Business Insider: Unaffordable housing in Palo Alto due to tech industry

Palo Alto commissioner resigns 

This article is mostly english, and all nonsense.

More beneath the break.

"Part of that is due to the rise of the tech industry in a city that has incubated the early life of companies like Google and Facebook and is now covered in Palantir offices. In the last five years alone, the median home value of the town has doubled from $1.2 million to over $2.5 million, according to Zillow.

In her open letter, Downing in part blames the city council for not listening to the planning commissions recommendations. Small steps, including adding two floors of housing instead of one in mixed use developments, legalizing duplexes, and allowing areas like the shopping center to build housing on top of the shops and offices, could have help curb the meteoric rise. Rather, Downing says City Council "ignored the majority of residents" who listed housing as their number one concern."

This is nonsense, and these changes will not result in lower housing prices or housing stock that the people needing housing would like. The problem is that while the San Francisco bay area is only 18% developed, the politicians have place the other 82% of the land off limits for development. Opening an additional 6% of the land for development would increase the total land in development to about 24%, and would increase the available land by 1/3 of the total developed land today. This would immediately make housing dramatically affordable, and likely allow the middle class to live and work in the bay area. 

Talk about missing the 900 lb gorilla in the room . . .

The San Francisco area toys with utterly destroying its housing market

San Franciscans were not the first to realize the city was a mistake . . .