If you are serious about the problems that result from NIMBY anti-growth sentiments, I strongly recommend that you join one of the following groups working to influence their city councils to build more housing. Just liking them on FB goes a long way to giving them more influence and credibility with their city councils and when you reshare their blogs or FB posts, if they gain just one more person willing to come to city hall with them, it's a terrific win. People ARE trying to do something about this problem, including many from the tech sector.
Take the feelings you have from this article and channel into a concrete good that you can do right now, today, for minimal effort and zero cost. The sad truth is that the people whose voices get heard at city council today are generally those people wealthy enough in both dollars and time to spend hours every week at city hall. They're mostly retired homeowners sitting on multimillion dollar properties. Renters, poor people, and homeless people receive almost no representation because they don't have the luxury of coming to city hall meetings- they're busy figuring out where they're going to spend the night and how they're going to feed their kids this week. These groups are doing just that on their behalf, so please support them.
If you're in Palo Alto, check out www.paloaltoforward.com (also www.facebook.com/paloaltoforward
Why this convoluted scheme instead of the obvious thing staring all of us in the face: build more housing!!! Huge swaths of the CITY are lots with single family homes and even the prime water-front real estate sits as empty warehouses and parking lots. There's a lot we can do to make the city affordable just by giving people more housing. Housing prices go up when more people want to live there than there are houses. Why are we all overlooking this extremely basic fact??
Keep in mind that in many places, and in particular in the Bay Area, the entire notion of trying to create short commutes from work to home as an ideal is one that lots of cities still haven't wrapped their head around.
I live in Palo Alto and I've heard people tell the City Council that no one wants to take public transportation and therefore we don't need it. I've also heard people scoff at the idea that jobs and housing should be built next to each other to avoid long commutes, emissions, lost time, sprawl, etc. Anyone here who says we need more housing next to all our huge office parks gets called "entitled."
We're facing a paradigm shift wherein younger generations want to be able to have the option of taking public transportation. They want to live in lively neighborhoods where friends and spaces for hanging out are close at hand- a trip to the local coffee shop doesn't involve getting in your car and driving to a strip mall. But, people who grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s grew up with the notion of the car as freedom and a house in suburbia as the definition of success. To them, quality of life is all about how fast they can drive somewhere and how easily they can park there. When they think "urban" they think "ghetto."
These attitudes contribute to the NIMBYism all over the Bay Area and they're the reason why outside of SF, it's extremely hard to get around without a car. It's the reason why despite being the center of innovation on the planet, Silicon Valley still looks like a Leave It To Beaver throwback.
Gee, maybe it's because there's very little housing in Mountain View compared to the number of people who work there and the city refuses to allow more housing to be built? That makes rent there very expensive. People in their 20s are looking at rents that eat up half their salaries - and we're talking Google salaries here. http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/09/08/mountain-view-city-cand...
Take the feelings you have from this article and channel into a concrete good that you can do right now, today, for minimal effort and zero cost. The sad truth is that the people whose voices get heard at city council today are generally those people wealthy enough in both dollars and time to spend hours every week at city hall. They're mostly retired homeowners sitting on multimillion dollar properties. Renters, poor people, and homeless people receive almost no representation because they don't have the luxury of coming to city hall meetings- they're busy figuring out where they're going to spend the night and how they're going to feed their kids this week. These groups are doing just that on their behalf, so please support them.
If you're in Palo Alto, check out www.paloaltoforward.com (also www.facebook.com/paloaltoforward
If you're in Mountain View, check out http://balancedmv.org/ and https://www.facebook.com/mvhousingdiversity
If you're in SF, https://www.facebook.com/BARentersFed and www.sfbarf.org
Menlo Park: https://www.facebook.com/MenloParkNoOnM