> If we make it easier to quickly travel longer distances in/out of work hubs, the intense demand for housing can be diffused to communities that can handle it. Wow, just wow. Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Cupertino et al can all "handle it" they just don't want to. There is plenty of space for transit oriented housing and office space along the cal-train corridor. If Cupertino can "handle" an office space for…
Where we are today is that your basic crappy 2/1 or 3/1 starter home is over a million dollars here. They're $2 million in a better neighborhood. The majority of higher density housing is rentals, not owner condos. We're losing everyone except families with dual high income workers due to housing costs here.
One big part of the problems is that residents who already own property resist change and want Mountain View to remain as it was when they moved in. It's a selfish mindset, commonly likened to pulling up the ladder behind you when you get on a ship to keep others out. Whenever there's a development proposal, a vocal group of generally older and retired folks show up to try shouting it down. The anti-development people constantly say that the character of the city will be ruined by more housing, but are blind to the character of the city being homogenized on high income tech workers.
Another big part of the problem is ridiculous zoning. It's basically illegal to build anything anymore given the land that's left and the density limits. Every development requires variances from the city council, so even though zoning code isn't meant to give the council the power to meddle in individual developments, it's become so overbearing that the city council effectively dictates what can be built and where, down to the type of food a restaurant will serve. This is no different than communist central planning. These code variances are attained by renovating parks, or contributing to schools, or whatever else the council wants to extort. Permit fees are well into six figures for new housing developments, per unit. Most of these are impact fees for infrastructure and parks. With the high cost of housing here, permit costs, and extortion costs, it's simply impossible to build affordable housing. This is fine, since expensive housing takes the load off the older, affordable stock, but the pace of housing growth isn't keeping up with population growth.
The local cities here belong to a larger organization called the Association Of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). ABAG sets minimum building quotas on towns, and they have to approve that many units, but where they approve the units is up to them. Here in Mountain View, the downtown area is mostly owner occupied single family homes, and these people are against increasing density at all, and probably the most vocal anti-development neighborhood. The downtown area is also the one closest to transit, which is where high density makes sense. Due to this NIMBY attitude, the new developments happen mostly along the El Camino and 101 corridors, which don't have good public transit.
It's a giant mess, basically. The same people who resist density will also resist and kind of better local transit if it means building more tracks near their house, or digging tunnels under their house.