131–140 of 215 posts
The elephant in the room wasn’t addressed. There is an affordable living developer involved yet no mention of pricing strategy? That said, hard to imagine it being any different than the highest of comps.
Supply and demand. If you increase supply, prices overall will go down. “Affordable” or other non-market schemes simply raise the prices for everyone else — including the non rich that don’t win the “affordable” lottery. More market housing everywhere solves the affordability crisis.
Parking would be less of a deal if they built mixed developments, which are more desirable anyway. It’s quite nice being able to walk out of your house and drop right into a coffee shop, bar, or restaurant. Walking to work or school is amazing too. People here seem to be so afraid that their neighborhoods will begin to look more like Dubai or Hong Kong. But clearly what we’re doing now isn’t sustainable, nor is it ev…
I got lost walking to my meeting from the train station in Mountain View, and people didn't even know how to give me walking directions to where I needed to go. It was crazy. It wasn't that far by a straight line on the map, so I figured whatever I'll skip the taxi, but I had no idea what I was getting into. I finally had to ask a bunch of cyclists and it turned out I had to walk about a kilometer along a raised highway to get to the bridge and then cross several insane intersections.
At lunch I was driven to a burger place a couple of km away.
Ok. I get it. You need a car to live there. That just doesn't sound nice to me, frankly, and I don't know if I could convert to that way of living.
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Vegas? Most of it is sprawl and the Strip (where few people live) is enormous hotels that are actually pretty spread out. I agree the Montreal core is fairly walkable. Cold is generally easier to deal with than heat. There's also a large connected Underground that people use when the weather is bad.
Vegas has wide pedestrian boulevards, escalators for elevated pedestrian crossings, throughways inside casinos, and even a pair of monorails. The Strip is mostly linear and there aren't long stretches with nothing there - food, lodging, entertainment, and (of course) gambling are never more than a few dozen feet away at any point. But I have to say, Rochester, MN - the Mayo Clinic - has to be one of the more extraord…
The rest of the city is basically giant soulless suburb. I've had friends who have lived there for close to a decade now.
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Yikes, stop with straw men. Live however you want! Nobody istearing down your house. Nobody is making you move. And NOBODY is plopping down density in the middle of single family homes, or even proposing that. But please just let me live the way I and many others want. Just stop interfering with mixed use buildings in the middle of commercially zoned areas. So you might drive by a commercial area that has housing on…
> And NOBODY is plopping down density in the middle of single family homes, or even proposing that. There is a fair amount of rumbling about upzoning single-family lots to permit mid-rise apartment buildings, i.e. SB827.
Along rail and the very busiest bus routes is exactly where we need and want apartments that have 3-4 stories. It would make no sense to put them in the middle of single family housing because those are deserts unless you have a car, and most people that would appreciate density would love to be able to do most of their tasks without a car. That's the appeal of density.
And we shouldn't be building rail without such density, because otherwise the rail is going to underutilized. Similarly with bus routes; why send tons of buses along a route if there's no possibility to pick up lots of people?
SB827 is about fixing planning processes to allow such density where it works, and letting the sprawl stay sprawl.
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Vegas has wide pedestrian boulevards, escalators for elevated pedestrian crossings, throughways inside casinos, and even a pair of monorails. The Strip is mostly linear and there aren't long stretches with nothing there - food, lodging, entertainment, and (of course) gambling are never more than a few dozen feet away at any point. But I have to say, Rochester, MN - the Mayo Clinic - has to be one of the more extraord…
To be fair, for Rochester that's an exceedingly small city core zone of a few square blocks that is interconnected like that. You're driving from where you live to that zone for 99% of the people working there. The rest of the city is basically giant soulless suburb. I've had friends who have lived there for close to a decade now.
But the nice area was really only a handful of blocks in each direction. And beyond that you are in mostly rundown post-industrial mill town and beyond that it is very spread out.
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The places where people are proposing new development are almost always along existing transit corridors or adjacent to job centers, like El Camino Real or Caltrain. Even those projects generate opposition. San Mateo just rejected a 10-unit, 35 foot condo building fronting El Camino Real, that had 26 parking spaces, because... it was "too tall." Millbrae residents fiercely oppose 5 and 8 story buildings located... ad…
The proposed bill I've seen people supporting - SB 827, by the SF state senator - defined "along existing transit corridors" so broadly that it covered the entirety of San Francisco and anywhere else with a vaguely functional bus service, and used state preemption of local laws to set a minimum height, remove parking minimums, and require local planners to allow dense mid-rise apartment buildings in the entire area.…
This may be a typo, but that's now what it does. It sets a minimum on the maximum height; people can still build below that.
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Its a little bit of hyperbole to say it still looks like the 70s when there used to still be a lot of orchards back then. They never could have anticipated this growth
> They never could have anticipated this growth That's silly. San Francisco isn't the first city to boom. Detroit added more than a million people between 1910 and 1930. Brooklyn added a half a million people per decade in the early 1900s. And neither of those cities look like Midtown Manhattan or Tokyo or whatever else SF residents seem to imagine is required to support fast growth. They did it by building vast area…
My grandfather told me that his commute from Santa Clara to Lockheed in Sunnyvale involved mostly driving past orchards all through the 1960s and into the 1970s. He left the area in the 1980s, saying that traffic and livability had become too much of a problem. It's been decades of intentionally not addressing the problems - nobody can reasonably claim to not have known or anticipated.
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Vegas? Most of it is sprawl and the Strip (where few people live) is enormous hotels that are actually pretty spread out. I agree the Montreal core is fairly walkable. Cold is generally easier to deal with than heat. There's also a large connected Underground that people use when the weather is bad.
Vegas has wide pedestrian boulevards, escalators for elevated pedestrian crossings, throughways inside casinos, and even a pair of monorails. The Strip is mostly linear and there aren't long stretches with nothing there - food, lodging, entertainment, and (of course) gambling are never more than a few dozen feet away at any point. But I have to say, Rochester, MN - the Mayo Clinic - has to be one of the more extraord…
Parking would be less of a deal if they built mixed developments, which are more desirable anyway. It’s quite nice being able to walk out of your house and drop right into a coffee shop, bar, or restaurant. Walking to work or school is amazing too. People here seem to be so afraid that their neighborhoods will begin to look more like Dubai or Hong Kong. But clearly what we’re doing now isn’t sustainable, nor is it ev…
Honestly, after visiting the bay area, this is among my top reasons for not wanting to move there. It is so beautiful, and yet.. for someone coming from a city lifestyle, it just doesn't seem.. livable. At all. I got lost walking to my meeting from the train station in Mountain View, and people didn't even know how to give me walking directions to where I needed to go. It was crazy. It wasn't that far by a straight l…
But, yeah, in general Silicon Valley is pretty much a sprawl. There are some nice small downtowns scattered around but you mostly need a car to get from place to place and most big companies are on their own disconnected campuses and others are scattered around industrial parks.
Every time they mass-build housing, the results are horrible. The quality of the homes is always "transitional". In Europe or even New York, you can rent flats which are large enough for a family and constructed to give you a sense of privacy, even with density. Floors and ceilings and walls are solid enough you barely notice you're sharing the building. Shops are always close by, as well as public transport and scho…
Not in Ireland. The last housing boom (late 90s/early 00s) gave us poor quality apartment blocks along with deficient building control regulations which in essence allowed developers to self-certify.
Which leads me to agree with your statements: "Every time they mass-build housing, the results are horrible" & "aimed at single 20 somethings without any thought to the long term or general community"
Made horrible as:
1) plenty of work so sub standard builders get away with it.
2) plenty of work so jobs are rushed
3) far left shouting for loads of (mainly free) housing to b e built right now.
4) plenty of work that any and all officials rush through decision making/inspection so that they don't have get chewed out of it.
Even with good facilities around and location being very walkable, nothing can compensate for not having a nice peaceful place to lay your head.