Any time I have to ride the Caltrain I play a game of "spot places you could fit an apartment block". It's stunning how many Caltrain stations are surrounded by empty land, parking lots or single story buildings. Public transport hubs should have housing near them!
Sure, it's near a waste processing plant. But the fact that the area around it is just a square mile of shrubs and dirt is ridiculous. They could probably fit 2000 homes there right by the train station, 15 minutes from San Francisco, 10 minutes from the airport, 10 minutes from Milbrae BART. Other vastly under-built areas like Belmont also raise questions.
However, Hillsdale and Redwood City have done a good job building dense housing right around their respective stations.
The Bayshore station isn't really baffling. It's an ex-Southern Pacific railyard and requires significan cleanup. The city of Brisbane (where the station is) wants to build an industrial park, pretty much everyone else wants that development to include housing. It's been in the news quite a bit.
Cities want more offices and less housing because housing requires costly services that aren't covered by property taxes, especially if it's high-density rental housing which rarely changes owners. Remember, parcel taxes are assessed per parcel, not per unit. A 1000 unit for-sale condo complex generates 1000 parcel taxes. A 1000 unit rental complex on the same parcel generates 1 parcel tax. And the apartment owner lobby (CAA) fights successfully to keep this system in place.
Cities like retail because of the sales tax revenue, but developers don't like it because retail is less profitable than commercial office or rental housing.
Anytime something seems obvious, there is probably a good reason why there's more to it than meets the eye.
Solving these issues is so hard because the developers have the money to lobby legislators to avoid any solution that would impact them financially.
Not really. Rail yards are usually a real shitshow in terms of toxic contamination and nasty stuff.
One site near my home just had a casino built on it, which will require active ventilation of wells sunk in the ground for years to prevent toxic gas buildup.
Quite a few neighborhoods are built on or being built on them. The two that come to mind in recent years are the new Hudson Yards neighborhood in NYC (being built on the West Side Yard) and Potomac Yards (built where those rail yards were) in Alexandria, VA right outside DC.
A number of Manhattan neighborhoods are built on former rail yards. On mobile but I believe there is even a wikipedia page on it.
If the demand is high enough developers would love to clean it up. SF prices are at that level.
The developers do want to clean it up and build housing. The city (and residents) of Brisbane are the objectors. In this case I think the planned development would roughly double the population of Brisbane. It's understandable that they would object, but less sympathetic given how absurdly low density Brisbane is.
And for christ sake, get rid of the darn height limitations. Why on earth would you have height limitations in the first place??? the only height limitations there should be are economic and those should be determined by developers and demand, nothing else.
Around every station in the bay area, I see nothing more than 3 to 5 stories at the most, or even less.
I took a tour of the Recology plant there (highly recommended!) and asked the same question. Apparently there's a development plan in place and they expect to start building housing soon, though the person I spoke to didn't now the timeline.
There is a long-term plan in place for that area, and phases of it such as the Schlage Lock Plant land reuse are already beginning, but in typical bay area governmental style it has taken far too long for the cities of San Francisco and Brisbane to come to an agreement and for construction to begin.
Re-use is complicated by needed environmental remediation, the town border cutting through the Baylands, and the (largely deserved) poor reputation of the nearby Viz as an unsafe and undesirable area. However, the land value is there, and construction could have come much faster if the local governments approach to housing development was not obstructionist first.
I bike to the Bayshore Caltrain station every morning and at the North end of the station they have started construction for something. There is a retaining wall put up and various heavy machinery moving earth around.
And further up Geneva Ave, a 10-15 minute walk away there is a relatively new apartment complex with 'now leasing' signs.
In Los Angeles many transit stops are well developed with residential and retail nearby. The result has been the property values near the stations is so high that people who use public transit as their primary mode of transit can't afford to live there, and the bulk of people who do live there typically drive and use transit occasionally.
It's not just the property value of the neighborhood that's absurdly high. The rent/cost of the units in the newly built dense housing buildings is absurdly high too.
I mean living in LA, who would want to pay ton of money for a box of living space with no yard, and yet share subway with the less desirables (not my view of course). And the public transportation systems in LA doesn't really have the reach either.
LA Transit has a "last 5 miles" problem. Many people live 5 or more miles from the stop. The local bus can add 30-40 minutes for what should be a 10 minute car ride. The park and ride lots are always full before 6:30AM, and account for 200 riders at the smaller lots and maybe 1000 at the larger ones. Parking is expensive to build too.
Add to that, poor choices to build at grade reduce the effectiveness of light rail. In Pasadena the Gold Line crossing was put at grade across a major artery; should have continued underground for just another mile. This creates a daily traffic jam that lasts for about 2-3 hours.
And then through Highland Park, the rail is at grade through a residential street, making it go 5 MPH and it has to obey traffic signals at the same priority as cars. The end result is a 35 minute commute time Downtown for a trip that takes 20 minutes in no traffic, 35 in typical rush hour traffic and maybe 45-50 worst case. People choose to drive instead just to save time...including my best friend who lives two blocks from a Gold Line stop.
How much will that cost? Measure B will help a bit, but brings our sales tax to 9%. Property tax is limited by prop 13. Should developers kick in more? Is 10-12% sales tax ok?
Measure B is mainly roads, with little for transit. Does anyone trust VTA to manage mass transit development?
Funds for transit should come from fuel taxes, vehicle license fees, and development fees. Sales tax increases are very regressive and a terrible way to pay for transit. But that's always what the Silicon Valley Non-Leadership Group favors because it avoids their members having to ante up for the transportation problems they create.
Glad the NYT article author at least quoted me correctly. He was going to characterize me as "anti-growth," which is completely false. Growth is just fine as long as it's sustainable growth with transportation, housing, and school impact taken into consideration. But developers don't want to take a systems view and look at the long-term impact of their projects.
Is anyone naive enough to believe that newly build dense housing is going to bring down the cost of housing? It doesn't work that way.
One of the biggest contributors to high housing cost in San Francisco is rent control. It benefits some tenants, but it results in more and more rental housing being turned into TIC buildings under the Ellis Act.
My wife's family had a four unit apartment building in SF and they had to sell it because with rent control, and de-facto vacancy control, it was a money-losing proposition since there was no way they could maintain the building and pay the mortgage with the rents they were getting. My wife may have married me for the free handyman services I provided to them. I'm sure that the new owner did a TIC conversion. In a way it's good that more people become owners rather than renters, but it does not increase the supply of housing or lower the cost.
There are also a lot of houses in San Francisco with empty in-law units because the homeowners are scared to rent them out because of all the laws on rental housing, even in the cases where the in-law unit is not covered by rent control. So we're in the odd situation of having a housing shortage with tens of thousands of unoccupied housing units.
How long had the tenants been in those apartments? I'm just curious how costs rose faster than rents, since property taxes are pretty low. Was the high cost of labour for maintenance a big part of it?
Maintenance and repairs were a lot when they had to pay someone to do everything.
Then when I entered the family, suddenly I could repair appliances, replace plumbing fixtures, replace outlets and switches, install lighting, it never ends. Many trips to San Francisco from Silicon Valley for repairs.
I think if they could have raised the rents when tenants changed, and have been allowed 3-4% annual increases, instead of 2% or less, then it would have been sustainable. But tenants passed on the apartments to friends and relatives, and the rent was delivered in cash to our house.
A lot of apartment building owners in San Francisco aren't wealthy, and own just one small building. The lesson that was learned is that it's a really bad idea to own rental property in a city with such confiscatory rent control. And this rent control only on older properties ends up driving up prices on non-rent controlled properties because it constricts the market-rate supply.
Are you saying that tenants who names weren't on the rent-control leases were living in the apartments? Forgive me, because I just moved to SF, but that doesn't sound legal to me.
Yes. But since they delivered the rent in cash, it was not possible to prove that the tenants had changed even though we knew they had.
For us, it was not sustainable financially because we didn't have the resources or the will to challenge the "vacancy control." I'm sure the new owner solved the problem or converted it to a TIC.
I like the Ellis Act and TIC concept since it makes more people property owners, and owners will maintain the property better than tenants or absentee landlords.
OMG I sound like a Republican even though I am quite the progressive.
Do you also look for places where you could fit schools, shopping, parks, etc.?
Sensible and sustainable growth needs to avoid tunnel-vision. But cities are so controlled by developers that they rarely want to take a systems view when rezoning land. In Palo Alto, they realized that there is no way they can build enough housing and schools to offset more office space, and that housing, especially rental housing, is impractical financially because of the crazy parcel tax system and Prop 13. In San Jose, they desperately want more commercial and retail because they have have too much housing and not enough businesses, which causes more congestion, as well as financial problems since taxes on housing don't pay for city services.
There are two policy changes needed at the state level:
1. Prop 13 should apply ONLY to owner-occupied residential housing. Owners of rental property and owners of commercial property will prevent this from ever happening in our lifetimes.
2. Parcel taxes should be assessed per housing unit, not per parcel. The CAA (California Apartment Association) has fought successfully against this.
What's happening now in Cupertino is a developer spending tens of million of dollars on ballot measure that bypasses the CEQA required EIR, so he can build 2 million square feet of Class A office space, and a few hundred luxury apartments. He'll make out like a bandit, and the city will be left to deal with the traffic, pollution, school impact, and future ABAG housing mandates. It's extremely short-sighted, but of course the developer doesn't care. It's the same developer being fined by Palo Alto for failing to fulfill a CBA (Community Benefits Agreement), the same developer responsible for the abandoned Sunnyvale Town Center, the same developer responsible for Mowry Crossing. These little suburban cities don't have the expertise to craft development agreements that can be enforced, and they get screwed every time. Look at Santa Clara and the Levi's stadium fiasco.
Have you tried living near a Caltrain station? I have, and IMHO the noise from the trains (they blow their horns when entering the station) is very annoying, and harder to ignore/get used to since it's discrete, unlike continuous white noise from highways.
Also, given the overall large area served by a single Caltrain station, parking lots next to them is arguably better and more egalitarian since people can drive in, and take the train more easily. The Park N ride concept is also not just a Bay Area thing, I believe it's quite successful in New Jersey and New York for people commuting to Manhattan to work.
I think you might be comparing to the subway systems in places like Manhattan or Barcelona or Paris, but the population and station density of those places is very different.
Personally, I ride a bicycle to Sunnyvale station from Cupertino then take the bicycle on the train, and the "last five mile" problem is solved. Except that the bicycle capacity on Caltrain isn't enough, and sometimes all the bicycle spaces are filled in San Jose (on the express and Baby Bullet) so now I ride a folding bicycle to guarantee access.
Obviously not everyone can bicycle to the train, and it's more of a hassle than Park & Ride, but it also saves money, and often time, on each end. In SF, once the new Muni line opens that will make the SF end of Caltrain more accessible to more people.
I think that I'm the only candidate for Cupertino City Council that actually ever uses transit! And I am very much opposed to Measure B, which is mainly money for more roads, which won't solve the congestion problem.
Park and rides are actually less egalitarian and worse for the system.
An apartment close by is much more likely to generate ridership. Walking is the cheapest form of transportation available, so no need to own vehicles that cost thousands off dollars to reach the station.
Also, increasing the supply of housing in general means more access.
I'd be willing to bet that housing would allow more people per square foot to ride than a parking garage. Cars take up huge amounts of space. Truly tremendous amounts.
Walking is great, but it is staggeringly expensive to live close to useful things, and similarly expensive in time costs to go from a 60mph freeway to a 4mph brisk walk. I don't disagree that cars take up a lot of space, but from my recent assessment when finding a place to live in the Bay Area, car-centric lifestyle is really a lot cheaper unless you're prepared to make enormous sacrifices in what you accept in terms of living space.
>I'd be willing to bet that housing would allow more people per square foot to ride than a parking garage
A parking lot requires about 300sqft per car. A stacker system should cut that roughly in half, but to be generous with the fixed costs let's say 200sqft.
Every person we serve with a modest 600sqft 1-bedroom within walking distance is 2 people who can't get to the train effectively at all.
Drivers can live arbitrarily far away, at whatever cost:space:time tradeoff makes sense for them, and still take the train. If all 3 drivers decide they'd like to sell their cars and walk, the price on apartments within walking distance must rise until 2 of them back off.
Bulldozing the parking delivers an awesome lifestyle for the one guy who can afford the housing that replaces it, but at great expense to him and greater expense to the other 2 guys, who now can't get to the train effectively at all.
This is why park-n-ride is egalitarian and hip urban development is elitist. Even though you're adding housing, you're increasing the cost to be able to get to the station easily (rent > transportation costs by a long shot) and decreasing the number of people who can do it (unless you're suggesting we live in car-sized apartments).
If we want to demolish the walking-distance parking, we need to replace it with something approximately as good for as many people at approximately the same cost. Apartments are better, but they fail the other two tests. Self-driving Uber, bike racks, motorcycle/scooter spaces, all of the above, whatever.
I live 1.2 miles from a Caltrain station. The office where I work is 1.1 miles from a Caltrain station.
On days when it's raining or I'm feeling too tired to walk, I can Lyft to the station or ride a commute.org shuttle that gets to Caltrain and has a pickup/dropoff spot a block from my apartment.
Which is a good thing, because the parking lot at the Caltrain station is completely full by the time I wake up (and shifting my schedule 2-3 hours earlier would take away my ability to actually work with the people I work with).
For context, the average car commute in a sprawling metro is 25 minutes total. Assuming your walking speed is near average, you spend more than 45 minutes just on the first and last miles each way.
That's brutal and insane. We should not have to live this way.
On the other hand, I just got back from Amsterdam, where I can get from pretty much anywhere in the city to anywhere else in the city, without a car, in that 25-minute time period. Transit doesn't have to be bad.
The problem with housing and transit is that people change jobs, and companies change locations, so often that it's impractical to move every time a job location changes (and for couples, there are two people to deal with).
When I have a contract in SF, I use Caltrain. I have a gig in Fremont now, and I drive. I tried combining a bicycle ride with VTA light rail, and it was really terrible, taking two hours, rather than a 25-30 minute drive. A large industrial area in southern Fremont, with no VTA bus from the light rail station on Tasman, and no A/C transit bus from BART. Maybe when the BART extension opens they'll add a bus from the station over to the industrial park area.
Conversely, it would be easier for potentially hundreds or thousands of others, plus it would likely increase ridership and result in a more sustainable future for Caltrain. And it would also be better for the environment and economy.
Apartments are quite a bit bigger than parking spaces. Fewer people can live in a given amount of space than can park in it, unless we're talking dorm-room sized apartments.
One of the reasons that cities build office space while ignoring residential is Prop 13 which fixes residential property taxes. Taxes on equivalent office space and the business it generates are a better source of revenue over time for cities than the fixed taxes from housing. This disincentivizes balanced planning.
One thing that also should be mentioned: while it's perfectly ok to want your city to stay the same, it's not practical to put the burden of growth on other cities. And it's also not legal. California law actually requires municipalities to plan for and support their share of new housing[1]. Something many cities are not doing.
Prop 13 actually fixes commercial property taxes as well so long-lived corporations end up paying very low tax. In addition, one can also pass the lower property assessment value on to ones children (principle residence and up to $1,000,000 other property)[1]. California has been slowly building up a landed aristocracy.
True that. In fact, every set of buildings have their own legal entity. So, when these buildings are sold, prop 13 does not impact them. That's because the legal entity remains the same even though the controlling interests are changed. Maybe, it is time to buy a home through a legal entity and sell that entity, so that the future buyer doesn't need to pay the tax on the increased price.
What might stand up to a legal challenge is creating an entity that owns say ~1000 houses and when you want to buy a house you buy a very small fraction of the company with what your house would cost to purchase. Then the company would buy the house and let you live there until you want to sell. Maybe these already exist as a weird residential coop REIT.
I like that you bring the legality of these housing restrictions into question. I understand that there is a use for zoning laws in maintaining neighborhood quality; however, I think that what the Bay Area has is a defacto immigration control system. Notice that this doesn't mean expensive neighborhoods are illegal in general. The problem comes when government regulations are the direct cause of elevated housing prices that stop the majority of Americans from being able to live there. I'm probably wrong but I'd like to know of its even theoretically possible for the federal or state governments to do something about this.
I'll be the very first person to tell you that I am quite ignorant to many things in life. However...
> California law actually requires municipalities to plan for and support their share of new housing[1].
...I've watched this exact situation unfold in numerous cities in California, over the last 14 or so years since I landed here, and I think that it's a stunningly stupid decision that only benefits developers, municipalities, bureaucrats, etc... So...
"Taxes on equivalent office space and the business it generates are a better source of revenue over time for cities than the fixed taxes from housing. This disincentivizes balanced planning."
I am not sure either of your conjectures are true...
First, "over time" the tax returns from residential and commercial property, even under the prop 13 regime, should even out - since eventually everyone dies or moves out ... eventually all of the residential property changes hands (and resets to current taxation levels).
Second, brand new residential property gets immediately taxed at the current tax rate. So in the very short term that doesn't seem to be (relatively) disincentivized.
I'm oversimplifying, but it would seem that only in the medium term does prop 13 affected residential housing (relatively) underperform commercial property - in terms of (relative) tax receipts.
Sure but it's always "medium term": Taxes weren't fixed once, they are fixed at time of house purchase (and some other events).
It would only be revenue neutral if they had raised the absolute rates to make up for the fact that an increasing number of people are paying under the current rate.
Anecdotally I have heard that there are various machinations like shell/holding companies and partnerships which let you functionally prevent the commercial property tax from changing and is very common because the incentives are so large.
The lack of any substantial quantity of residential development other than large single-family detached homes on large lots in cities like Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. is absolutely destroying the Bay Area. It forces people to commute from further away, increasing traffic, sprawl, and radically distorting the housing market. We don’t need to turn these towns into Hong Kong or Tokyo, but just build a few blocks radius of 4–6 story mixed-use low-rise apartment buildings around each transit stop, with relaxed parking requirements.
The response of the cities, which is basically to put their fingers in their ears and shout "La la la la we can’t hear you” is a farce. They keep pretending that they can keep indefinitely building office space without anywhere for the workers to live, while maintaining the same small town feel from when these suburbs were first built over the top of agricultural land in the middle of the last century.
People aren't concerned their cute neighborhood is going to look like Hong Kong. They're concerned they won't see the rapid appreciaton of their assets and don't make forcing the negative effects on anyone else. It makes me think you should be able to vote in both the place you live and work. I pay taxes to Palo Alto and spend the majority of my waking hours there, yet have no say in what rules and regulations the government makes (or doesn't) while I'm there.
"People aren't concerned their cute neighborhood is going to look like Hong Kong. They're concerned they won't see the rapid appreciation of their assets "
You assert this as if it's true for all people.
But it's really really not.
I actually do not want to live in an urban area. I am worried my cute neighborhood will turn into hong kong.
As the article says, we are going from suburban to urban with nothing in between.
I don't actually give a crap about rapid appreciation of my home or anything else like that.
People who actually can afford multi-million dollar houses can usually can afford to diversify, and with such low mortgage rates, it pretty much makes no sense to tie large amounts of equity in a home and hope for rapid appreciation. It's a very risky investment strategy.
When most of the area was orchards, and some of the first development restrictions were passed, it was not about property values.
I also don't think acting like yours is the only acceptable viewpoint, and nobody else could possibly have a valid concern, is going to get any of these issues solved.
So, rather than just blindly assert what everyone's concerns and views are, and dismiss them out of hand, maybe you should try to have a well-reasoned discussion?
(and FWIW, i'm actually not anti-development, i'm anti-people who don't actually want to have a reasoned discussion about things, and instead, just want to assert whatever view they've come up with.
I'm honestly surprised at the arrogance in this thread).
Either you're the "landed gentry" referred to in an earlier post, or you bought your home recently at an outrageous price and would be way under water if it were priced closer to it's actual value. Either way, you are strongly incentivized to support the system that squeezes renters and newcomers to enrich longtime landowners. Whether or not it was part of a deliberate investment strategy is irrelevant.
The problem is, is that these cities are approving the creation of more office space (local jobs) without increasing housing. If you're building commercial property there should be a plan to create additional housing.
That is the reason for the ABAG housing mandates. It's why Palo Alto capped commercial office space. It's why residents of Cupertino think that 2 million square feet of office space at Vallco is short-sighted.
If you look at ABAGs desired jobs/housing ratios, on which they base their mandates, it's clear that it's insane to build so much office space since there is no land on which to build sufficient housing to offset the office space. But of course that's not the problem of the developer of the office space, it's the problem of the city, and the problem doesn't happen for years, or even a decade or two, after the office space is occupied.
It's all short-term planning done by city councils that are owned by developers.
"You assert this as if it's true for all people. But it's really really not. I actually do not want to live in an urban area. I am worried my cute neighborhood will turn into hong kong."
"As the article says, we are going from suburban to urban with nothing in between."
Hey I live in one of said cute neighborhoods too and love it. But that line about "nothing in between" is so much dishonest claptrap. A simple drive down the peninsula will show you every shade of (sub)urbanism. From 2 acre lots of Hillsborough to fairly urban (and still... way way way less dense than HK) Redwood city.
There's a right balance to be found somewhere in there. The alarmists in my own neighborhood as well as places like Palo Alto want to freeze the current snapshot of their areas as their sense of "perfection". That's disastrous in the long term if we want to continue being a viable place for "immigrants" (both from inside and outside the country) to come here and keep the area vibrant like it has been until now.
So would you support building over all the surface parking lots in downtown Palo Alto and replacing then with 4-floor apartments that match the height of the existing office buildings? What about townhomes or row homes a few blocks from downtown? I wasn't advocating for building 50-story behemoths.
But in Palo Alto and Menlo Park they won't even build a proper street grid, so all traffic to the East Bay is basically forced down the one lane Middlefield Road. Is having through streets also not suburban?
And I don't think it's arrogance when people are wasting 4 hours a day commuting into a city simply because the city refuses to build enough housing for everyone.
I don't live in the Bay Area, but I actually hope that the problem gets worse and that non-development continues. It can/does keep some engineers here in areas like where I live.
The primary issue the Bay Area has is that, as you mentioned, there is no in-between. It's either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards. What the area actually needs is more mixed-use development neighborhoods.
"The primary issue the Bay Area has is that, as you mentioned, there is no in-between. It's either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards. What the area actually needs is more mixed-use development neighborhoods."
The Bay Area is a very large, very diverse place and has plenty of the inbetween of which you speak.
In fact, right in the epicenter of this particular Silicon Valley - in downtown Mountain View, for instance, there is quite a bit of medium density, two and three story apartment complexes centered around the small downtown.
Or take the N-Judah all the way to the beach - that's filled with two and three story apartment buildings. Certainly, many people believe that's the problem - it should be four and five story apartment buildings - but it is really not true at all that the Bay Area is "either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards".
The zoning in the Sunset is outrageous. If you take the N Judah, almost the whole neighborhood (except for a few tiny bits) is zoned for very low density residential.
Upzoning a significant percentage of the Sunset and providing faster public transit from there to other parts of town is in my opinion one of the best things SF could do for local housing prices.
By "gigantic" I'm sure you really mean is the 1200-1800sqft tract ranches from the 1940s-60s that consume the majority of the developed suburban land, right, because there are almost 0 gigantic houses in the region compared to literally every other major metro in the country. And that's one of the problems: too many people stretched their budgets to buy crappy $1m houses, they can't really afford to do it again, and prop 13 (plus impending rising mortgage rates) actively disincentivize anyone from selling after they manage to get into this market, no matter what their house is like.
A lot of people like a house in the suburbs with a two car garage. Should the fact that more people want to live in their town force them to have their house torn down so high-density housing can be built?
People can only pay X mortgage. With rates at 5% that makes the max house they can afford ~20x, at 10% the max house ~= 10x. Thus increasing rates lowers housing prices.
Inflation has a role here making everything complicated. But, you are generally better off to buy when rates are high and refinance or sell when rates are low.
Yes, it's best to buy when rates are very high, then refinance when they fall. Our last refinance was at 2 5/8%.
One big issue with Prop 13 is that people that would normally sell and move to a smaller place, or to another location, don't, because of the property tax consequences. Prop 90 partially addressed this, but most counties opted out because they did not want an influx of new residents paying artificially low property taxes.
And rates are at historic lows, with the Fed intending to keep moving them up, which means anyone who has been stretching to afford a home is going to be underwater shortly.
Isn't a typical mortgage rate fixed? If I have a fixed rate that is withing my budget and I like the place, I can keep paying for decades, and the market ups and downs become purely virtual to me in the long run.
If rates went up to 11% (1990 rates), your borrowing power drops 60% or more.
That's why we're maintaining these wacky rates. If rates floated via market forces, a significant part of the economy would just implode, particularly in California where people can walk away without penalty.
In the short term at least, I would expect re-zoning some low density residential neighborhoods to medium density mixed-use zones would substantially increase property values for those areas, because developers would want to buy out single family houses and replace them with larger buildings.
From listening to anti-development folks, most of their arguments seem to be vague concerns about “neighborhood character” etc., rather than property values.
"From listening to anti-development folks, most of their arguments seem to be vague concerns about “neighborhood character” etc., rather than property values."
I guess of the hundreds of thousands of people in multiple cities, counties, etc, who have voted for various types of development measures for many years (30+), literally none of them have any valid points that are worth discussing, and any concern about neighborhood character, etc, any of these folks make is really about property values.
Sure seems likely there is only one true and right side on this!
What you’re claiming I think is exactly the opposite of what I wrote.
I take people at their word that they’re concerned about neighborhood character. I never said such concerns were invalid or that there was only one right side. Sorry if the word “vague” comes across as dismissive.
My primary point was that these cities are happy to add huge amounts of office space but are not willing to build housing at the same pace, and this is upending the housing market in the whole region and leading to massive problems with traffic and sprawl. Do you disagree?
I wonder how many people would accept a compromise of this: they vote to reduce building and density, but at the same time agree that their asset appreciation will go mostly to the city (via cap gains or land value taxes), rather than themselves. (Obviously this goes against Prop 13, but I still wonder how many people would be willing to admit that they want space rather than money.)
> The lack of any substantial quantity of residential development other than large single-family detached homes on large lots in cities like Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. is absolutely destroying the Bay Area.
My Caltrain commute takes me from Santa Clara to Redwood City every day. I see quite a few new apartment buildings nearing completion along the line from Santa Clara through Sunnyvale, and again in Redwood City. Driving around Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, I can see even more. Most of them are between three and five stories tall. A lot of new construction is going into multi-unit housing around here, in some cities but not others.
There’s certainly some development in parts of the valley, but not nearly enough to meet the past 2 decades’ increase in employment and housing demand. And a large proportion of the prime transit-accessible real estate is covered by parking lots, strip malls, and low-density residential neighborhoods.
That's true, but those places aren't employment hotbeds. We need housing by the jobs. It should be easy to walk or bike to work. Caltrain is overloaded as it stands already.
There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming.
As long as people live >20 minutes from work, there will be many reasons to take the car, and own a car. In Sydney, most of my colleagues didn't own a car. Cars mean parking lots, hence lower density, hence long distances to travel, hence cars are required. America won't reduce their dependency on carbon emissions as long as everything relies on cars.
The other responses to your comment seem to disregard that fact that even electric cars don't have an infinite life span, and still require the production of tyres, paint, lubricants, not to mention batteries.
As car tyres wear out most of that rubber ends up in the ocean as it's washed in to the drains by rain. Probably not a good idea.
In my opinion we need a strong reduce, reuse, recycle ideology. Good design comes from the earth and returns to it. It's a closed system. We need to radically rethink how we do things.
Exactly. We just need to sum the energy costs involved in moving 1t of metal to see that no amount of electric cars compares to living close to the workplace, and no "10% saving" will allow USA to divide its emissions by 7 [1].
But electric cars are a solution for the top 5% who worked a lot and deserve luxury, assuming the other layers of the population also make enough effort to avoid global warming.
[1] USA has a carbon footprint of ~7 per inhabitant, so unless we assume some Chinese people should keep being restrained to 1/100th of American consumption, we'll have to come up with a scheme where most humans live at the level of an Eastern European in average. Living in a 5-floor building and working within 20 minutes distance being one of the consequences. It's not that bad, compared to the alternative.
Actually it's pretty awesome. Whenever I work in Europe for an extended period of time I stay in one of those 5-floor buildings within walking or biking distance of the office (thanks Airbnb). It takes commuting from stressful and makes it relaxing, even when it's around 5 degrees Celsius, raining and with heavy winds.
"There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming.
"
Truthfully, on that scale, it doesn't matter.
Seriously. On that scale, we will run out of space everywhere, no matter what we do (unless you limit the population or expand to other planets).
It's not even clear that we could do anything to change the timeline there, either.
Really, no matter what we do in the bay area - turn it all into highrises, whatever, is going to matter a few centuries from now.
There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming
You're being orthogonal there. Electric cars powered by carbon-free sources (solar, hydro, geo, nuclear) won't have that impact. The economy of scale of cars and other road vehicles is that roads are cheaper per mile to build and maintain than rails, and have fewer constraints on their routing. You can be ideologically anti-car if you like (it's a free country) but be honest in your arguments.
Building cars is incredibly energy/resource intensive, even if nobody ever drives them (which is why they cost tens of thousands of dollars). Organizing urban design and the rest of society around car travel also directly and indirectly leads to hugely inefficient land use and additional infrastructure construction, which is also energy/resource intensive.
I don't think the argument here was about rail, it was about moving housing closer to jobs so human-powered transit (i.e. biking, walking, skateboarding etc) becomes viable for more people.
Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Redwood city etc. are employment hotbeds. Lots and lots of companies, especially startups but also more established firms, are based in these areas
San Francisco rents are higher than rents in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Cupertino, but younger workers at Apple, Google, Yahoo, etc., still choose to live in San Francisco because these suburban towns are so fricking' boring. Try to go to a restaurant after 9 p.m. in Cupertino.
The theory that people want to live adjacent to where they work is bogus. They want a way to get to work without driving or massive congestion. In this area, the private transportation networks set up by companies solve this for a lot of workers. And the same sorts of transportation systems exist in other countries. I've seen them in Taiwan and Korea as well.
Sadly, the political climate isn't going to change anytime soon. Politicians are bragging about how they're going to keep things the same, in their voting pamphlets - this should tell you something about the vast majority of voters.
It's time we accepted this and moved on. Let's all leave the bay area, to another tech hub that has space for expansion. If everyone did that, companies would eventually have to follow suit, unless they wanted to pay even higher salaries.
It’s not sufficient to just build massive amounts of high-density housing in a never-ending race to keep up with more commercial office space. You have to think about where you’re going to put new schools, new parks, new retail, and new transportation, both road expansion and mass transit. Naturally, developers are in it only to maximize their short term profit so they make all sorts of promises that they don’t fulfill, and are able to get away with it because these smaller cities lack the legal expertise to craft bullet-proof agreements. In Palo Alto, Sand Hill Property is being fined a measly $1000 per day for failing to provide the legally mandated grocery store at Edgewood Plaza. Palo Alto’s response: writing the developer a letter—Peter Pau must be terribly scared—not.
In Cupertino, when there was a temporary dip in school-age children, the two school districts rushed out and sold or leased schools. They’ve been gradually taking back the leased-out properties, though there are still two elementary schools and one high school that need to be reclaimed. But the sold-off properties became housing, with a small park. When the housing stock finally began to turn over number of school-age children skyrocketed they were in serious trouble. Insufficient money to build new permanent classroom buildings, roads that were never intended to handle the amount of traffic, auditoriums, gymnasiums, cafeterias, playgrounds, and fields that were inadequate. The beneficiaries of this short-sightedness were developers and the manufacturers of portable classrooms.
Then high-density housing began to be constructed on former commercial property and school enrollment skyrocketed again, and more portables were added. No money for permanent buildings, though a few were finally built. Every summer you see trucks hauling more portables to the schools. "What did one portable say to the other portable? See you on the playground."
Developer fees are set artificially low by state law, laws which the developers lobbied for. Proposition 13 loopholes ensure that commercial property is not reassessed when sold. Parcel taxes are assessed per parcel, not per housing unit, so there is a big incentive to build rental housing, not for-sale housing, which screws over the schools and any other parcel tax beneficiary.
The root cause needs to be addressed. It’s money in politics where developers get laws passed that benefit themselves at the expense of residents. So there’s no money for mass transit, schools, parks, roads, etc.. Prop 13, the third rail of California politics desperately needs to be changed so it applies solely to owner-occupied residential housing, and not to commercial property or rental housing. In Cupertino you can see some older condo complexes that are more than 50% rental properties now. The owners pay miniscule property taxes, and rent the units out to families with two or three children. $2000 in yearly property taxes doesn’t pay for even ¼ of one child’s public school expenses, yet the owner is raking in $3500-4000 a month in rent.
If you look at major cities throughout the world, they build transit systems that allow residents to commute quickly from outlying areas. The LIRR and PATH in the NYC area. Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Munich, Frankfurt, Paris, etc.. BART did this, but they stopped too soon. It needs to go through Livermore and continue out to Tracy and Stockton, as well as going north to Santa Rosa. CalTrain needs to continue to Salinas. But in the U.S. we are unwilling to fund mass transit through higher vehicle fees and fuel taxes.
We really need a regional planning authority for the Bay Area, with the power to override local zoning boards, exercise eminent domain, and with an enormous budget for building mass transit.
Politically, I think the only way to get there is to wait for the Big One. Plate tectonics has become the best hope for urbanism in northern California.
It's hard to define "just compensation" as anything other than a market price, meaning the price that a buyer and seller agree upon when the buyer isn't "negotiating" using the threat of force.
I have no dog in this fight. I’m just responding to the comment “If you want the land, pay for it.” which makes it sound like land is seized with no compensation.
What makes you think market prices are just? This might not be an easy problem to solve, but it's not an impossible one either. ED would be used when people are unwilling to sell. If you can buy 20 plots of land from people willing to sell for price X and then the two hold outs who are unwilling to sell have to EDed, you know perfectly well what just compensation is.
This is a perfect case where leaving it to the market does not generate the most welfare or the most just outcomes. A form of rent seeking behaviour.
Except in a fair market, if a developer managed to get all but a couple holdouts, those remaining would likely be able to command higher prices as they would have leverage. ED robs then of the extra money they could have made, and it can be considerable.
There's an obvious defect in that approach. The incentive there is to delay the transaction as long as possible. Worst case scenario, the public project fails and you keep your stuff.
It's certainly imperfect, especially when it's used for stadiums or other private purposes. But even then -- At least it's an open, public process and not some secretive thing that puts neighbor against neighbor.
I don't mean to make some grand moral claim about markets always being "just." My point is that a buyer who gets to force someone to sell AND gets to choose the price they must sell at is VERY far from my intuitive (yet admittedly ill-defined) feelings about justice.
In your example, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that one person may value their land much more than their 20 neighbors value their own lands. Perhaps the one plot of land has been in the family for generations and has immense sentimental value. Perhaps the one landowner doesn't approve of the development project being pursued.
The value of my house to me is higher than what I could get for it on the market in part because I simply do not want to be bothered moving anytime soon.
And it's really the only way to overcome NIMBYism. Don't want a power line running through your land? Don't want light rail a half block away? Too bad, here it comes.
Yeah, not saying it's right, just that it is how things get done. Usually the people who get screwed on compensation are the ones who hold out and fight.
There was a homeowner in Denver who refused to sell to make way for Coors Field who got what he was originally offered, minus all the money spent on legal fees fighting it.
Power lines, airports, highways, rail lines, sure. Stadiums, outlet malls, casinos, not so much.
Some kind of democratically elected board of soulless government bureaucrats. Basically the same configuration as makes the decisions now, except on a regional rather than community scale.
The point is not to remove accountability, but to prevent small municipalities from having veto power on things that would vastly improve people's quality of life regionwide (like a BART line to Marin, for example).
"We really need a regional planning authority for the Bay Area, with the power to override local zoning boards, exercise eminent domain, and with an enormous budget for building mass transit."
The East Bay should get more attention from investors and the startup community. The area includes a world-class university with huge student population (UC Berkeley), a less NIMBY atmosphere, beautiful natural settings, and proximity to San Francisco, for significantly more affordable costs. Why is that still not the case?
I am not sure about the NIMBYism though. It certainly exists but I feel it's less intense than in Silicon Valley proper. Could someone with more knowledge of the issues share your opinions?
There is no such less NIMBYism in Oakland. The stakeholders are just different. There is also a racism problem: I sat at a round table forum where the most successful developer in the city (he's building that Brooklyn Basin project) said banks don't want to lend in Oakland when they can just lend to Developers in SF (500/sf is not good enough to deal with minorities, etc). But you're right, East Bay cities ought to get more attention. The person above is right though - Prop 13, as well as CA ballot system is killing the cities and making them museums to car-centric suburbs of the past.
I'm actually a bit surprised that offices and apartments aren't in the same building. Wouldn't it be convenient to work in the same building you live in? Getting a job at a company could come with a 'perq' of getting an apartment in the same building. It could be a very attractive recruiting tool.
You can do this on projects sometimes and its not necessarily as great as it sounds. Its ok when the office building is over the road from where all the consultants stay, but occasionally the meeting rooms in the hotel get used too, especially for training and workshops and longer events needing catering. You end up bumping into the wrong people at the wrong times. Theres no privacy. Cant just pop outside for a joint in the evening because your bosses are having dinner downstairs and will see you walk past. If someone thinks you need to sign a document at 6am or 9pm there will be knocks on your door. Everyone will have to go on runs together and shit...
I urge you to look into the history of company towns.
What happens when they fire you and kick you out of company housing? What happens when unpaid overtime is the norm because you're not really 'at work' despite being in the same building?
Campuses like Facebook's already creep me out with the whole potemkin village vibe.
And what happens when they pay you in scrip that can only be spent in the company store?
They did it back in the day but now it is more subtle: company food, company laundry/dry cleaning, company healthcare, all the other company perks are both carrot and stick.
> What happens when they fire you and kick you out of company housing?
That would depend on what your contract with the landlord says.
Anyway, consider that universities offer student housing. Nobody makes students live in that housing, and students don't expect to continue living in it when they are no longer enrolled. Nobody seems to think that is a problem.
1. You aren't living with authority figures. The RA's that you live with are also students. So minimal conflict of interest in living your life.
2. You don't expect to live there indefinitely
3. You aren't relying on the school to provide means for living. You're paying the school for the privilege to be there. That means you aren't screwed if they fire you.
> You aren't living with authority figures. The RA's that you live with are also students. So minimal conflict of interest in living your life.
You're living under the university's code of conduct, and the RA is there to keep tabs that you do. Many students do move off campus for that reason, and for privacy reasons.
Where? I've never heard of that. It's not terribly relevant, anyway, because nobody makes you go to college in the US, nobody makes you work for a certain employer, and no employer can make you live anywhere.
Anecdotally, my state school had an "on-campus" policy for 2/4 years, which appears to be the norm in schools attempting the liberal arts model. The housing is truly part of what they're trying to sell you in the "college" experience.
I didn't intend to comment on your broader implications.
We're seeing a lot of poor planning by cities. And they are being pushed hard by developers, and probably want the revenue.
People would be less NIMBY if they saw better planning. As it is, quality of life is suffering as we fail to balance commercial development with residential -- and address traffic/transit, schools, parks, bike routes, etc.
What are the motives of people who want to stop this development?:
"In July, San Jose sued to stop the project, saying it would create 25,000 jobs but provide 1,350 apartments at most. That would shift “the environmental burden and expense to support that economic development onto neighboring cities and counties”
If you own property, it'll increase it's value. If you live there, you'll have more jobs. If you have to pay for roads - well that bill probably goes to the property owners and developers who can build more houses to serve those people. If you want to help the economy, more jobs is good.
Who loses out with growth like that? The view of the skyline? Are there really that many luddites in San Jose? Surely someone must stand to lose money, but who?
The 23,650 people who get jobs in that development but have nowhere to live. These people end up having to live a 2hr drive or 2.5hr mass transit ride away - or, maybe they can save up for 15 years so they can afford a 1bdm nearby. Intentionally building dense commercial areas but restricting residential is a deliberate scheme (as you point out!) to drive real estate prices up for existing owners. Well, the city of San Jose has stood up and said 'no more'.
Hey, this may be an unrelated question, but how come real estate developers are always villains in american TV shows and movies? All the comments here are about how there's not enough development, and people tend to agree that NIMBY attitude is bad, and yet, every time a real estate developer is portrayed on screen he's an evil scoundrel who's trying to throw people out on the street. Am I the only one who's seeing the contradiction here?
It's only fair for the state to require housing to offset new office space. In Silicon Valley, the issue is that there is no more land in cities like Palo Alto or Cupertino for more housing, more school, or more roads, and the transit agency is grossly incompetent so there is no new mass transit. Developers care only about short term profit and never look at the big picture.
i don't get it. they are not solving anything, they are just making the housing situation worse. by not providing adequate housing- and office-space the pressure on every individual will just rise and rise.
