I think we should have a letter writing campaign to shame residents of Atherton. There's not that many of them.
It's 90s/2000s tech and finance leadership money - excluded from Woodside and Portola Valley so Atherton was the next best thing back then.
Not being around Asians played a huge role as well - in the 1990s and 2000s, Saratoga, Cupertino, the Fremont Hills, and the parts of Palo that fell under Gunn High became "Asian" and we were viewed negatively by Silicon Valley types back then. I remember the white flight first hand [0]
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." (2005)
Their kinds still populate HN.
> Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias
Older money (1950s-1990s)
> Palo Alto is next to Stanford
Palo Alto was much more "middle class" (think like Fremont or Dublin is today) back then
Back about 15-16 years ago, there was an international incubator BlackBox based out of one of the properties in Atherton.
The state should be able to collect damages for frivolous NIMBY lawsuits. I don’t care if they’re ashamed. If they’re fine paying more taxes to behave like idiots, who cares.
Atherton is a vibe, but it's an older demographic of tech and finance successes (the 1990s-2000s scene).
Atherton is wealthy. But it’s surrounded by the Bay Area. Atherton is uniquely civically engaged, but that’s about it. Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Cupertino and San Francisco can each muster more capital than it can, to say nothing of LA.
Atherton, along with Hillsborough, Ladera, Potola Valley, and Woodside represent old and oldish money who were much more engaged and locally entrenched.
These are peers of Draper, Ellison, Conway, Steyer, Newsom, Getty, Schiff, Pelosi, Sobrato, Panetta, and Siebel and are an entirely different social and political strata.
There is a money as well as a racial component, which is ironic as a significant portion of the community were Italian, German, and Irish Catholics who were excluded by descendants of the Hearsts and Stanfords barely 70 years ago.
Edit: I completely agree with you. The issue is organizational though - California local and state government is structured in such a way that local priorities can override collective goals, and this goes well beyond weaponized environmental reviews or NIMBYism.