Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.
Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few years since I noticed.
I have a hard time accepting the "in part" even, and sort of align with "the only reason it's expensive is because of the closeness to SV".
But yes it is very nice. And yes billboards would make it less nice.
Large numbers of high paying jobs are necessary for high housing prices except in tax havens like Monaco.
One summer a job was across the our small lake, a 40 minute drive by car, but maybe 10 minutes by boat as the crow flies. Sure, I got wet during rain and wavy days, but clothes get dry, and it sure was convenient.
I often wondered, if the job was in SF itself, do people take boats to get to work? If so, why not? I presume docking costs? The place I worked had their own dock, so ... "sure, just tie up over there every day".
https://www.goldengate.org/ferry/schedules-maps/
https://www.blueandgoldfleet.com/sausalito/
I don't know of anyone using or having used a private boat to make the commute.
He was OK but apparently the was a lot of boat theft in that area too.
At another job, the project manager lived in WA but worked in Palo Alto. He flew (commercial) in early Monday, with a small apartment to live in during the week, then take off mid-afternoon Friday to be back in WA with his family for the weekend.
<https://marinmagazine.com/community/history/history-of-a-hig...>
At least one billboard, along 101 at the highway cut between San Rafael and Larkspur, survived until the late 1970s or early 1980s, but was burned down in what has been described as the closest an act of arson has come to earning an award of commendation by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
More recently, a "flower billboard" was created, and in 2010 removed, along US-101 in Novato:
<https://www.marinij.com/2010/08/24/controversial-flower-bill...>
(That article also places the county-wide ban more recently, in the 1970s.)
Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short things that actually improve life for all instead of just providing some more passive income for property owners. It's a total no-brainer if there ever was one.
They are incredibly obnoxious. I’m surprised if they don’t case car crashes.
Fucking blinding.
I got stopped at a roadblock even before LED's, the highway patrol officer said "I wasn't sure you were going to stop, you nearly ran over [X] over there" and my reply was, "Your lights are so bright, and blue, and right here on the road, that I can't see a thing. I'm glad I didn't."
Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring. They are very visually polluting.