Save the last orchard in Santa Clara!

[bigdumbgod]

Originally Posted by neutrino78x

Plus who cares if you don't have a yard or you share the building with other condos? Isn't the goal, when you plan to have kids, to have a safe place with enough bedrooms so each kid has their own? I don't see why a single family home or townhouse is a requirement for raising children.

After the kids get out of their own bedrooms and go out the front door...is there anything but concrete and legions of other LegoLand condos staring down on them? Can't run around even a most well-appointed, spacious condo all that much without breaking stuff.

[NoMoreSnowForMe]

Originally Posted by otterprods

Exactly.. but it looks like no one answered, or even responded. Just a bunch of arguing over the density of development that should go there. It should be as dense as the market demands, or better yet some very rich resident can by it and preserve it as a tree museum. (which would be a lot better than dense housing, IMO, just not very likely)

And what about the corn palace, isn't that still there in Sunnyvale?

I bought a 2 acre lot in WA state way back when. It had almost 600 feet of road frontage, and that's the only area the previous owner left any trees on. He'd cut down the rest and sold them. I needed a well, and the price of Douglas firs happened to be really high at the time.

So, I had a crew come and cut down the marketable trees, and used the money to put in my well and a driveway.

An acquaintance told me she was mad at me for cutting down the trees, that she drove by my place on her way to and from work and enjoyed looking at the trees. (As if there weren't any other Douglas fir trees in the mountains of WA state.)

I told her she should have bought the place herself then. And then I reminded her that she lived in an old log cabin made from large older-growth trees.

You want that orchard? Buy it.

And I'm so sick of this high-density trending talk. I don't CARE if you can't afford to live in the SF Bay Area. I. Don't. Care.

And I would never vote to allow you to make the area ugly because you think the area should accommodate everyone who wants to live there. And I bet I'm in the majority.

The day would become a holiday if all the whiners would decide to boycott SF because it's too expensive. Don't let the screen door hitcha.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by bigdumbgod

If this is inevitable, then what would it hurt to preserve a few of what little pieces of open space/history that are left? Kind of makes a concrete jungle bearable for the humans (and others) that inhabit it, no?

It's a question of not making a bad situation worse, which is what coastal California metros have been doing for the last 20-30 years.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by neutrino78x

Plus who cares if you don't have a yard or you share the building with other condos? Isn't the goal, when you plan to have kids, to have a safe place with enough bedrooms so each kid has their own? I don't see why a single family home or townhouse is a requirement for raising children.

I have to say, despite being an advocate of higher density housing, I can understand why people don't like it. In the U.S. it's typically cheaply built with not enough insulation, noise control. There's no reason in this day and age to not have reasonably sound proof walls. Also, many high density developments are plunked down in the middle of suburban neighborhoods without transit, not in walkable areas, etc. So you end up getting the worst of both worlds.

The mistake suburbanites living in single family detached homes make is they think the above characteristics are inevitable for high density housing when they are not.

Living in a condo/apartment/townhouse will never be like living on a free standing house on 1/4 acre of land (for better and worse). But the negative aspects of high density housing can be significantly mitigated.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by marcopolo666

It seems like a good idea to pass a law like that because you didn't like your experience as a kid. I'm sure everybody will think catering to your opinions is the exact right thing to do, and the law will pass with over 90% of who-ever voting for it.

Neutrino is a bit extreme...but it's not like he is the only one who bases his housing preferences on what he liked/disliked growing up as a kid. Almost everyone does....and those preferences find their way into zoning laws. Neutrino's just more honest about the source of his desires than most people. Indeed, the whole thing about preserving the last orange orchard is about preserving a way of life that old timers experienced as kids.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by NoMoreSnowForMe

And I'm so sick of this high-density trending talk. I don't CARE if you can't afford to live in the SF Bay Area. I. Don't. Care.

.

This is the problem in a nutshell. Once people get what they want, they don't give a d*mn about anyone else. The high costs of this area effectively forced someone like you to move to a less expensive and less desirable area...so I don't get why you don't care.

The thing that makes me the maddest about CA is it purports to care about the little guy....yet housing is the average person's biggest expense and it's like they never even try to bring supply and demand into balance so that people can actually afford to live here without mortgages/rents gobbling up a huge portion of people's incomes.