<story><title>Silicon Valley&apos;s housing crisis, in one sentence</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2016/6/7/11877378/silicon-valley-housing-crisis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baron816</author><text>Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, London, and Paris, that argument doesn&amp;#x27;t exactly hold. Those cities are incredibly dense and expensive, but people love living there enough to pay the high prices. People who can live &lt;i&gt;anywhere&lt;/i&gt; choose to live there. I&amp;#x27;m willing to bet that SV could triple its population, and property values would hold or increase. Supply will create it&amp;#x27;s own demand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>FWIW that is the wrong question. People are opposed to change.&lt;p&gt;So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for &lt;i&gt;existing&lt;/i&gt; residents (not me but I&amp;#x27;m a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don&amp;#x27;t want the neighborhood experience to change from what &lt;i&gt;they&lt;/i&gt; know (or knew) to something they don&amp;#x27;t know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They &lt;i&gt;loved&lt;/i&gt; them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth.&lt;p&gt;The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don&amp;#x27;t seem to internalize that things change. They won&amp;#x27;t acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; values and &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; memories and opinions of what is &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; and what is &amp;quot;wrong.&amp;quot; Meanwhile we have people in their 20&amp;#x27;s and 30&amp;#x27;s who don&amp;#x27;t want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Silicon Valley&apos;s housing crisis, in one sentence</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2016/6/7/11877378/silicon-valley-housing-crisis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baron816</author><text>Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, London, and Paris, that argument doesn&amp;#x27;t exactly hold. Those cities are incredibly dense and expensive, but people love living there enough to pay the high prices. People who can live &lt;i&gt;anywhere&lt;/i&gt; choose to live there. I&amp;#x27;m willing to bet that SV could triple its population, and property values would hold or increase. Supply will create it&amp;#x27;s own demand.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&amp;gt; Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes&lt;p&gt;Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails.&lt;p&gt;In many cases, its not to prop up the &lt;i&gt;market value&lt;/i&gt; of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the &lt;i&gt;personal&lt;/i&gt; value they place in their homes: its &amp;quot;I live here, and I&amp;#x27;d like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here&amp;quot;.</text></comment>