Some of the buildings have less than one parking spot per apartment which in theory is supposed to help encourage people to use transit, in practice people fear it will lead to more street parking in adjacent residential neighbourhoods which already have pretty full streets.
200,000 dwellings in Sunnyvale would be a DoS attack on the city's infrastructure, not some new urban dreamland.
1. Considering that some of the apartment dwellers will become homeowners and their place will be taken by new apartment dwellers, how will the overcrowded schools support the influx?
2. Considering people will take public transit to go to work, they still would use cars to move around locally in the area on evenings and weekends. How will the current streets support the greater density of cars? e.g. Central Expressway used to be an expressway now it is a parking lot.
3. Overburdened police and firemen will be exposed to further strain.
4. Parking is a nightmare not just on residential streets but even at local establishments. Space needed for parking is used to build more housing.
Unless you live here and face these issues it's easy to downvote rather than come up with solutions that are at pace with the housing construction boom.
If I paid over a million dollars to buy a house in a school district that has a good score what would you suggest I do when suddenly the student to teacher ratio is so skewed that the education of my children suffers?
As revenue increases, city services can be expanded. Schools on the other hands are basically crooks as far as I can tell. The reason being that I have yet to get the Fremont Union Highschool District to offer up actual budget numbers and actual spend. They will argue all sorts of things about "confidentiality of teacher salaries" or "we're not a government so we don't have to give you that information." but generally I have not been impressed with the way they operate. [2]
Traffic and parking is a legitimate concern. Traffic has gotten worse again (after getting better after the dot com crash). But many programs are targeted at making the city more bike accessible for easier access.
[1] Page 12 -- http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/FIN/FY%2015-16%2...
[2] I had an administrator at the district tell me that it was "illegal" to be home schooling my children.
For parking, Sunnyvale is indeed surprisingly bad. For a sleepy town with nothing to do you often can't get parking downtown.
Maybe these possibilities haven't been explained well but I sort of think there are other interests that would prefer things stay approximately as they are.
Edit: one aspect that occurs to me is that developers probably wouldn't want a process that solves the housing crisis immediately either. It seems to me that satisfying the pent-up demand for housing gradually, project by project, would allow a developer to scoop up a lot of the excess, monopoly home-value now enjoyed by homeowners whereas if a huge stock of apartments appeared in one big bang, developers could wind-up selling them at costs plus a small profit level.
Municipal bonds backed by future property tax flows in the one of the wealthiest cities in the USA is pretty secure, so you wouldn't have to save for a few years.
Even if you fear putting the cart before the horse, it simply begs the question of why you don't already have the horse. And the answer to that, I think, is back to what was stated above: fear of change, of urbanization, of government, of government spending, of property value declines, of loss of "heritage" – whatever that means to a farming town that replaced its (AFAIK) last orchard with a strip mall called the "Cherry Orchard" in 1999...
Sadly it's not quite so easy to increase road capacity as unlike a real city where you can add residents without adding vehicles, it's simply not possible to add residents in the 'burbs without adding an equal number of cars on the road. I'd love for it to be otherwise, but the sprawl can't be fixed just by rezoning lots for higher density.
I think it's more an issue of poor planning than fear of change (although yes, some residents want the city to be a 1966-themed amusement park). Hanlon's Razor and all. Personally I have no attachment to the sentimental issues around Sunnyvale but my proposed solution of levelling half the city and rebuilding it like central Toronto seems like a non-starter.
And a project like that seems like it could result in both keeping single-family housing in many areas and solving the broad housing crisis. These directly hit against zoning limits but I suspect there's more going than inertia.
Maybe I haven't passed that critical milestone, but I can't think of a scenario where I'd complain if my neighborhood decay came with such a surge in net worth? (not trying to be sarcastic, could be an issue of be never having been that attached to a specific neighborhood)
(Naturally, this wouldn't apply to those who are without rent control, and suffer the double-whammy of more outsiders + higher rent.)
This is what someone replied earlier. For some ROI is the most important thing. For someone who lives in the suburbs I can say that for me it isn't the most important thing.
So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for existing residents (not me but I'm a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don't want the neighborhood experience to change from what they know (or knew) to something they don't know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They loved them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth.
The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don't seem to internalize that things change. They won't acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for their values and their memories and opinions of what is "right" and what is "wrong." Meanwhile we have people in their 20's and 30's who don't want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don't know.
We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.