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by caryhartline 3449 days ago
That is all painfully obvious. What Velodrome is saying is not out of reach in the slightest. State and local governments could take plenty of steps to lower the cost of living.
2 comments

State and Local governments COULD take steps to provide affordable housing... but that would ruin San Francisco!

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/In-a-wealthy-SF-n...

It won't match the Church! My kid(s) won't be safe! People with Mental Illness and Drug Addiction will end up there!!!

This is just one example I found for San Francisco... expand this example to any other town in California - Hollywood, The Valley... any part of town with wealthy people or people who don't want to lose their identity.

And THESE situations - in addition to basic Supply & Demand - are why housing costs are even WORSE in these areas. Demand alone causes the coastal areas to cost more - people want to live close to the ocean. This fight against affordable options cause the situation to be even worse.

Good luck solving it in California. I pick on CA, but CA isn't alone in these issues.

Which would just make more people want to live there, and ... make supply lower, and make the cost go up.

California has a finite people carrying capacity. You can remove all the cars, build sky scrapers to the stratosphere, etc, etc.

It's like arguing that all the people in the world who want to live in hawaii should be able to live in hawaii.

California isn't very densely populated. It's much less populated than UK, Switzerland, Italy, Germany etc.

Large swathes of the coastline are protected. That's not a particularly bad thing. But also, development in general is really wasteful of space. Spending time in California as a European was an object lesson in scale: everything is bigger than it needs to be, everything is spread out, walking places takes ages, roads are far wider than necessary, parking lots take up loads of space (legally mandated!), etc.

California's urban planning has long been guided by the assumption that everyone owns an automobile:

http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Environment/E_Casestudy/E_...

As vigorously promoted by the automobile industry:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...