Proposed CA law tells cities: Build more, or we’ll do it for you

Re:Proposed CA law tells cities: Build more, or we’ll do it ... by WillPostForFood on Saturday December 10, 2016 @04:39AM (#13144887)

Why do rational urbanists suddenly crave development in suburbs like Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Cupertino when we have three major urban centers in San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco that all could use a lot more density. Building more out in the suburbs between will just mean more traffic, more pollution, more global warming. It makes no sense.

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Re:Proposed CA law tells cities: Build more, or we’ll do it ... by jacobolus on Saturday December 10, 2016 @08:06AM (#13145479)

I think a good chunk of San Francisco should also be up-zoned for mixed uses and more housing units in buildings up to 5 stories with less parking requirement. All the pale yellow here is very low density residential: http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf

But anyway, I don’t think it would be inherently terrible to have relatively low density suburbs.

The problem is that all the towns in the peninsula love building massive amounts of new office space, but don’t build enough housing for the workers to live there. As a result, the workers all live in SF and commute daily to the peninsula by car or corporate shuttle. This is a horrible planning pattern for everyone. (Except for the peninsula towns who get big tax revenue from the office space and don’t have to pay for any of the costs of housing the workers’ families.)

It’s plausible that increasing the housing supply in Silicon Valley suburbs would even decrease commute-hours traffic. (I’m not enough of an expert to predict precisely.)

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