Tree huggers should recognize that having a yard means lower density, thus more sprawl, less area reserved for actual nature, and more energy use (longer distances to travel [more likely by car], more roads and utilities to be built and maintained)…
Sadly, it seems that many who claim to care about the environment care more about seeing trees and fields around them than actually protecting real nature.
Better move fast. The lava from the current eruption has eaten over 600 houses, and I doubt there are that many houses available at the low end for the displaced people to buy as a replacement.
Via San Francisco Chronicle, VTA bus driver Adan Miranda is now getting kicked out of his employer’s parking lot to make room for developers
I genuinely thought this meant they were kicking bus drivers out of parking lots to make room for software developers to sleep in those parking lots.
The parcel I was going to visit was on Kilauea before the eruption, up in Mountain View outside of Hilo. No lava, it went down the other side of the volcano. but definitely a lot of shaking going on there.
Sure, but properties for which there was little or no competition a few months ago will now be sought after by people who just lost their houses but want to stay in Hawaii.
I see things like this and am reminded how boneheaded and stupid the tech industry in California really is. All this potential profit being lost to high cost of everything just to be located in a hyped location. This is especially puzzling when we see the posted tech jobs in SF are dropping while they are increasing in other places which have better living conditions, lower cost, and a lot less urine on the streets.
Family tends to be a big one, a partner with a job that is more geographically constrained is another common one. Also bus drivers aren’t as needed in Topeka as in the Bay Area. The Topeka Metro Transit Authority only has about a dozen lines and they generally stop running after the evening rush hour. In contrast the SFMTA has something like 90 bus lines with about a fifth of them running all night.
Yards don’t necessarily mean lower density and actually serve a useful urban purpose. They slow stormwater runoff and reduce the urban heat island effect. As far as density and yards, consider Hoboken New Jersey. It has higher density and still has yards. It has a lot more to do with what you build in the space. If it is low rise single family homes, you can get rid of all the yards you want and it won’t do much to help density. About 1 in 5 homes in San Francisco County are single family detached.
There are actually ways to step back from this type of housing situation that actually work without needing to collapse into a dystopian hellscape first. We have never seen them applied in a scale as big as San Fransisco, but they have worked. The problem is that it requires getting a majority of your population to care about zoning codes, property tax structures, and building codes. Then wait 20 years after that.
The stormwater runoff situation in places like San Francisco and the PNW is no joke. In rainy areas you hear about increasing incidences of flooding as every square foot of sod in the city is covered over with concrete or other structures.
They have had this problem in the Bay Area for 30 years, yet have done little to nothing as far as I can tell. This latest phase has been more dramatic, but they’ve known this was an issue for a long time. I don’t see anyone doing anything substantive and even then, as you point out, the timeline isn’t promising.
Umm, have you been to Hoboken? Lot coverage is well over 40% in most cases. Only the oldest homes have less. Newer are north of 70%. Compare that to the 1k sq ft footprint on a 11K sq ft 1/4 acre most suburbanites consider “normal”.
Here’s a typical chunk. Note I have circled newer construction.
And notice that the center of most of the blocks in your image have yards, clearly not huge yards, but they still have something with almost double the density of San Fransisco. Clearly the suburban large lot format isn’t viable, but the starting point in SF has a long way to go before even hitting Hoboken, to say nothing of getting to no yard. R-1 zoning in Hoboken is restricted to 60% lot coverage.
You’re preaching to the choir about density, but I’m clear eyed about what it means. Our tiny yards don’t mean much in terms of runoff etc. And those Bayonne Boxes I circled look like more than 70% to me. However well meant ex mayor Zimmer was, I find a lot of green talk to be lip service, like the new hideous SW park with it’s permeable surfaces. That won’t help in the next Irene or Sandy, or even a just a heavy rain.
They definitely don’t do much but placing the blame on yards tends to lead to people pursuing weird solutions like maximizing lot coverage instead of people per acre. Its a clarification I wouldn’t worry about but I spent a lot of time arguing with a local NGO about their new high density development strategy that replace small single family homes with giant townhouses. They legitimately believed that because it filled more of the space it was higher density.
The thing with the storm runoff is that very little will help the Sandy and Irene scale events, but stuff like permeable pavers and yes small yards is that they help reduce the volume impacts on your sewage treatment system in each unnamed summer thunderstorm. Just having the water spread out over a longer period reduces the incidence of combined sewer overflow events.
You sound very dispassionate about California.
/s
That’s a good point. I guess I should’ve pulled the trigger on building that house last year. oh well, it’s not like I can predict volcanoes.
The other thing to remember is there are always good deals if you look hard enough. One can definitely find investments outside of Silicon Valley that require less capital. And if you look hard you can find ones that will have similar or better return rates.
My best investment advice is to own a time machine.
You should give them a dictionary. The JC R-1 zoning also encourages huge homes, since that’s the way to maximize sale price when you can’t actually increase density beyond 2 units on a lot. It also encourages the cheapest possible construction and cookie cutter designs.
The Downtown Jersey City sewers are so inadequate any serious rainfall at all is a CSO event, by default the entire system serves as a holding tank, and the level just rises, often to street level in the lowest areas. The only solutions are more pumps to the river, which the EPA is against, or a giant many billion dollar holding tank. All the talk of permeability is diversion from the point in my opinion.
You’re assuming that this is only a bay area problem. It’s not. Cost of living is going up everywhere (albeit in an uneven fashion) and jobs that pay a living wage tend to not be in places where it’s affordable.
In another decade, I’m betting that there will be large parts of the Atlanta Metro area for example, where working class people can’t afford to live at all, moving them further out into the exurbs further away from decent paying jobs.
True. I guess I meant yards in the “single family home with its own private yard” sense.
