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Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

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Re: Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

#161

Post by zjaffee »

pm90 wrote: post #153
radarsat1 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It really depends on where you decide to live. California in general was designed around people getting everywhere by cars. Especially the Bay Area, which is basically suburbs which suddenly became the Tech Center of the world. Like others have mentioned the downtown areas are pretty walkable: I visited a friend in Mountain View and there were so many bars/restaurants downtown, there was always something to do once y…

For what it's worth, Southern California is far less walkable than the bay area is. Much of Southern California (San Fernando Valley, Orange County, South LA, ect.) doesn't even have downtowns like you see in bay area communities, just long streets with buildings that have huge setbacks for parking.

At least in the bay area the places where there are shops aren't hostile to pedestrians (although if I recall you do see more of this as you move down the peninsula into San Jose).

Re: Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

#162

Post by ghaff »

narrator wrote: post #157
ghaff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mountain View proper has a pretty nice downtown area but it sounds as if you were trying to traverse 101 from the Caltrain station to Shoreline Drive or something like that. Yeah, that's not going to work very well. 101 is an extremely busy multi-lane highway. 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…

A lot of those barriers are there for a reason. In the 90s East Palo Alto had the highest per capita murder rate in the country. Meanwhile, just across the 101, Palo Alto was the land of million dollar homes. Like the cold war, the suburbanites chose the containment strategy.

Although aspects of this sort of separation go much further back. Being from "the wrong side of the tracks" is an expression that probably dates to the 19th century. (Of course, that was less of an actual physical barrier.)

Re: Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

#163

Post by wbl »

makomk wrote: post #99
kevinburke wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

SF isn't a real city but pretends to be. SB 827 will make it one.

Re: Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

#166

Post by ghaff »

ac29 wrote: post #146
AskewEgret wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In less than 50 years, Chicago went from a town of fewer than 5000 to the second largest city in America, with well over 1 million residents, yet during that period: a) Skyscrapers didn't exist until the end of the period b) Mass transit as we know it didn't exist until the end of the period c) Half the city burned down in a single fire, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless My grandfather told me that his commut…

>Nobody can reasonably claim to not have known or anticipated. Suggesting that people could have predicted the dot-com boom of the 90s or the tech/startup driven boom of the past 15 years (and that it would be so heavily focused in the Bay Area) seems a little far fetched. It might seem obvious now that it has already happened, but in the 60s and 70s I don't see how you could have known (the industries driving develo…

Silicon Valley was admittedly relatively pricey even by the late eighties. I turned down at least one job in that timeframe because of the CoL difference and I lived in Massachusetts which wasn't extraordinarily cheap.

But there certainly have been rapid changes, especially in some currently popular cities. For example, I believe Boton was still losing population in the 1990s and, at one point, when Teradyne moved out that was pretty much the last tech company in the city (including Cambridge) leaving. There may have been some early biotech but pretty much none of the Route 128 computer companies were in the city.

New York City was also in pretty dire straights in the latter part of the eighties.

Re: Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

#167

Post by ChuckMcM »

what_ever wrote: post #58
ChuckMcM wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although nearly all of the new building in some parts has been mixed use. Sunnyvale has nearly completed replacing the old mall and town and country commercial shops with mixed apartments and commercial. Ever since Santana Row in San Jose turned out to be a huge success it seems one of the few types of development that gets approved. It will be interesting to see where it all leads. I applaud Mt. View's willingness t…

Probably not a tenth. MTV's population in 2013 was around 77k. Adding 100k homes would get the city to s standstill. As much as I want more housing here so I can buy something myself, the infrastructure is nowhere close to handle that right now.

If I understand your comment you are equating more houses to more traffic. (the 'standstill' point).

If that is the case, you may find, as I have, some interesting systemic properties in the various studies of Bay Area traffic. The part that really struck me is that traffic is more closely related to people living 'outside' a town or region than people living 'inside' a region. The analysis postulates a model like this:

Lets say you have a single large employer in a city, and no housing. Then every person who goes to work comes from somewhere else to get to the employer, then leaves to go back to where they live. This pattern was exacerbated in the 60's when new cities were all work and the communities around them were 'bedroom' communities. That leads to arterials to the city that get massively clogged during rush hour (and greatly reduced night life / commerce because no one lives there).

Now consider the opposite extreme, you have a large employer or industry and everyone who works there lives in the same town. Now you get short rush hours because people near to the employer can get there easily by walking or biking, people further away can drive but the drive is short. Additionally because there aren't any employees coming in from out of town there is no traffic on the roads between the town and other towns that is commute related.

I am not saying that any place is at either extreme, but in the Silicon Valley area (aka the 'south bay') it is believed that an imbalance exists between available housing and jobs, and further that the imbalance contributes to congestion on the freeways and arterials throughout the various cities. Many of the cities are building additional housing and doing it near transit so that it maximizes the choices the residents have for how they want to travel. There are however some cities that are not so convinced, Cupertino comes to mind, which continues to add office space without adding housing. This is forcing more people to drive through Cupertino to get to work.

Re: Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

#169

Post by ghaff »

fishbone wrote: post #165

Slightly off topic, are there any good books on urban planning? It’s a topic I want to educate myself more on.

You might take a look at the OpenCourseware for the MIT Urban Studies and planning department: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/

A classic is Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. There was a fairly recent documentary on her as well. This book is a bit of a Rorschach test though. People who rail against cars highlight her opposition to Robert Moses' highways. But opponents to large-scale high-rise construction highlight her general opposition to urban renewal projects.

Re: Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

#170

Post by fishbone »

ghaff wrote: post #169
fishbone wrote: post #165

Slightly off topic, are there any good books on urban planning? It’s a topic I want to educate myself more on.

You might take a look at the OpenCourseware for the MIT Urban Studies and planning department: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/ A classic is Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. There was a fairly recent documentary on her as well. This book is a bit of a Rorschach test though. People who rail against cars highlight her opposition to Robert Moses' highways. But opponents to…

Thank you for the suggestions
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