Mud starts flying in council race

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Is this the article by Mike Greenfield you are referring to? wow.

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[Portion removed.] You don't need 8 story buildings to have affordable housing, you just need projects that fit in done with low profit and low end cost designed in. Not much change of a low profit as a motive if the growth serves the needs of High Tech High-Paid employees. It's very two-faced indeed.

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PA Forward followers need to know the mentality of their leaders. This helps.
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I love the Generation X people - such hubris. Guess what - by luck of year of birth you all missed the really big issues -clean-up after WWII, the Korean War, The Vietnam War, the death of JFK, RFK, MLK. Oh - and the Democratic Convention in 1968 - Chicago with the SDS and all of the other bombers.
That was when Saul Alinsky was busy with his Rules for Radicals in which Ms. HRC was an acolyte as a young pup. Lots going on back then that you all missed. But hey - you have the current activity in the Middle East which was perpetuated by many people including your favorite candidate.

The Baby Boomer generation which you deride has dealt with tough issues and we know who has the respect for the past and the people who worked those issues.

And the millennials who think that they should get free stuff - don't get started on that topic.
Thanks for defining who we should vote for and who we should AVOID.

This followup to Greenfield's message is from a commissioner on the Planning and Transportation Commission and a leader of PA Forward. It helps us understand the thinking of Palo Alto Forward's leadership.
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Palo Alto and the SU campus has always been populated by a mix of people who work in the area or are associated with SU. The companies that are located in the immediate area are generally multi-national and move people to different locations based on skill sets and promotions. I have a large mix of people on my street and the immediate area. So whatever he is complaining about is simply being a pot stirrer. So that is his job - being a pot stirrer. Probably a Saul Alisnky student. Disrupt what ever is there and keep stirring the pot. He is fomenter of rage.

Comparing Palo Alto "residentialists" to Trump supporters is not just a gratuitous insult, it is a completely inept comparison.

Trump supporters want to roll back the clock to the past. They would love to deport millions of Hispanics and go to back to a mostly white America, with jobs that have vanished for various reasons.

Palo Alto defenders of our quality of life have nothing in common with them. We do not want to restore Palo Alto to some glorious past. We do not want to kick anyone out of our town. We do not mind ethnic diversity or immigrants. I should know, I am an immigrant myself. We just want to keep our city livable, and yes suburban, more or less as it is now. Anyone who wants to come and live here is welcome to do so as long as there is not destruction of our current environment. I do not see anything nefarious or intolerant with this.

We worked hard to make a life in this town and we do not want to lose our quality of life. It does not mean we do not accept newcomers or others. It does not mean we do not want progress where progress is a positive. I personally would love to see more transit here. Better more frequent buses, electrified trains that run more often etc.

Comparing us to Trump supporters is the same as trying to compare environmentalists and nature preserve supporters to Trump fans. After all, anyone supporting our park land prevents developers from building yet more offices and condos or luxury houses on that land. Laughable comparisons all around.

A Hillary supporter.

Did Mike Greenfield not notice that Trump is a *real-estate developer* for pete's sake? He's many things, but he's not anti-development. If Trump were in Palo Alto, he'd be pro-development and that development would be YUUGGGE.

Anyway, the comparison was pointlessly nasty and inane.

But on to the main point--I don't work for Palantir and, honestly, I think it's a terrible idea for our downtown to be its campus--our city center's not designed for that kind of thing. Pro-growth types love trying to make Palo Alto residents feel guilty for valuing our quality of life, but they seem incapable of making a sales pitch that would make me want to vote against my self-interest.

Very simply, Mr. Greenfield: What's in it for me? And why on earth should I believe that increased density and a higher population would lead to *less* traffic? Push through a BART line or a high-speed rail from the Central Valley and then we'll talk. Otherwise, I see a traffic grid that's small and *can't* be expanded. I see a town that's flat enough for biking, but a traffic situation that makes it risky to do so. I see developers who lie, out of habit, about what their developments will provide. (Edgewood Plaza, for instance,--uninhabited luxury units sold to overseas investors and an empty grocery store--well, at least we got a Starbucks out of it. We got more community use out of it when it was hosting food trucks on Monday night.)

Glad to see that people are reading my blog post, even if they don't necessarily like it!

I have a couple of responses to thoughts and questions on this page:

1) I don't quite understand the stuff about "rules for radicals" -- I had to look up Saul Alinsky. I'm a geek and an entrepreneur, and I also like to write blog posts from time to time (mostly about stuff like a/b testing and using data to grow a startup). I'm very far from being a community organizer type.

2) Re: "you just need projects that fit in done with low profit and low end cost designed in" -- the bulk of the cost in Palo Alto is land. If zoning requires each home to be on a (roughly) 7000 square foot plot of land, home prices are going to be very high. If you can divide that 7000 sf across a few homes, you decrease the price. Still won't be cheap, but it will be a lot less than the current $2.5M median home price.

3) I believe there is a substantial desire among residentialists to return to a simpler past where (to paraphrase) techies weren't running all over the place causing traffic. My quote from Lydia Kou is "City hall has, and is, allowing excessive development to overwhelm our infrastructure: our streets, parking, schools, parks, and other civic facilities" -- she's saying that there's been a lot of change (I'd argue with that!) and we want things as they used to be.

4) Great question as to what's in it for you to increase housing. I don't know who you are and what you're interested in (would be awesome to post non-anonymously!) but for me the answers are as follows:

First and foremost, I have a lot of friends, many with small kids, who have either left Palo Alto or will soon do so because of home prices. There's an incorrect assertion among residentialists that the relative cost level hasn't changed, but PA home prices were 2.5x the national median in 1980, and they're over 10x the national median today -- because demand has increased and supply has not. If home prices were 2.5x national averages, you could buy a home here for $600K -- not cheap, but a lot better than $2.5M. To me, that's a massive quality of life issue: if you can't live here or your friends and your kids' friends are leaving, that is a huge hit to your quality of life. And it makes the community weaker.

Second, there's a lot of noise about preserving retail. In theory, this sounds great, but with the current population and cost of space, that's pretty tough to do. More density downtown would mean that more local retailers (e.g., a nice local food market) would be viable. I lived near Bi-Rite in SF for several years, and I'd love to see something like that in PA -- but it's much more likely if there's more density downtown.

Third, I'd love to see as much diversity as possible in the population. I worry that Palo Alto's only going to be 50-something VCs and people who've had big exits. I have nothing against people like that, but it would be great to have teachers, 20-somethings, etc.

Fourth, traffic has virtually no effect on my quality of life, and I think it's completely realistic to live in downtown PA and almost never drive. My wife and I own one car and I only drive during the week about once a month. I bike our kids to school, I walk, bike, or Caltrain to work/meetings (1-2x/month I'll use Uber). Unlike most residentialists, I think that's a completely viable lifestyle for a large number of people. Planned correctly, with the appropriate pricing for parking/driving (it's $30-40 to park in SF, so I almost never drive there!), we could add a lot of housing while having very little effect on traffic.

Thanks for all of the comments!

"Traffic has no effect on my quality of life"

Wow! Mike, what a weirdly selfish response. For someone who likes to sling Trump's name around, let me tell you that you are showing a Trump like lack of empathy. For those of us not as privileged as you, traffic does affect our quality of life. And more development means more traffic, and a lower quality of life. It is also a Trump like lie to say you can add a lot of housing with little effect on traffic. It is literally impossible. Great, San Francisco has $40 AND terrible traffic. I want neither here.

Mike Greenfield,

Seems to me that you are really the one who wants to keep things as they used to be, namely housing costs, and that would guarantee your quality of life defined by age diversity and economic diversity in your neighborhood (no 50 VC somethings and 20's teachers instead).

Did I get this right - your idea is to divide up the lots in Palo Alto in order to maintain your quality of life and the suggestion is that would also increase the population and therefore that would help attract more retailers?

Well, you are not alone in wanting to keep housing costs lower. Ask people who have had to leave many a global city or town because of intense investments in those areas and demand. It used to be you could move to Brooklyn and then you could not afford Brooklyn.

For Palo Alto, it is indeed a choice. We either divide up the lots (as you suggest) and build tall buildings, or we don't. I would choose "don't" because building housing at these costs will not bring more age or economic diversity. Whatever can be done to accommodate more housing great, but not for the purpose of curating the perfect mix of ages and livelihoods. When the millions you would be spending to curate an age group could for example go to building even better and more housing (at lower costs) in other areas which are still accessible to transportation to come work here.

About the jobs,

Pat Burt could have explained that the jobs created by Palo Alto companies are in the hundreds of thousands of jobs around the world. Jobs created by Google or Facebook in Europe do not mean that the work forces all have to live in the main office. And when a Google is bigger than a garage it makes sense to leave the womb.

We should be discouraging the companies which simply want to use Palo Alto as a ready built campus. Bigger players can figure it out and actually it is a major risk to have one or two companies dominate the small downtown, which lo and behold still should serve a function to the community which lives here, and yes that includes 50 somethings.

Allow for space to be available for real start ups instead. I'm not an expert on how you do that but there has to be a way. Palo Alto is reachable by public transportation and more should be done about that.

I met someone working in a local bank who loves to live where he lives but needs to take two buses for nearly two hours to get here. A ride easily achieved by one bus and in less than one hour. The fact that nobody is doing anything about this (and instead spending focus to bike inside Palo Alto) tells me that what you have with PA "Forward" is actually backwards.

To be honest, I was very surprised by the Pat Burt, stating: "Palo Alto’s greatest problem right now is the Bay Area’s massive job growth."

That's one hell of a self-serving comment. And, taken literally, the totally wrong mentality to have as a mayor. I was surprised no journalist challenged him on it.

So, besides the Trump hyperbole analogy (and self-congratulatory tone), the blog post made a lot of sense. If Mike decided to tone it down a lot and take a long look in the mirror, maybe he'd be in with a chance.

If Palo Alto builds dramatically more housing it will become a source of housing for the entire local area. Palo Alto can't do this alone. To compare the degree with which a community is keeping up with its neighbors, the thing to look at is how many new people work in the area (new jobs) as well as how many new housing units are added.

Extreme views like those of Greenfield that we can simply add 8 story apartment buildings all over the city are not well founded. They are what resembles the ramblings of Trump. The demand for new housing is coming from Google in Mountain View more than any other sources, because Stanford is keeping up by adding housing itself. So, if Palo Alto wants to solve the regional issue, it should build the 8 (or 12?) story apartment complexes in South Palo Alto near to their targeted jobs in Mountain View. Since Google is located up north of the freeway, the idea place would be to build some big apartment buildings up by 101 north of the freeway. That would be a short commute. All this office development is happening up there by the Bay, so why not the homes? The office buildings on East Bayshore road could give way to apartment complexes, 4 stsory, 6 story, 10 story, whatever.

So what's the probleem?

I am all for rebuilding on East Bayshore and the general business area in that location. The problem is who owns the buildings? We have the same issue on El Camino in the area from Oregon to Charleston. Who owns those properties?
We keep going around in circles discussing this but there are obvious locations that are run down and there does not seem to be any movement on anyone's parts to identify who the owners are and what the plans are to upgrade those locations. Many are always "For Lease" so it is unclear if the realty companies represent an owner or are the owner. Maybe the Weekly can help here and lay out who controls those properties.

Mr. Greenfield - you started this discussion with reference to your political leanings and projections of other people's political leanings. It was offensive. That qualifies the boundaries of what you have to offer. Rethink how you present your point of view on housing and leave the political nonsense out of the picture.

You indicated that your are voting for HRC. HRC was an acolyte of Saul Alinsky in her college days through her current life. Mr. Obama also was an acolyte of Saul Alinsky and ran workshops on his techniques as indicated in Rules for Radicals. Do not take it from me - check it out in Wikipedia and google. When you say you are for a candidate understand for the older candidates there is a lot of legal history on these people. It is history which incorporates many legal issues. And social media is not the bottom line for any research on any one of the candidates.

"That was when Saul Alinsky was busy with his Rules for Radicals in which Ms. HRC was an acolyte as a young pup. Lots going on back then that you all missed. ... HRC was an acolyte of Saul Alinsky in her college days through her current life. "

A strangely clumsy pair of fabrications, given that Hillary Rodham was working for Barry Goldwater back then.

Greenfield writes "I had to look up Saul Alinsky. I'm a geek and an entrepreneur, and I also like to write blog posts "

Right. and that's the problem. Like many narrow experts you venture into areas in which you have no knowledge or experience. The risk is sounding like an ignoramus. I can't understand how you could have graduated from college and not heard of Saul Alinsky. Busy crunching numbers instead of widening your understanding of society?

Society is complex, but if you don't broaden your understanding, you sound like an ignorant person. For example from the PAF website I learned that you did a "survey" on Facebook a few years ago. I was astonished at the hubris, thinking that you understood how to do a survey, as though statistics was all you needed to know.

Yes hubris is the best description of your essays.

@Curmudgeon - Resident was correct, but who cares? We all do dumb things in college, she'll make a fine moderate President. Defend her truthfully, but elsewhere, as it distracts from Greenfield's nonsense.

If you care, read this NY Times article that covers her college years, which started to the right, but ended to the left, working for Democrats, interviewing, endorsing, and writing her senior thesis on Alinsky.

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Mr. Greenfield, do you even realize how arrogant you sound?

Okay, first, making some comment about how wouldn't it be nice if we weren't anonymous after you trashed Lydia Kou by comparing her to a xenophobic racist is disingenuous at best. People like you, who show a basic lack of respect to others, are the reason people like me prefer anonymity.

That Trump comparison was way out of line and you should not only apologize for it, but think about *why* you feel entitled to say crap like that.

Second, you, like a lot of the pro-urban density crowd, didn't answer my question about how density would *reduce* traffic. Instead you spun a little urban fantasy where we suddenly become San Francisco. (Which does have miserable traffic, by the way that does impact how people live there. Seriously, c'mon--do you really think we don't know better? Many of us have lived and/or worked there over the years.)

Look, kiddo, I don't live in walking distance of the downtown. *Most* of Palo Alto doesn't. However, I live in a place that is deeply affected by the traffic that goes in and and out of the downtown. Most of Palo Alto, for that matter, is divided into small lots owned by individuals. You seem to have this fantasy that we'll become another city on another larger street grid (You totally bailed on the grid issue, by the way.) or the school overcrowding.

You understand so little of any view other than your own that you don't begin to make a convincing case.

So, here are some of my suggestions:

Get decent public transit to Palo Alto--BART, high-speed rail, at the very least, get the frickin' light rail up here. One of the big reasons that PA traffic is so dismal is that the downtown isn't close to either freeway or even the town's one expressway. The downtown *is* close to the railroad.

Get Palantir out of the downtown. Other companies, like Facebook, left when they got too big. Not only is Palo Alto's downtown physically small, it is, as mentioned above, not easily accessible from the freeway. End result: endless traffic jams on Willow, University and Embarcadero--all residential streets. (And, no, that's not going to change--you really need to get that through your head. The real-estate turnover in Palo Alto is pretty low.)

Increase the tax on non-resident foreign buyers. We shouldn't be an enclave for investment properties when people need places to live.

Last, but not least, reform Proposition 13--the key reason that Palo Alto is in such extreme demand is the lack of well-funded schools in the state. Palo Alto's an exception with its basic-aid structure.

We're a physically small city with water on one side, Stanford on the other. We've been built out for decades. Simple geographic reality--hectoring residents won't change that.

My guess is that Mr. Greenfield has stubbed his toes and will not get many votes. And the people he hangs with that he keeps touting are now compromised by his statements. I am sure they just love that. See - the is an Alinsky trait - compromise the people around you and then blame everything that goes wrong on someone else.

Resident,

I agree Mr. Greenfield stubbed his toe, but enough with Saul Alinsky. Seriously, my one big issue with Baby Boomers is that they way, way, wayyyyy overestimate the importance of the 1960s. Saul Alinksy's a footnote in a history book no one under 45 has read. Part of the reason so many youngsters were excited about Bernie Sanders is that they didn't know how old his ideas were.

If anything, I consider Mr. Greenfield's lack of awareness generational. He thinks he's smarter and more aware than anyone older than him. I believe him when he says he has no idea who Saul Alinsky is because stuff that happened to people before him doesn't matter--aka history. Goes with his knowing what he wants and his lack of awareness of what other people want and *why* they might want it.

Well that was easy - now I know for certain that this joker will not get my vote.

" read this NY Times article that covers her college years, which started to the right, but ended to the left, working for Democrats, interviewing, endorsing, and writing her senior thesis on Alinsky."

Yes. But most people are ignorant of where she began, what she first embraced then rejected as her education progressed. Not the career path favored by Mr I-love-the-poorly-educated Trump.

This stream is about Mr Greenfield - he just made the unfortunate mistake of providing extraneous information to support his views which take him and us off topic. No need for Curmudgeon to further explain HRC - her collection of legal battles is well documented on U-Tube, Wikipedia, google. That Democratic Convention in 2008 was a humdinger - Obama vs Clinton vs Biden. WOW that was definitely a nasty event. But maybe Mr. Greenfield missed that due to generational lapses. He can check it out on the internet. Old history is current history - it is all just the same old stuff.
Hey what I have learned is foundation type activity. Now that is the barn burner. You can donate to NPR for "programming" and they are donating to the Clinton Foundation. And what about Carlos Slim - one of the richest people in the world. He resides in Mexico - owns Mexico - but of Lebanese parentage. His parents fled to Mexico during the Ottoman Empire issues 1904. The best is he is the top shareholder of the NY Times Corporation. And his "Foundation" works with Bill Clinton's Foundation. So next time you read the NYT think Carlos Slim - the editorial policies always support the big dog. And Mr Putin should be concerned as Carlos is focusing on Eastern Europe.