Why try to convince people to take money if they don't want it?
Edit: People usually ask for everything: landlords of non-transit areas may ask for transit improvements, as well as to keep zoning regulations, as well as to keep their property price at current levels. Hopefully they won't get all three!
Not a new topic, wouldn't change much.
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/out-of-control-shopl...
I haven't followed the stats since then (and there could be other explanations for the reports in that article), but the perception in the region that transit brings crime is very strong.
"I want to thank you for ruining our city," said Donna Azarian, an Eden Prairie resident, during the city's public hearing. She said that the city doesn't have the density to support light rail and that it will "bring crime to our city." Her comments were met with audience applause..."
Source?
Which does a bad job of estimating the kind of people who use mass transit even in the Bay. Caltrain (which has also been targeted by wealthier communities in an attempt to stop it from improving), for example, is packed with young professionals and with middle-class (by peninsula standards) teenagers who use it to commute to school. BART and the ferries and other transit systems are used heavily by tech people and other professionals, because trying to get places by driving is a massive headache. But among a certain class of people the whole transit network is perceived as being for the exclusive use of homeless people and criminals.
It's also essentially a way of telling everyone "want a life where rail travel is your primary commute? hope you also don't want a single-family home."
Now, maybe that's an acceptable loss, given that single-family neighborhoods are already not exactly friendly to rail lines coming in, and they are by nature exactly in heavy supply near rail.
Or maybe the unintended consequence is going to be to halt the expansion of rail.
They have no interest in "property value". Especially if they already have too much money.
NIMBYism is less "I don't want my property value affected" and more "I don't want anything affected"
That's really not generally true. Talk about "property values" generally does actually pertain to financial outcomes related to their property.
And they have valid reasons to: if you're paying a mortgage, you're in trouble if the value of your property drops. Even if you've paid off your mortgage already, you still don't want it to drop, because it reduces your wealth on paper (reducing your financial flexibility), and it also reduces the size of the estate you can bequeath to your children. But more immediately than that: just because the value of your property has dropped, that doesn't mean the taxes you pay on it automatically drop too. (See: Detroit, where people had to sell their homes to force a revaluation, because the annual taxes were more than the value of their homes after the market crashed, and the city refused to reassess the homes, because it was broke).
The problem is that "property values" is also used as a dog-whistle for racism and redlining - or, in other words, making neighborhoods less accessible to (or attractive to) people who aren't white. This is especially true in California and the Pacific Northwest, which has an incredibly long history of passing exclusionary laws regarding housing and property ownership.
Proximity (especially being close to tracks but far from stations) is viewed as a minus.
In regards to politics, the answer to this question is, without a doubt, regardless of the content, always "Yes it will."
SF does not have nearly the subway line coverage it needs to adequately serve the city (e.g. takes 40 minutes to take the bus to downtown from the marina).