[tn13]

Biggest question I had when I first arrived in bay area. Gov. Regulation are the reason why it is a bit harder to have taller buildings, tech companies have lot of money to go for more land grab is the main reason.

If you are building a building with X floor area the city government requires you to have f(x) area as open land. If you want to build a very tall building it will have to look like the Saruman's Tower. This regulation is part of the reason why Sunnyvale or Mountain View do not look like SF. It is also the reason why property prices are so expensive. The good part however is that it means less crime, better neighbourhoods and overall good quality of life.

[rm_-rf_slash]

Are the better neighborhoods, crime rates, and qualities of life a result of lower-rise buildings, or because the cost of living is so high that only the wealthy or upper-income can afford to live there?

[justinlardinois]

Asking the real questions. I'm not sure what the correlation between tall buildings and crime is. "Better neighborhoods" is usually code for the sorts of things people don't say in public and it seems to be that quality of life is more dictated by your level of income rather than where you live.

[matt4077]

I like how you seem to say that a google building taller than X would be a crime magnet :)

[karma_vaccum123]

It's happening. I think the one thing people need to realize is the big "space crunch" in the Bay Area is a relatively recent issue. There is NIMBYism to be sure, but development is slowly catching up. Look at the Sunnyvale side of Moffett Field, it has rapidly grown a collection of tall buildings.

The potential issue that was brought up in Mountain View is an unwillingness to become a "company town" for Google. Residents can remember being a "company town" (to a lesser extent) for SGI and then SGI went poof, leaving the Shoreline area vacant for a time. I actually think it is good for residents to be suspicious of tying their fates to one very large employer; nothing lasts forever.

The same issue may one day impact Cupertino...how many companies could or would want to acquire a single property as big as the "spaceship" campus? Apple isn't going away anytime soon, but this is still a valid concern.

[minwcnt5]

Would it really be that bad for them if Google went belly up sometime in the future? Sure their property values might decline, but in the interim they'd go up. Is it that bad if property values go from x, to x + y, back to x, as opposed to just staying at x? In the interim, allowing Google to expand means they'd get a bunch of new infrastructure, run down parts of the city would be rehabilitated, the area would gentrify some. I'm not sure how these people are acting/voting in their own interest.

[home_boi]

You have to pay taxes for x + y but can only sell the house for x after the company leaves