As to fire safety, all Californians are rightly concerned. But we have to be clear about what the issue is. And we have to treat all types of permissible housing the same.
In some cases, it’s fear of narrow roads being blocked by cars. But a house is not a car. If we decide a street is too narrow for cars, ban parked cars on that street. We are not obligated to provide car storage for people who bought a car but neglected to pay for a place to put it. If they need a place, they can park their car on their lot, or pay a neighbor for a parking spot.
We should not allow existing homeowners to park on a street, but ban ADUs because their residents might or might not park on the street. Allow the ADUs, boot or tow the scofflaws. Plenty of ADU residents don’t have cars or don’t drive; no need to penalize them while catering to others by providing free car storage for them just because they’ve always had it.
In some cases, the appeal to safety is based on the claim that services (eg water) can’t be provided to new residents. But if that’s the case, treat all applications the same, and reject them all. You can’t reject the ADU, then allow the 2500 square foot house on the vacant lot next door. If there’s not enough water, there’s not enough. The ADU application and the new house application are equally legitimate.
The 1200 sq foot ADU in the back yard (who needs the tennis court?) AND the second ADU, the junior ADU, made by converting 400 sq feet of the garage into an apartment.
We can buy it, and even though it’s on a hill, I’m sure we can find a flat spot for that 1000 square foot ADU. And, of course, we’ll also convert 400 square feet of a garage or storage space or something to a second ADU. The rent for the two ADUs will cover the forty million dollar purchase price.
I remember when that LAH house went on the market. They originally priced it for 55 million. If you are looking for a bigger discount, this house was originally listed for an aspirational 96 Million and now can be yours for 54.8 https://www.lostrancosestate.com
The Los Trancos sale is Scott McNealy’s estate; I could tell because it has its own hockey rink. Strange that it’s in Palo Alto, because you get to it from Portola Valley. I suppose it doesn’t matter that the house is (I suppose) in the Palo Alto school district. If you live there, your kids go to private school anyway. Woodside Priory isn’t far.
Los Trancos Road is close to (almost on in some places) the county and city boundary line, and 610 is on the Santa Clara county and Palo Alto city side.
The Palo Alto Unified School District boundaries are not the same as those of the city of Palo Alto, but do include the property in question. But someone who can afford that house probably thinks of private school costs as pocket change if the public schools are not to their liking.
I was looking for some specific info and found this thread. So interesting, and I thought CC is all about colleges :-).
About the housing shortage - when we were there to drop off DD in August, I thought the way to solve this problem is to build a lot of high rise apartment buildings. I wonder why so few of them in the bay area…Any reasons? I mean as far as living space is concerned, Berkeley, SF, Oakland, etc… are becoming Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore…Why don’t we have many more high rise buildings already?
An NHL regulation hockey rink is 200 feet by 85 feet (with rounded corners, but we’ll ignore those because we can remove the boards). How many ADUs would fit on Scott McNealy’s hockey rink on his Los Trancos estate?
Local NIMBYs fight any kind of housing that is not single family. Not just high rise apartments, but low rise apartments, row houses, condos, bungalow courts, converting dead shopping malls to mixed housing and retail, turning little-used parking lots next to BART stations into affordable housing, anything.
Construction costs for a high rise in the Bay Area are prohibitive for all but the priciest dwellings due to the deadly combination of liquefaction and high earthquake risk. Affordable housing could not be built unless the state kicked in major funding, maybe instead of funding a bullet train. Here is some schadenfreude reading: https://www.businessinsider.com/is-millennium-tower-safe-still-leaning-sinking-2017-9
And yet, somehow, multi-story office buildings go up all the time.
It’s not construction costs. It’s that cities don’t approve housing. They approve office parks, but not housing. For example, this giant office park is being constructed right now in Sunnyvale, at the corner of 237 and 101, right at Moffett Field: “Three 8-story, 315,000-sq.-ft., steel-frame office buildings.” https://www.level10gc.com/project/moffett-place-campus/
But if somebody asked Sunnyvale to approve an 8-story high-rise apartment building, I’d be able to hear the screams from here.
We know this, because we know what happens to much smaller projects. A Los Altos 5-story mixed-use building proposal is being met with screams (40 Main Street, currently the subject of a lawsuit on unlawful denial). A San Mateo proposal (4 West Santa Inez Avenue) for a four story building was denied because of “neighborhood character;” the planning commissioners wanted them to lop off a story.
It’s not the construction that’s too expensive, it’s the years of lawsuits fighting NIMBY planning commissions.
That’s really crazy, not in my back yard mentality. Can the people of CA put something on the ballot and vote on it or something? The housing situation in the Bay Area is just not sustainable. I was just raving to a friend that CA is always leading the pack with great ideas, when I was telling her that by 2022 high schools in CA cant start classes before 8:30 AM. This is something NJ people talked about all the time but not able to do it (off topic I know )
There is no shortage of expensive housing in Bay Area (how do I know?). There is a shotage of affordable housing… I mean 1-2 bedroom apartments for under $2,000 a month that are not in a slum or located more than 40-60 minutes away on a good traffic day.
There is a huge shortage of expensive housing in the Bay Area. That is why an undistinguished 3 br 2 ba 2000 square foot house on a 11000 square foot lot sells for over two million dollars. That is why San Jose and San Francisco have among the lowest vacancy rates for rental housing in the nation.
Current homeowners are powerful in local politics because they are already there; those trying to move in are not there and therefore do not vote or influence local politics. Current homeowners often want to keep the housing stock in shortage to drive up their own house values. Current homeowners are typically wealthier and have lived more long term than renters, so they are more likely to better attuned and connected to local politics.
Of course, if a statewide proposition were put up, current homeowners all over the state who have NIMBY leanings would vote against it.