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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#391

Post by TulliusCicero »

pwinnski wrote: post #255
beambot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only solution is changing the zoning laws What about pulling a HongKong / Singapore: Create a special economic zone that is a stand-alone municipality with extremely lax zoning laws to spur housing & transportation growth? Google is kinda-sorta doing this. To avoid Mountain View NIMBYism, just carve out the Google land for this purpose.

Extremely lax zoning alone isn't enough. Houston is a large city with no zoning at all, and it's still not population-dense.

Houston still has minimum parking requirements, plus local/state road development patterns incentivized car-friendly buildings.

It's harder to build denser if you have very little good public transit (or walk/bike infra) to speak of. Density doesn't exist in a vacuum.

I mean, Houston is the principal city of a metro area of 7 million people, and has no subway, no mass transit that's separated grade whatsoever. That's not a setup that's going to easily support higher population densities.

Meanwhile, you look at a city like Munich that's in a smaller metro area, and it has several subway lines, plus several hybrid commuter/mass transit lines that are separated-grade at least within the city proper. They're steadily building yet more, and Munich residents don't even consider their transit to be all that great! (lots of complaints about the S-Bahn, for sure)

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#392

Post by shados »

jefftk wrote: post #324
shados wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, just the noise from the events in Davis Square can be heard from half a mile away, so most decibel meters would flag that as "pretty loud".

I'm within a half mile of Davis and don't remember ever hearing an event there from my house? Maybe Honk?

Just the typical music events (not the small solo musicians but when there is an actual show) they hold every now and then, or when the flea market gets pretty crazy can definitely make it hard to watch TV even with windows closed in my experience.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#393

Post by falsedan »

davidw wrote: post #21
falsedan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software development isn't an industry like oil refining. Imagine if all the architects or civil engineers were located in a small handful of cities!

Architects and civil engineers mostly work where their services are needed, which makes sense. The economics of their industries are different.

I don’t know what the point of this fact is. Architects and engineers mostly work from offices, which are usually located so that there is a good pool of potential employees around.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#394

Post by camel_Snake »

foolfoolz wrote: post #345
gesman wrote: post #321

Why don’t allow employees to WFH full time and only come to office as necessary? Why don’t government stimulate and encourage corps who promote full time (not 1 day a week for good behavior) WFH policies? There is absolutely no need for 2/3 of all high tech employees in Bay Area to drag their physical bodies into their statically assigned corporate chairs. Lots of meetings, conf calls and work can be done remotely. T…

this is already happening and a big part of the problem. when you separate work location from living location, that opens up people to live farther away from work. so you end up with more people living in places with less housing because its "cooler". like san francisco. even though tons of people work at businesses outside the city.

Are you aware of any studies that support this hypothesis? It's an interesting one.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#395

Post by aidenn0 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #386
aidenn0 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice there are a lot of soundproofings that can substitute for an air-gap, but the cheapest soundproofing to meet code (resilient channels) is useless: Resilient channels basically work by fixing horizontal metal strips to the studs, and then hanging the drywall on the strips with clips. Because there is purposefully play in the connection, vibrations cannot easily transfer from drywall to stud to drywall. Why…

> In practice there are a lot of soundproofings that can substitute for an air-gap To clarify, I did indeed mean "no soundproofing in widespread common use", rather than "no physically possible soundproofing". And thanks for the great explanation! > The proper fix is to have a separate frame for each dwelling unit, preferably with fiberglass insulation. This essentially doubles the cost of inter-unit walls, so it is…

No clue how that would be advertised. My parents own rather than rent, and they specifically checked for that before purchasing.

There are standards for sound-proofing, but they are construction standards, they require a particular amount of sound isolation, and resilient channel passes the current standards (since it gives "okay" levels of soundproofing at construction time, even though later modifications are almost certain to nullify that).

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#396

Post by ChuckMcM »

iandanforth wrote: post #379
ChuckMcM wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far in my quick bit of research since this story came up I have not found a law that would prevent it. There are laws about discrimination based on race, religion, Etc. but not about employee / non-employee. I have yet to find either a California law or Sunnyvale city ordinance that would disallow an owner from preferentially selling or leasing a house to someone who was employed by a specific entity, even if that…

Interesting looks like there is a specific permitting process for Employee Housing Programs ( http://www.hcd.ca.gov/building-standards/employee-housing/in... ). I hope that any zoning decisions are made with a written declaration of intent to / not to apply for such a permit.

That is super awesome, thank you! It isn't clear to me reading section 17005.5 [1] how exactly you trigger this law. For example section (b) which says you have to have at least 200 homes in a single community to be considered. That seems like a pretty big loophole to drive through. Now I have to motivate myself to walk over to the reference section of the library to see if there is any case law associated with this stuff that will add insight.

[1] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#397

Post by drugme »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #389
drugme wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism It's definitely simple-sounding , as a single cause -- but unfortunately that doesn't make it so. Any sober analysis of the current housing crisis points to a convergence of multiple, and in some cases highly nuanced factors -- ranging from shifting crime rates and the collapse of urban industrial base; to shifts in government policy (including the near-ab…

There's various reasons for why people are NIMBYs, sure. But that's still the single biggest proximate cause of the housing crisis, by far. I mean, you could also say, "those tech companies created too many high-paying jobs!!" but last I checked, that's generally what we wanted companies to do, so getting mad at them for it seems pretty weird.

That's generally what we wanted companies to do,

Maybe so -- but as a response it completely dodges the question of whether or it has been a contributing factor or not.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#398

Post by sologoub »

stevenwoo wrote: post #187
thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #56

Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped. Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the mi…

Every time we get heavy rains which seems to occur more often these days, there are several slides in the open space above Woodside and some roads are unpassable for weeks or years in the case of the last slides on Skyline Drive and West Old La Honda. Evidence of how slide prone the area is is abundant on even gentle trails in every park along the ridge as well. Most of the housing currently there all the way to the…

That’s not entirely correct - Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir supplies much of the coast: City of Half Moon Bay and a part of the unincorporated area of San Mateo County including Miramar, Princeton By The Sea and El Granada.

http://www.coastsidewater.org/production.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/water-supply.html

Unfortunately, no new connections are currently available, but the already sold connections are not all 100% utilized and some are just assigned to parcels without use.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#399

Post by danans »

nostrademons wrote: post #362
danans wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sunnyvale and Mountain View aren't really different rental markets, though, so I'd be surprised if the difference in rent increases you saw between the two are related to differences in new housing permits. Put another way, restricting housing supply in Mountain View likely impacts rents its socioeconomically similar neighbor, Sunnyvale.

They are, though. I wouldn't have expected it, but I was just looking at Craigslist now and rents in Mountain View seem to go for about $700/month over roughly equivalent housing in Sunnyvale. I'm in a pretty old 2BR right next to the Mountain View border for $2600; the equivalent would be a 2BR in the California/Escuela area, which rents for about $3300/month. Perhaps it's just my neighborhood (rents in new construc…

Those factors do make sense, although I'd think Sunnyvale would have a shorter commute to employers like Apple.

I definitely don't have a nuanced enough understanding of the difference in civic liveliness of the two cities - and resulting desirability - they both always felt pretty suburban to me. But I've never lived in either one.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#400

Post by panopticon »

brandall10 wrote: post #332
pickle-wizard wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 10 years of living in an apartments and hearing all of my neighbors I got tired of it. So I bought a single family house. I have a small yard, only 1/8th acre, but it is enough of an air gap that I don't hear my neighbors.

I live in a concrete/glass/steel luxury high-rise in downtown San Diego. My neighbors can have raging parties into the early morning and I can't hear a thing unless I wander into the hallway. The construction quality of multi-family homes in SV pretty poor.

I've lived in apartment buildings in at least four cities (mostly in the midwest) where I could hear my neighbors doing normal things (i.e., not throwing ragers). It seems be a widespread problem not confined to SV.
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