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Originally Posted by suburbanite
I doubt homeless camps are the primary indicator of a housing shortage. I think it's more people working in the Bay Area making $130k+ living with 4 roommates. California may be a massive state, but the most desirable areas are still geographically constrained. If tech companies wanted to locate in Fresno or Bakersfield instead of Palo Alto, housing affordability would likely be far less of an issue. As it stands, there is a long-time contingent of wealthy and powerful homeowners that have little to gain from supporting intensification of their neighbourhoods with mixed-use, medium/high-density projects.
I don't know Los Angeles as well, but I know BART has done a pretty good job of incentivising private investment into exurban transit stations that bring a drastic uplift in value to the surrounding land. I've used a couple of examples there as case studies for similarly structured deals here in the GTA. Unless the State is going to implement some sort of mechanism to overrule local zoning disputes, I see developments like this one in West Dublin/Pleasanton being the primary method of adding large numbers of units.
There are over 1,500 units in this photo and it's about a 45-minute train ride to Downtown (according to Google Maps, never done the route myself). There's no existing layer of low-density residential full of NIMBY homeowners. Also, upzoning from medium-density like this to high-density in the future should be far less of a battle than going from SFH to 4-5 storey blocks. |
The problem is there's few developments like this in the Bay Area. Dublin is one of the few exceptions because they build the suburban housing and mixed-use developments like this. Literally across the freeway in Pleasanton or Livermore, you'd never see developments like this and there's few suburban housing developments.
In countless areas of the Bay, there's suburban shopping centers with parking lots that are >50% empty most of the time, yet trying to rezone these areas to allow for midrise residential on top of commercial big box stores would be like asking someone to tear off their arm. The Bay Area is one of the extreme examples of what happens when you don't build housing (the most extreme example in California to me is Santa Barbara). You don't have to build neighborhoods of McMansions, but a few townhome developments and mixed-use could solve a lot of issues. But my views! The shadows!
Quote:
Originally Posted by LA21st
LA suburbs are late to the party, but I'm starting to see more big projects next to light rail/commuter train stations. Even places like Compton have plans to redevelop industrial sites with dense housing near it's stops.
It's going to be interesting going froward but they still need to do more.
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I wouldn't say LA suburbs are late to the party considering Bay Area suburbs haven't done much anyway. LA suburbs just haven't received the rail yet, but even near the Metrolink stations you see developments like this. The Orange County line being a great example, as Anaheim, Orange, Fullerton, Santa Ana, etc., all have multiple mixed-use developments near their stations. There's others like Corona, Riverside, and Montclair. Rancho Cucamonga has a big development planned near theirs. Greater LA in general does a better job with housing as there is more land and slightly less NIMBYism among it's residents, especially away from the coastal areas.