Parking would be less of a deal if they built mixed developments, which are more desirable anyway. It’s quite nice being able to walk out of your house and drop right into a coffee shop, bar, or restaurant. Walking to work or school is amazing too.
People here seem to be so afraid that their neighborhoods will begin to look more like Dubai or Hong Kong. But clearly what we’re doing now isn’t sustainable, nor is it even that pleasant. Much of SV looks like it did in the 1970s, and you have to sit in a half hour plus of traffic if you want to do anything. I think we would be in pretty good shape if maybe we didn’t go to the extremes, but took a housing model more like Paris, London, or Amsterdam. We can limit heights, but still build dense and create a place people really want to live in.
Honestly, after visiting the bay area, this is among my top reasons for not wanting to move there. It is so beautiful, and yet.. for someone coming from a city lifestyle, it just doesn't seem.. livable. At all.
I got lost walking to my meeting from the train station in Mountain View, and people didn't even know how to give me walking directions to where I needed to go. It was crazy. It wasn't that far by a straight line on the map, so I figured whatever I'll skip the taxi, but I had no idea what I was getting into. I finally had to ask a bunch of cyclists and it turned out I had to walk about a kilometer along a raised highway to get to the bridge and then cross several insane intersections.
At lunch I was driven to a burger place a couple of km away.
Ok. I get it. You need a car to live there. That just doesn't sound nice to me, frankly, and I don't know if I could convert to that way of living.
Mountain View proper has a pretty nice downtown area but it sounds as if you were trying to traverse 101 from the Caltrain station to Shoreline Drive or something like that. Yeah, that's not going to work very well. 101 is an extremely busy multi-lane highway.
But, yeah, in general Silicon Valley is pretty much a sprawl. There are some nice small downtowns scattered around but you mostly need a car to get from place to place and most big companies are on their own disconnected campuses and others are scattered around industrial parks.
A lot of those barriers are there for a reason. In the 90s East Palo Alto had the highest per capita murder rate in the country. Meanwhile, just across the 101, Palo Alto was the land of million dollar homes. Like the cold war, the suburbanites chose the containment strategy.
The more I dig into this, the less I realize I know.
I asked, "did the slums exist before the highways and freeways that divide them from the wealthy whites?" The best I've come up with is "Sort of."
Apparently, in the 50's and 60s, city officials throughout the US thought of urban freeways as "a good opportunity to get rid of the local 'niggertown.'"[1] But that attempt at clearing the local slums ended up further disrupting and distressing them, deepening the problem.
I appreciate the mention of West Oakland. I walked past Esther's Orbit Room on my way to work today. A derelict jazz club, a holdover from the time when West Oakland was flush with money and culture brought from all over by the people who worked the railways.
That was before the Cypress freeway tore West Oakland in two, or 980 sheared it away from downtown Oakland, or the trans-bay BART tracks, or before the USPS distribution center was built. The last, for those not familiar, is a 6 story concrete windowless menace that I've started calling the "Ministry of Truth."
Slums exist because the privileged spent a century paving over neighborhoods filled with people that they wished would just stop existing.
> did the slums exist before the highways and freeways that divide them from the wealthy whites?
You mean Oakland and Vallejo? Yeah that stuff has been there before the start of SV. See MC Hammer and Too Short for references to past gang activity in Oakland.
Those references are not before the highways and freeways mentioned upthread, and also do not predate Silicon Valley. (Too Short and MC Hammer were in elementary school when Silicon Valley was first recognized as a thing.)
Although aspects of this sort of separation go much further back. Being from "the wrong side of the tracks" is an expression that probably dates to the 19th century. (Of course, that was less of an actual physical barrier.)
In the case of East Palo Alto, the disparity can be traced back to at least the prohibition era (1919). EPA was the openly "wet" town during prohibition (after the now forgotten city of Mayview's speakeasies were shutdown), and I speculate the behavioral norm to overlook laws, no matter how misguided, fostered an environment where other undesirable business ventures thrived.
Another way to view it would be that speakeasies thrived where the police didn't bother (or accepted discouragement) to go. Police resources are financial and political, and often stretched thin over poor or minority neighborhoods. So it is strange to divorce something and call it just "norms" when such strong economic forces are in play.
It really depends on where you decide to live. California in general was designed around people getting everywhere by cars. Especially the Bay Area, which is basically suburbs which suddenly became the Tech Center of the world. Like others have mentioned the downtown areas are pretty walkable: I visited a friend in Mountain View and there were so many bars/restaurants downtown, there was always something to do once you parked and started walking (granted, there weren't quality nightclubs, but that might just reflect the demographic of the city). And the train station is nearby too.
For what it's worth, Southern California is far less walkable than the bay area is. Much of Southern California (San Fernando Valley, Orange County, South LA, ect.) doesn't even have downtowns like you see in bay area communities, just long streets with buildings that have huge setbacks for parking.
At least in the bay area the places where there are shops aren't hostile to pedestrians (although if I recall you do see more of this as you move down the peninsula into San Jose).
What about Gas Lamp in San Diego? Downtown Santa Barbara? Tons of Southern California communities have walkable downtowns...more than I can list...Montrose, Fullerton, Redondo, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Sierra Madre. Honestly, you could do a year of day trips just visiting them all. Way more than I can list here.
I’ve lived up and down the peninsula and haven’t relied on a car in 10 years. Thanks to a mix of choosing strategic locations, biking, BART, Caltrain, Lyft, Zipcar / Getaround, and friends with cars. Anecdotal, I know, but just chiming in to say it’s definitely possible.
It's possible everywhere. The last two places I lived in St. Louis had Walk Scores in the 90s. If you prioritize it, you can get it. (But obviously some places have a lot more of it than others.)
Not everywhere. I live a whopping 30 minutes from the city line and no uber, no bus, no train, etc. There is a local who will drive you to the airport, and thats it. You overgeneralizing city centric viewpoint is not applicable to MOST of the world. We still need cars, and gas ones at that. Hell, I am one of the few with ACCESS to "high speed" (1.2mb) internet. I am on a major highway, not some obscure hole either.
By "everywhere" I meant "in at least one neighborhood in every major U.S. metro." I did not say (or mean to say) that it's possible anywhere in every U.S. metro, just that it's possible somewhere in every U.S. metro.
(I mentioned my experiences with high Walk Scores in St. Louis to imply that they are anomalous in the St. Louis metro, but that dense, walkable neighborhoods exist even in such car-centric MSAs.)
On my first trip to Hong Kong (decades ago, as a teenager) I remember my family stayed in a hotel with a shopping centre on the lower levels. You took an elevator down from your room that literally opened out into a supermarket, food court, department store, etc. I remember thinking it was awesome. Add other facilities within enjoyable walking distance and you're laughing, for those keen to live with that density.
I've travelled all over the world and lived in LA for 22 years. Dubai is the least walkable city I've ever seen by a wide margin. It would hold that title even if the weather did not already make it feel like hell on earth.
The weather makes it impossible to have the city walkable and enjoyable. If you want to see another city less walkable than Dubai, it is Qatar. There isn't even public transportation there (though a metro line is in the works).
I was stuck there for a few days for a job and wanted to do literally anything other than sitting in the hotel. There was literally nothing within a 30 minute walk (in brutal heat) so a taxi was required, but I didn't have any local currency, so I asked the hotel concierge where the closest ATM is. I then had to walk 30 minutes, just to find a broken ATM inside of a little structure with a broken A/C. At that point, I realized if I walked another 30 minutes, I would be at the mall. 2 of the 3 ATMs at the mall didn't work. After 20 minutes of realizing the mall was full of Gucci and other designer shops which I had no interest in, I took a taxi 15 minutes to the next nearest mall. Again, nothing but designer shops. Taking another taxi to visit yet another (unfinished) mall, which was worse than the last two, not to mention only 1/3rd of the shops were even open, but according to multiple people and the taxi driver, it was the "hot spot to go". The taxi driver refused to park inside because the line of cars was hundreds long and would have taken ~30 minutes. I ended up walking 15 minutes from the highway to the mall.
Vegas? Most of it is sprawl and the Strip (where few people live) is enormous hotels that are actually pretty spread out.
I agree the Montreal core is fairly walkable. Cold is generally easier to deal with than heat. There's also a large connected Underground that people use when the weather is bad.
Vegas has wide pedestrian boulevards, escalators for elevated pedestrian crossings, throughways inside casinos, and even a pair of monorails. The Strip is mostly linear and there aren't long stretches with nothing there - food, lodging, entertainment, and (of course) gambling are never more than a few dozen feet away at any point.
But I have to say, Rochester, MN - the Mayo Clinic - has to be one of the more extraordinarily walkable places I've ever been: the whole city is not only interconnected underground between apartments, parking structures, and offices but there are plentiful underground facilities as well. It amazed me to have streets so empty when I first showed up: I had no idea where everyone was! The answer is: why on earth would you go outside? :)
But it's pretty much just tourist stuff: casinos, a mixture of crappy and mostly high-end restaurants, souvenir shops, bars. I'm not sure I can think of having seen a grocery store outside of rundown convenience stores. And the transit is fragmented because most of it only runs between hotels with the same owner.
So the Strip is walkable but mostly in the same sense that a big shopping mall with tower or two of apartments is walkable.
Toronto also has extensive interconnected underground walking space. Even though the weather isn't terrible it is often bad enough that you don't want to walk outside. You can still go many places downtown on foot without being exposed to the element. Walkable doesn't necessarily require good weather year-round although that makes it easier and certainly more pleasant.
To be fair, for Rochester that's an exceedingly small city core zone of a few square blocks that is interconnected like that. You're driving from where you live to that zone for 99% of the people working there.
The rest of the city is basically giant soulless suburb. I've had friends who have lived there for close to a decade now.
Though interconnection isn't common there are a number of older small cities in the Northeast with walkable, revitalized downtowns. I worked in downtown Nashua NH for a number of years and there were plenty of little restaurants, places you could run various errands, and so forth.
But the nice area was really only a handful of blocks in each direction. And beyond that you are in mostly rundown post-industrial mill town and beyond that it is very spread out.
The monorail(s) might be more useful if they were accessibly priced and not so far from the strip. At least walking through the casinos is a fairly interesting and air-conditioned experience.
Maybe it's the weather conditions what produces a city like that. I live in a city that reaches 110F every summer, and
walking is something I avoid as much as I can with that heat. (And I love walking)
Dubai is a horrible place to be a pedestrian, at least the areas I briefly visited. Everything is at a huge scale so the distances are extreme, and obviously the climate doesn't help at all.
I wonder if anyone has ever built a city, or significant part of a city, with either a purely subterranean transport layer, or all pedestrian layers a storey above? (Obviously I'm talking beyond a subway system.)
In Montreal, we have the largest underground complex called "The Underground City". It's a series of tunnels of a total of 32 km that allow going almost everywhere downtown (add to that the subway and soon the electric train, we could say almost everywhere in the city) without going outside.
Canadian cities (sans Vancouver) seem to have a lot of pedestrian tunnels (often doubling as downtown malls). In HK you can get pretty far underground as a pedestrian in some parts (you can basically walk between subway stations in an underground labyrinth to avoid rain).
Also, Minneapolis has a nice skyway network. Then there is La Defense in Paris where the pedistrian level is above street level.
Yeah Toronto has the PATH system and you can get around much of the downtown core that way (though I prefer not to...). Toronto itself is really quite walkable for hours in most directions if you live downtown. However to get to anything in further reaches of the city—Scarborough, Etobicoke, or Vaughn—it's far better to have a car. Living downtown and visiting the zoo on transit is a long stretch ;)
Calgary also has a skyway network (called the Plus-15 http://plus15.com/). Living there one winter was odd to me after Toronto—you'd never see anybody on the streets. And downtown Calgary is reasonably quiet on a normal, nice day. That said that town is also quite walkable—though it's best parts are relegated to certain parts of the city that are separated by less interesting areas.
Victoria, BC is one of my favourite walkable places so far. I also really enjoyed my time in Montreal, but I'm a little conditioned to the cold.
It has become a lot more pedestrian friendly compared to 15 years ago my first visit and 1 year ago my last visit. But the problem of afternoon heat cant be solved.
It takes time to build up a high density culture. Thicker skin, a bit more aloofness, etc.. many run counter to what is considered "good" in sparser area.
In my experience in London, the people living in the centre are not aloof, but it's the commuters who switch off their brains on the train or in the car and forget to switch it back on when they're in town. But that's an extremely broad brush, so don't take the categorization to heart.
I found this wasn't universal. Grew up in relatively unfriendly (especially for a Canadian city) Toronto and then moved to Chicago, found people were much more outgoing and friendly in the midwest, even in the city. In the bay area now and it seems like spending too much time driving with other angry drivers (from themselves spending too much time driving) makes everyone irritable.
Just have been to HK at Admiralty/Center. And the stairs up and down to get anywhere over the streets is super annoying. Especially at night. But surprisingly not much traffic, and lots of buses and trams. But maybe that was due to new year.
That's because you have been conditioned to look for the streets. The midlevel is amazing and protect you from the heat/rain plus makes your walk less of a pain (no need to cross roads).
One of the things I miss most about HK, having grown up there, is just how far you can get in a (roughly) straight line without touching the ground. There were parts where you could go for 10-15 minutes at a stretch, and that was ~25 years ago. I can only imagine that's grown since.
This. I grew up in Los Gatos, but now live in London. Virtually anywhere in the city there are decent shops within a 5-10 minute walk; this fact alone makes London vastly more liveable than 95% of Silicon Valley. This is only viable with mixed-use zoning and a certain minimum density. This in turn makes public transport more viable, further increasing the quality of life. Done right -- and it really isn't that hard to do it right -- high-density mixed-use development produces a very virtuous feedback loop.
Major European cities have had centuries to develop, and were built in large part before automobiles existed, which necessitated density and walkability. Silicon Valley, by contrast, was largely agricultural or undeveloped even 50-60 years ago, and development of suburban housing represented a significant increase in density (and automobile transportation was cheap and fast then, so relatively low density housing made sense).
Now, we are left with the problem that the suburbs aren't going anywhere for the most part, due to lack of political will, and lack of a reasonable market-based solution -- single family homes are often in the $1-1.5 million range for ~1/8 acre lots in less desirable areas, and redeveloping even a relatively small subdivision would be extremely expensive, even if you could get everyone to sell (they wouldn't), and get permission from the city. Redevelopment is limited right now to the commercial corridors, such as El Camino Blvd, and existing commercial/industrial/business districts, all of which are undergoing pretty heavy redevelopment in much of Santa Clara County. Transportation infrastructure including both public transportation and public roads are also undergoing multi-billion dollar improvements, though some of the work may take a decade or more to complete.
source: I have lived in the Silicon Valley area for over 30 years -- its changing faster now than at any point I can remember.
This has been causing me more and more despair the more I think about it. I feel like the US had one chance to decide how most of it's cities were, fundamentally, going to be, and that chance ended about 50 years ago. The choice made was "design everything around cars". This now looks like a disaster on a near cosmic scale. Even worse, it's almost impossible to reverse.
That is exactly why urban planning needs to be from the top down, at least for high level activities. Arranging for an entire area to be re-developed at once is a top down planning activity.
Conversely, the precise details of what goes in to an area should be 'bottom up', but within zoning policies similar to how Japan does it.
Support Scott Wiener's SB827, which will require zoning restrictions to be relaxed around California metro public transit stations. Currently many BART and other subway stations in California are in neighborhoods where you can't build anything other than single family, 2 story houses.
Having lived and grown up in ultra-dense urban cities like Hongkong, Singapore and Tokyo, I very much prefer somewhere with a little more breathing space. Though not to the extent of American suburbs. The European cities are probably a good balance.
HK and Singapore I get, but I didn’t find most parts of Tokyo to be very dense at all. More continuous low and mid-rise density (but not high rise density) levels like Europe.
If you want breathing space get out to real space. I own 8 acres in the middle of nowhere. Suburbs don't give you enough space to enjoy the rural lifestyle, but you are spread out too much to enjoy the advantages of living in the city.
Of course there are not that many affordable lots with land near any jobs.
I roll my eyes at a lot of the urban infatuation but I mostly agree. I've always felt that conventional suburbs brought together the worst of urban environments (you're in fairly close proximity with others) with the worst of rural living (you have to drive everywhere). I live in an exurb on a fair bit of land. If I were to live somewhere different it would probably be in a city or at least a town center of some sort.
Although nearly all of the new building in some parts has been mixed use. Sunnyvale has nearly completed replacing the old mall and town and country commercial shops with mixed apartments and commercial. Ever since Santana Row in San Jose turned out to be a huge success it seems one of the few types of development that gets approved.
It will be interesting to see where it all leads. I applaud Mt. View's willingness to add 10K homes. its about a tenth of what is needed but it is a great start.
Probably not a tenth. MTV's population in 2013 was around 77k. Adding 100k homes would get the city to s standstill. As much as I want more housing here so I can buy something myself, the infrastructure is nowhere close to handle that right now.
If I understand your comment you are equating more houses to more traffic. (the 'standstill' point).
If that is the case, you may find, as I have, some interesting systemic properties in the various studies of Bay Area traffic. The part that really struck me is that traffic is more closely related to people living 'outside' a town or region than people living 'inside' a region. The analysis postulates a model like this:
Lets say you have a single large employer in a city, and no housing. Then every person who goes to work comes from somewhere else to get to the employer, then leaves to go back to where they live. This pattern was exacerbated in the 60's when new cities were all work and the communities around them were 'bedroom' communities. That leads to arterials to the city that get massively clogged during rush hour (and greatly reduced night life / commerce because no one lives there).
Now consider the opposite extreme, you have a large employer or industry and everyone who works there lives in the same town. Now you get short rush hours because people near to the employer can get there easily by walking or biking, people further away can drive but the drive is short. Additionally because there aren't any employees coming in from out of town there is no traffic on the roads between the town and other towns that is commute related.
I am not saying that any place is at either extreme, but in the Silicon Valley area (aka the 'south bay') it is believed that an imbalance exists between available housing and jobs, and further that the imbalance contributes to congestion on the freeways and arterials throughout the various cities. Many of the cities are building additional housing and doing it near transit so that it maximizes the choices the residents have for how they want to travel. There are however some cities that are not so convinced, Cupertino comes to mind, which continues to add office space without adding housing. This is forcing more people to drive through Cupertino to get to work.
Mountain View has done a decent job on the streets near me on San Antonio with a lot of three-four story apartments/retail going up versus say Palo Alto or Los Altos right next door. The mall going under around the same time helped of course.
Personally I can't imagine a more ideal living situation than taking an elevator down in to a grocery store. Easy access to two completely different styles of grocery stores a block or two from my home has been amazing.
>There are pros and cons of each model. You probably won't see the cons until you experience it yourself for a few years.
I'm curious what you feel the cons are. I've lived in essentially this format now in two cities in two different continents, for a while overall, and I haven't really noticed downsides, except that sometimes I would need to cross the street to go to a different "grocery store" because the one I lived above didn't stock something, luckily the bodegas/farmers markets/produce stands nearby did.
All the cons about living in an apartment/condo vs a single family home (which all basically boil down to a reduction in one's personal freedom on/in their own home).
> All the cons about living in an apartment/condo vs a single family home (which all basically boil down to a reduction in one's personal freedom on/in their own home).
I personally grew up in a spacious single family home, but love my current life in an apartment. I don't feel it restricts my personal freedom at all, plus I get the perks of living in a vibrant area.
Ah, I thought you meant something specific about living in an apartment/condo in an urban area with things in walking distance, vs. rural/suburban. I consider those somewhat orthogonal, but I see your point.
Some of the recent developments in Bangalore are heading in this direction. Mixed use is absolutely one of the better approaches to provide a good lifestyle to people. The sad drawback is that you get isolated and will lose the belongingness to the city as a whole. This is not a big deal in the short term, but in the long term, a set of isolated societies isn't that harmonious for the society.
By isolated I don't mean walled, but a natural preference to just be within your conclave.
What might rather work is super fast door to door transit, which in the present is quite unrealistic. Congestion creeps in pretty fast.
What I find worst about modern city life is not having a relationship with my neighbors. I'd much prefer a neighborhood where everything I want is within a 5-minute walk.
Being in a modern city doesn't prevent you from having relationships with your neighbours. We live in a dense mixed-used neighbourhood in Berlin, in a 4 stories apartment building and have good contact with most of our neighbours.
The key is mixed-use. If you're in a large block of apartment buildings, people go elsewhere for everyday things, only coming back to the neighborhood when they want to be alone.
"What I find worst about modern city life is not having a relationship with my neighbors"
To each its own I guess. I used to live in a small town where everybody knew everybody and absolutely hated it. Now I live in a city where I don't know even my closest neighbors, there's no pressure to interact with them and I love it this way. Though it's a personal choice, I see some neighbors socializing in a yard all the time, looking after each others' kids etc.
Outside of the downtown areas, a lot of Dubai is like this too (low rise developments). From one side of the city to the other is more than 60km / 40 miles, so there is a lot of urban sprawl.
IMO Dubai is a pretty poor example of what cities should aim for, as you can’t get to a lot of places without a car. Public transport is good to the main tourist areas of the city, but if you want to go somewhere slightly further afield you need to walk (good luck doing that in the summer) or take a taxi.
Financing development is a big constraint - loans that conform to existing types can be resold. This is why strip malls, industrial parks, malls, and housing developments look the same all over America. If a developer wants to build a multistory, mixed use development, they have to negotiate exceptional financing as well as zoning variances. Even if a city greatly loosened single use zoning, it would still probably be slow and expensive to redevelop.
I'd be worried you'd never fill the retail on the ground level. The small neighborhoods that have the retail/residential buildings have a ton of vacancies even now due to high rents.
It is difficult to find developers that are experienced with building housing in the bay area, and experienced with building mixed use housing, and the location is suitable for mixed use.
Its a little bit of hyperbole to say it still looks like the 70s when there used to still be a lot of orchards back then. They never could have anticipated this growth
That's silly. San Francisco isn't the first city to boom. Detroit added more than a million people between 1910 and 1930. Brooklyn added a half a million people per decade in the early 1900s.
And neither of those cities look like Midtown Manhattan or Tokyo or whatever else SF residents seem to imagine is required to support fast growth.
They did it by building vast areas of multi-story mid-density mixed-use developments. There is zero mystery here, both about what was clearly starting to happen in the SFBA 30 years ago and what should have been done about it.
In less than 50 years, Chicago went from a town of fewer than 5000 to the second largest city in America, with well over 1 million residents, yet during that period:
a) Skyscrapers didn't exist until the end of the period
b) Mass transit as we know it didn't exist until the end of the period
c) Half the city burned down in a single fire, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless
My grandfather told me that his commute from Santa Clara to Lockheed in Sunnyvale involved mostly driving past orchards all through the 1960s and into the 1970s. He left the area in the 1980s, saying that traffic and livability had become too much of a problem. It's been decades of intentionally not addressing the problems - nobody can reasonably claim to not have known or anticipated.
>Nobody can reasonably claim to not have known or anticipated.
Suggesting that people could have predicted the dot-com boom of the 90s or the tech/startup driven boom of the past 15 years (and that it would be so heavily focused in the Bay Area) seems a little far fetched. It might seem obvious now that it has already happened, but in the 60s and 70s I don't see how you could have known (the industries driving development then were Defence and Manufacturing, both nearly nonexistent now). Plenty of areas in the US were increasing in density and economic development during that time, only one of them became Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley was admittedly relatively pricey even by the late eighties. I turned down at least one job in that timeframe because of the CoL difference and I lived in Massachusetts which wasn't extraordinarily cheap.
But there certainly have been rapid changes, especially in some currently popular cities. For example, I believe Boton was still losing population in the 1990s and, at one point, when Teradyne moved out that was pretty much the last tech company in the city (including Cambridge) leaving. There may have been some early biotech but pretty much none of the Route 128 computer companies were in the city.
New York City was also in pretty dire straights in the latter part of the eighties.
Mimic cities like Boston or Vancouver that grew along mass transit lines: commercial frontage (with apartments or small office space them) on major avenues that feature dedicated mass transit (either dedicated bus lanes or light rail), and then radiate out apartments and homes a few blocks. The mass transit can take you into a city core, but still be within a walking distance of various types of housing.
I disagree. People want to be here despite the cost of living, the crowding and transit. Mixed use is a scam. Nobody that works in the shops at Santana Row can even approach having the income to live there. The whole justification for these strip malls with million dollar apartments above them is s farce. And it’s the only plan some local cities have for accommodating future growth (which the citizens don’t want in the first place.)
You're contradicting yourself several times here. People want to live in SV despite all the downsides you've mentioned, which drives housing prices to such an insane level that local workers can't afford to live there, so the cities plan for more growth by building more density and more mixed-use neighborhoods to increase housing density.
All of the above is true, which you've mentioned. You then say that citizens don't want higher density living, but if citizens want more affordable housing in a housing crunch, the way to do that is to increase density. And if you want shorter commute times, the way to do that is to increase density. And if you want workers to be able to afford housing, the way to do that is to push higher income citizens into more expensive housing, freeing up the more affordable housing for those who actually need it.
You can't complain about the cost of living and then refuse to increase density. Keeping density and new construction low during a housing crunch is how you get insane housing prices.
You picked a luxury shopping street as your example. I live in an apartment complex which also has trader joes and starbucks and a few other restaurants. I walk to those places every now and then. Now imagine scaling this up a bit more.
People here seem to be so afraid that their neighborhoods will begin to look more like Dubai or Hong Kong. But clearly what we’re doing now isn’t sustainable, nor is it even that pleasant. Much of SV looks like it did in the 1970s, and you have to sit in a half hour plus of traffic if you want to do anything. I think we would be in pretty good shape if maybe we didn’t go to the extremes, but took a housing model more like Paris, London, or Amsterdam. We can limit heights, but still build dense and create a place people really want to live in.