[Kalium]

> You are telling those people who live there that they can never rebuild? If they want to rebuild their house they need to make it into an apartment complex?

Is it possible you have misparsed "minimum height limit" as a set of minimum requirements on height? I believe it refers to a minimum on height limits, saying that lots cannot be zoned to be one-story-only. Your hypothetical family will be able to rebuild under this.

> This seems really shortsighted and ignores the problem that each city and community is a little different. Some cities along the Bart/Caltrain lines could handle this. Others could not. A top down approach saying everything is the same and must follow these rules is not going to work

You're absolutely right right! This is, in a great many ways, very far from an ideal approach. It refuses to offer the kind of flexibility that individual cities and communities could use to best benefit their residents.

The problem is that these cities and communities have taken that liberty and spent decades abusing it. They have, by and large, used their rights to decide that the appropriate amount of development for them is little to none. This legislation has the feel of a response to those abuses.