Posted by Silver Linings
a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood
on Aug 4, 2023 at 12:39 am
Silver Linings is a registered user.

“The top reasons Americans moved in 2022 were to improve their quality of life (24%), live in a cheaper area (23%), and get a bigger place (22%).”

Building in ways that dramatically hurts quality of life is only going to put us at risk of lots of the tax base leaving suddenly. When it gets to that point, it’s hard to fix. Just look at San Francisco. The building frenzy there didn’t make it affordable. Now they’ve got double digit residential and office vacancy. Is it affordable? Still no. But they have now lost a huge tax base suddenly that isn’t coming back. Because QUALITY OF LIFE.

We just had a historic drought. Why should we be required to build more mostly market rate rentals that seriously negatively impact quality of life and safety until the state can ensure those who are already living here that they will have water during the next drought? The WAY of the building has ignored quality of life on the theory that it will solve a problem THAT IT IS NOT SOLVING but is creating problems.

California currently has over a million vacant homes. Think about that. A simplistic view of supply and demand getting everyone to overlook the environmental, safety, quality of life, and community-damaging problems caused by overbuilding will not end well. And it ends up kicking the can down the road on the hard problem of creating actual affordable housing in an expensive place.