This BoomCalifornia.com article is well-written but misses a pretty big point: these are in large part choices that SF bay area governments have made to limit new development. The article does discuss SF, true, but SF has only perhaps 10% of the area's population, and a negligible part of the area.
Housing prices on the SF peninsula once were in line with the rest of the country. Then came anti-development fervor, pushed in large part by existing homeowners who benefited from a rise in demand coupled by fixed supply.
That's one reason why, even though I have enough land to build a small guest cottage that I could then rent out on the SF peninsula, my local government makes it cost-prohibitive or impossible to do (can't cut down trees, can't disturb natural habitat, can't build within 40' of a stream, etc.). That's also why Facebook's massive new campus logically should be surrounded by high-density housing instead of ranch homes on quarter-acre lots, and isn't, and why no housing can be built within walking distance of the Googleplex in MV.
Thomas Sowell, an economist at Stanford's Hoover Institution, wrote about this back in April:
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20140423-op...
"There are people who claim that astronomical housing prices in places like Palo Alto and San Francisco are due to a scarcity of land. But there is enough vacant land (open space) on the other side of the Interstate 280 freeway that goes past Palo Alto to build another Palo Alto or two — except for laws and policies that make it impossible. As in San Francisco and other parts of the country where housing prices skyrocketed after building homes was prohibited or severely restricted, this began in Palo Alto in the 1970s. Housing prices in Palo Alto nearly quadrupled during that decade. This was not from expensive houses being built, because not a single new house was built in Palo Alto in the 1970s. The same old houses simply shot up in price. That is part of the unacknowledged cost of open space and just part of the high cost of liberalism."
>That is part of the unacknowledged cost of open space and just part of the high cost of liberalism.
The devotion to open-space around Stanford/Palo Alto actually comes out of the backlash to all the highway construction in the 50s and 60s. I find it odd to see opposition to big government programs described as "liberalism".
That's because it wasn't opposition to the big government component. It was opposition to the highways. For example, someone protesting a war isn't viewed as opposing big government.
The writer of this passage weakened an otherwise good message with this empty and needless use of "liberalism."
I see this was published in a Dallas based newspaper. Ok, I'd like to go build a 20 story cinderblock apartment building called "the proletarian towers" in the middle of a wealthy, republican-leaning Dallas suburb. Hey, I bought the land, I should get to do what I feel like with it, right?
It is still very much the case that Houston has no zoning laws. That does not, however, mean that there are no neighborhoods with their own zoning rules, i.e. home/property owners association regulations and other land use restrictions. However, because there are no overall zoning laws, the restrictions only apply to the immediate neighborhoods that have the H/POA.
Every political -ism gets watered down with time, but liberalism not more than anything else. Drawn from the latin word for freedom, it means a belief in free markets and private ownership (after Locke et al). As far as I know only the US has a political discourse so strong on conservatism that anything else sort of gets lumped together.
The article does mention policies of other cities in the Bay Area. For instance: "Although cities in the Valley, such as Google’s home of Mountain View, have been eager to approve the construction of new office space, they’ve refused to allow new housing construction to provide places for employees to live near their offices."
An old-school conservative op-ed--page troll who now looks moderate compared to tea-party FOX newsers -- boring but still toxic. Please leave him in his regional-newspaper dungeon where he belongs.
Housing prices on the SF peninsula once were in line with the rest of the country. Then came anti-development fervor, pushed in large part by existing homeowners who benefited from a rise in demand coupled by fixed supply.
That's one reason why, even though I have enough land to build a small guest cottage that I could then rent out on the SF peninsula, my local government makes it cost-prohibitive or impossible to do (can't cut down trees, can't disturb natural habitat, can't build within 40' of a stream, etc.). That's also why Facebook's massive new campus logically should be surrounded by high-density housing instead of ranch homes on quarter-acre lots, and isn't, and why no housing can be built within walking distance of the Googleplex in MV.
Thomas Sowell, an economist at Stanford's Hoover Institution, wrote about this back in April:
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20140423-op... "There are people who claim that astronomical housing prices in places like Palo Alto and San Francisco are due to a scarcity of land. But there is enough vacant land (open space) on the other side of the Interstate 280 freeway that goes past Palo Alto to build another Palo Alto or two — except for laws and policies that make it impossible. As in San Francisco and other parts of the country where housing prices skyrocketed after building homes was prohibited or severely restricted, this began in Palo Alto in the 1970s. Housing prices in Palo Alto nearly quadrupled during that decade. This was not from expensive houses being built, because not a single new house was built in Palo Alto in the 1970s. The same old houses simply shot up in price. That is part of the unacknowledged cost of open space and just part of the high cost of liberalism."