Andreessen family 2 years later: "IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development! I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton... They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values"[1]
[0] https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
[1] https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
However, I really appreciate both dense city centers and nicely organized single family home towns and neighborhoods.
So it makes perfect sense to me that one would advocate for the network effects of upzoning and building in dense, transit and service connected job centers ... and simultaneously be against breaking up an existing equilibrium in a smaller town.
Urban and sub-urban sprawl is an aesthetic and environmental disaster and it disappoints me that what was once a progressive imperative (working against sprawl) was jettisoned the moment it ran counter to economic self interest.
People in my town, Fort Worth, have been saying the same things for years. People were moving in too fast causing home values to sky rocket, so everyone was saying they need to build houses faster to prevent a property tax explosion. You can only build single family homes so fast, so then came the hundreds and hundreds of multi-family apartment campuses and home values immediately tanked. They got what they wished for. Now we have traffic, electric grid, and school system over crowding because they still can’t build everything else fast enough. Even still people keep moving in, about 65 new residents a day.