If want to do what's best for everyone as a whole, you need higher levels of government to step in and represent those people who don't otherwise have a voice.
https://carlaef.org/2018/04/20/we-sued-sausalito-and-then-we...
The Bay Area has really dysfunctional governance. We have 9 counties and lots of cities. Each one independently has incentives to attract jobs and offload housing to the other counties; though, some towns were incorporated specifically to prevent integration for racist reasons. The total result is that we have way more jobs than homes in the region, and unfunded pension liabilities, and mega-commutes, and advanced gentrification. It’s in the best interests for California as a state to override this whole mess with some reasonable baseline standards. That is what SB 827 was about.
https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/12/12945854/bay-area-cities-jo...
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-unfunded/ https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-raise-gdp-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/us/california-today-super...
https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/sb-827-retains-an-awful-lot...
I would prefer to see state measures that require cities to tie housing development to commercial development and jobs growth. Or even for SB-827 to be modified to exclude cities/counties that have maintained a balance. This would exclude Marin from SB-827, but would certainly still include SF and Cupertino.
(The Sausalito lawsuit is a separate matter to this discussion; its success demonstrated the effectiveness of existing state laws for that particular development.)
Homeowners in a city have an incentive to block housing construction. That hurts everyone who commutes into that city; those people deserve a say too, and they have one at the state level.
That's a fair point. (Although I would prefer to see it solved through fiscal incentives since the state is the one paying for transit construction.)
Although generally supportive of the Yimby movement in cities and the need to increase density, I am concerned that SB 827 (and similar) will steamroll the will of voters in smaller counties where staunch opposition remains.
Marin County, just across the bridge from San Francisco, is a good example: they have a strong history of opposition to housing development and density[1], and the overwhelming majority of Marin residents are opposed to top-down State measures to impose density requirements. This is quite different to San Francisco, where the YIMBY movement appears to have majority support (including me) and where a local jobs boom and office space increase has created a housing imbalance.
I would prefer that this is handled locally and am genuinely curious to know why the state government should be the interlocutor and arbiter?
1. http://rebelsdocumentary.org/