For once, CEQA would actually protect the environment: Nowadays, downzoning requires an impact study. There's no way any credible study could conclude that promoting sprawl is good for the planet.

a) It would lower their home values (note that the railroad tunnel predates the houses by a few decades, and the railroad has talked about doing this project for 2 decades)

b) Extra train traffic means more pollution. Seems reasonable, until you realize that the tunnel is almost literally in the shadow (it's on the south side, not north, so not quite literally) of an interstate. Guess who's responsible for most of the air pollution.

c) The project calls for railroad to temporarily run in a exposed trench while building the tunnel. Residents are worried about what would happen if an oil tanker car caught fire. Unfortunately, a glance at the map indicates that this is not on the routes between oil supply centers and oil demand centers, and, as Baltimore found out (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Street_Tunnel_fire ), fires in tunnels are much worse than fires in the open air.

Yes, but this time instead of an individual development being up for CEQA obstruction (which favors NIMBYs), proposed rezoning would be subject to environmental review. This means pro-growth people could use the NIMBYs' own favorite tool against them, preventing down zoning. Poetic justice.

In CA, various state laws require that cities zone some parcels for new housing. Often, that housing never happens because cities can disapprove even zoning-compliant projects on those parcels. The by-right law is intended to fix that problem.

Unfortunately, the by-right law does not seem likely to pass the legislature. If you support it, you should call and email your state reps.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x....

[2] http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/housing/datasets.html#report...

Good! Fantastic! Brilliant! Because that's the start to an actual, sustainable solution for this problem. I have no problem with construction, but diversification of the tech industry is far more important.

It is absolutely insane to believe that you can continue to cram the global tech industry into the popular third of the SF peninsula (i.e. the ~20 square miles east of Divisadero and north of Cesar Chavez), and maintain affordable housing. No matter how much you build, it's going to be ridiculously expensive, because developers do not build into falling markets. Manhattan and London and Tokyo are not cheap places to live, despite decades of construction. Moreover, even in "high-rise" cities like Tokyo, most of the residential construction is under 5 stories. Those cities sprawl to accommodate their population. SF doesn't have that option.

At this point, the only rational solution is for the tech industry to diversify geographically. It's better for SF, it's better for the companies, and it's way, way better for the employees.

That said, I fail to see how this makes me "wrong"...I said that most residential construction in Tokyo is under five stories, and that the city sprawls. Both are true statements. Tokyo has enormous, far-flung suburbs of low-rise buildings, and most of the population lives there.

It's better than SF, in that you do see taller (i.e. 5-10 story) buildings along major roads, and the buildings have a smaller footprint, but these things are details. Tokyo is a gigantic, sprawling city. It's something like 20 times the size of SF.

You can use either the carrot or the stick to promote tech companies to either deploy satellite offices across the country or enable remote work, but this is not a planning problem, its a tech sector externality.

With apologies to Sam Kinison, "Move where the land is cheap."

The SF housing crunch is an acute, hyper-local problem, obviously caused by a tech bubble. Rents were declining in SF as recently as 2009. Rents decline rapidly as you get further from the city.

The long-term price trends of homes in (say) San Luis Obispo, while interesting, is of little relevance to the discussion. The markets are so different that you can't draw any conclusions (except, perhaps, that Prop 13 is a horrible law, and that mortgage interest deduction is a disastrous public policy choice).

You shock me.

I could have just as easily used 2012 as the year, because rents were more-or-less flat in SF from 2010-2012, after some declines in 2009. Rent lunacy began concurrently with startup valuation lunacy.

http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2016/05/port...