Nothing weird about that situation at all. In fact it's the way much of planet is organized.
These people are assholes.
Nothing of the sort. They're long-term residents looking out for what's best for their community.
And it's exactly the kind of completely gratuitous negativity (project by outsiders, who otherwise couldn't begin to care what goes on in their town), exemplified above, which shores up this instinct that many of them have to protect what they have. Because they know that you're definitely not concerned about what impact projects like these will have on their quality of life and long-term fiscal interests.
No, they're just looking out for themselves. The community is hurt by their greed for massively inflated property values, low taxes, and keeping the younger generation from living the lives they want.
If that makes me negative, fine. But if they are white-washing their behavior by pretending to be concerned for "the community" when really they only care about themselves, yes, that is the very definition of asshole.
So the folks who live there now do because they were born earlier and got to buy a house first?
Until the state decides to apply eminent domain so more people can better use the space available.
> As if they have some inalienable right to live in places like Brisbane.
As if anyone had an inalienable right not to have neighbors.
I can see the grievances of both sides on this, but I honestly wish there was more focus on spreading out these 'tech hub' communities to places beyond just the Bay area. There's a certain absurdity to the idea that the tech industry of all industries has this need to clump everyone together into a hyper-concentrated beehive of activity that irrevocably alters the host communities upon which it descends.
No one is suggesting that Brisbane should be paved and turned into Manhattan. People are asking Brisbane to approve development in some fallow fields. Brisbane residents (like many of the small towns in the Bay) benefit financially from office space, but pass the buck on housing those employees to other municipalities.
And this is the key argument to be made here. Building stores and offices has a cost - the people who work on those offices and stores must be housed somewhere. A regional empty homes/unhoused inhabitant number could be used to guide a global rule for new developments. If you want to build offices at some place, you need to build k * offices houses at a nearby location.
There are many new residents to San Francisco that also prefer living there over places like Manhattan precisely because they enjoy open spaces and non-overbearing buildings. Suppose these new tech employees finally convince housing changes and get some condo buildings put in place of the single residence structures. Fast forward 50 years and now the newest generation that wants to move to the city asks these condo building to be replaced with Tokyo style super dense micro-apartment buildings. Those condo owning old-timers might resist that, no?
And yes, I too fail to see the need for the centralized tech hubs that created this dynamic. Spread it out or build new hubs where land is cheap.
The absurdity is that we have such low need for agricultural labor, and such sophisticated technology for skyscrapers and subways, and still live so far from each other, in such small clusters. The absurdity is that there are still, in 2017, substantial numbers of humans that don't live in major cities.
Right now, they should drag this out as long and as hard as they can IMO lest they get screwed again. Because if the place didn't smell like a$$ on a daily basis, it would have been discovered and gentrified long ago (I remember checking the place out myself in 2007). It could be a fantastic suburb of SF in a world where win/win usually triumphed over I got mine so @#$% you. But that's not how this area works in my experience.
That one of the major issues I think the Bay Area faces: each township passes the buck to the next: "Why should we build housing, when township X is completely unwilling to do so?" Yes, and they say the same thing about you! With this attitude, nothing will ever get built, anywhere.
The Problem is SF, Oakland and SJ --localities which can/could build if they wanted to but simply don't.
The entire peninsula is tiny, it's not fair to compare it to Zurich.
But Brisbane, California is not a "small town" it's a disgusting example of exurban sprawl.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brisbane,+CA/@37.679201,-1...
Brisbane is a small town. It is dense, not sprawling. It has a town square and a handful of shops. It has schools. It is surrounded by empty space on all sides. It is in a canyon of San Bruno Mountain on three sides and surround by bay water and rail yards on the north side. You don't know what you are talking about
Looking at the map (https://goo.gl/maps/7kvttaK8z7F2), it's not even in Brisbane proper, so I think you're wrong about your assessment.
I have been to Brisbane, the number of large McMansions is very tiny.
Point it the existing built environment of Brisbane, CA is not worth preserving. Its car-dependent nature is a menace to the region.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6916572,-122.4087356,3a,90y,...
I think your assessment is a bit heavy handed considering how bad public transit is in the area in general.
That's not what we call an 'exurb', either.