to the city of course -- and that's where the NIMBY and rich vs. poor issues are played out on the ground. I find it absolutely challenging and amazing to see (and be part of) the balancing of the various factors to actually govern. There are winners and losers in every decision, and it's important to remember that we're not playing a one-round, zero-sum game.
I can't say anything about the state and federal governments -- but it's easy to get involved and make a contribution at the city level, and absolutely will be enlightening. The first step in conquering the "denial of reality" problem you complain about seems to me to be understanding how cities actually work, and then working to make some constructive improvements.
[1] http://www.abag.ca.gov/housing-top.html
[2] http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/pdfs/SFHousingNeedsPlan.pdf [PDF]Read the original article. Edward Glaeser also discusses Silicon Valley in his book The Triumph of the City.
Here's my suggestion for constructive improvement: Ignore existing residents' concerns about "quality of life" and allow builders to construct high-density housing. This will have the effect of increasing housing stock and making housing more affordable, without having to regulate affordable housing in special cases that almost always end up pleasing nobody.
Some city plans include provisions for some affordable housing, but that misses the point of the article. The point is about housing supply: creating a few units of "affordable" housing and requiring them to be sold below market to income-qualified people doesn't address the supply problem at all. It just changes the distributional effects of the supply problem a tiny bit.
The claim is not that politicians are stupid, exactly, it's that bay area incumbent residents, collectively, have made stupid land-use decisions. As long as you own real estate here, and the value of your home keeps going up, why would you complain? You'd only have a problem if you were trying to move here, or if you're trying to recruit here, or if you have the imagination to see all the increased economic activity that would occur if the housing supply problem was solved. And most residents don't have the ability to see that.
Think outside the box .. but the nature of the valley is that everyone thinks inside it .. Go figure.
After some observations, A visiting friend commented : You have some of the highest paid/intelligent people in the U.S located here yet they live no better than the garbage man in other states... I don't know if this is incredibly stupid or smart.
I expect that in its heyday, Detroit's auto industry had a similar synergy. Manhattan's finance, creative and ad industries do, as with other financial and creative centers. Hollywood is Hollywood for similar reasons as well.
Silicon Valley is also helped enormously by California's extremely strong protection against exploitative non-compete agreements. This is fairly unique in the United States, and is the very first thing any region needs to address in trying to become "another Silicon Valley" but none do, typically in an attempt to be employer-friendly.
Yes, and it's not physical density but time-to-get-there that matters. That said, it's impossible to provide the latter without either (a) making living arrangements more dense, or (b) providing an efficient rapid-transit infrastructure, which usually leads to urbanization.
Silicon Valley is also helped enormously by California's extremely strong protection against exploitative non-compete agreements.
Bingo.
but none do, typically in an attempt to be employer-friendly.
I agree. That's bizarre but quite interesting, because kowtowing to employers on microgripes means they miss out on something far more important (to their long-term interest) than whether they can enforce noncompetes: whether they can find talent at all.
It certainly did. Unfortunately, the most innovative idea to come out of the autombile industry - the assembly line - had the subsequent effect of destroying innovative learning and thinking on a vast scale. Detroit became a one-industry city and that industry demanded a large, mostly unskilled workforce inimical to the kind of entrepreneurial activity that might otherwise have diversified Detroit's economy.
All of the good places to live in the USA are balls-expensive, because there aren't very many of them.
Berlin's great this time of year.
The Upper Midwest (Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor) is great if you can get an interesting job there. The weather isn't as bad as it sounds and the cities themselves are beautiful (although I wouldn't recommend most of the suburbs).
I grew up in Detroit and spent a lot of time traveling and working around the midwest, and those kinds of places are exactly what I envision when I think of unlivable American cities. They simply don't have the density to support the kind of scenes that make living in a city fun. Chicago is borderline, but the car thing and the snow thing totally ruin it. The parts of the city that are close to anything fun are expensive to live in.
Fact is, any state with a default 2AM bar/club time is at a severe disadvantage.
I think the list for the US at the moment is NYC, SF, and perhaps maybe Seattle or Portland - but I haven't been to the northwest so I can't comment directly.
There's a lot more to Chicago, and if that's your take on it you obviously haven't spent much time here. It has an incredibly diverse and vibrant nightlife.
Also, the notion that if you live in Chicago it's because you weren't "smart enough to make it to the coasts" is incredibly insulting and narrow-minded.
I hardly ever drink, and not very much when I do.
By "good places" of course you mean places that you've hard about in Berlin, right?
I won't go to the Valley, and it's been worth it. I'm north of Houston right now. Had a chance at a really compelling Valley gig last year, with an awesome boss and turned it down purely because of location.
We as a culture have traded "making a comfortable living" for "making a killing".
And, by other people's, it's a terrible place to live because you have to drive everywhere. As "The Soul of the Commuter" describes, driving makes people unhappier in almost every possible way: more socially isolated, fatter, and less connected to their communities: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_... .
Las Vegas is a great recent example of too much over-optimistic growth being followed by a devastating bust and urban decay.
1) urban sprawl, which means
2) more land being used inefficently (wasted) and
3) more hours of life commuting (wasted), which leads to
4) more need for cars, leading to
5) more hours in congestion (wasted)
6) poorer people getting the worst of those points above, making
7) building public transport even more political feasable, while
8) public transport is the least efficient in low-density areas (wasted)
One could say that the decay of Detroit is at least contained in terms of space. Also, just because a bust is to be expected, it doesn't mean that people should be deprived of Jobs that never come to existance due to handicapped growth.
Low density is what made the emptying so contagious and the costs so unsustainable. Low density requires continual growth to pay for the long utility runs and the long service routes for everything from busses to police patrols to trash pickup. And because service erodes as buildings empty, more buildings empty. And when the remaining 20 or 30% of your population is scattered, it's very hard to introduce new businesses or retrench old ones to serve them. The erosion is almost impossible to contain without Flint-style abandoning of large swaths of area and relocation programs for anyone who remains. (Detroit has been trying similar, but it's expensive and slow.)
I don't know much about SF and the valley and I'll refrain from commenting there. But you guys know demonstrably nothing about Detroit and you may want to follow the example.
Of course, it takes money to attract new people to a city, but I think it can be done if the cost of doing business (i.e., cheap office space, business taxes, access to skilled labor, etc.) is attractive.
(For the record, I grew up in the Bay Area, if it matters.)
However, 30% of a lot seems small for a high density area.
I don't have the answer - and I notice that you don't really offer one - but I know that the answer is not to throw out all our laws in a short-sighted imitation of some polluted Chinese metropolis.
Not really. See Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High, and Ryan Avent's The Gated City for more; pay particularly close attention to the sections about how urban life tends to be far more sustainable than alternatives.
As all four books point out, there's basically no intellectual case to be made in favor of low height limits, strict parking requirements, and lot setbacks in urban or heavily urbanizing places. The only "case", such as it is, comes from NIMBYism and existing landlords or landowners who are seeking to nominally protect their perceived investment.
But all that's not the same thing as adding skyscrapers today's mid-Peninsula. Most of these responses are coming from an idealistic blank-sheet mindset. In the real world, we don't have the option to start from scratch.
The problem is far from being solved. However, it's true that the pollution per inhabitant is much lower than in the Silicon Valley.
I also know it can be much better.
I left Montreal to go to "30 year recession" Japan and the difference is night and day. I don't believe in the future of Japan, but I am even more skeptical of Quebec's. Bringing it up as a success story makes me doubt your comment, eventhough I strongly want to believe what you said.
It may be falling down and overrun with student protesters but at least it is not the never ending soulless sprawl that is Toronto.
If the government cannot confront organized crime and its parasitic presence in its construction requisition system, it is basically engaging in selective budgetary restraint - which means it doesn't believe it "really" has to engage in budgetary restraint. Mind you, the budget problems are real - but attacking soft, weak targets means the gov't doesn't believe it.
It is easier to ask for sacrifice when you are seen as having tried to avoid it. That didn't happen. Now we see the inevitable outcome, and the media spin on it is shameful.
My personal belief is that Jean Charest's administration will be remembered akin to Nero's, except that JC's administration will actually deserve the dishonour.
"Le déclin inexorable de la ville de Montréal
C'est pas ma faute
C'est la faute du fédéral!"
You had poor people living in rookeries and tenements up against the wall of the smoke and pollution belching dark satanic mills. So philanthropic reforming politicians introduced zoning laws to separate industry and housing and move all the people out to fresh air of the suburbs.
100 years later it's not too much of an issue to have your air-conditioned condo tower in the same zip code as your air conditioned office tower - but the rules still apply.
The downtown core here is ringed with self-store, car lots, freight terminals and other low rent low density industry. While the area around every suburban transit station is ringed by condo towers.
But you can't build in the industrial zone around downtown because of planning rules and taxes. Amazingly you pay 20% tax to build on a brown field site and nothing to bulldoze trees in the suburbs.
For water, the problem is the same.
More to your point, dense cities can be much more sustainable than suburbs. Money spent on infrastructure benefits more people. People living in apartment buildings use less energy for heating and cooling. Commuting doesn't necessarily require a car so you use less fossil fuels.