Engineer on @googlechrome. Involved in CSS and W3C standards. Previously @mozilla, @w3ctag. Mastodon: @dbaron@w3c.social
Rockville, Maryland, USA
Joined March 2008
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So to remove an incentive to choose office over housing, there was a proposal to allow residential development to participate in the in-lieu parking program.
But this was too scary for Palo Alto. There might be "underparked" apartment buildings!
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But the in-lieu parking program applied only to non-residential development. Apartments would still need to build parking, even if parking entrances or forbidden or the lots are two small to fit a parking lot.
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There's also an in-lieu parking program. This means that if the zoning code specifies that a development requires 17 parking spaces, instead of building 17 parking spaces, the developer can pay about $70,000 per space ($1.2 million here) into a fund to build parking garages.
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See, downtown, along University avenue, is supposed to be a pedestrian friendly area. So curb cuts aren't allowed along University avenue. This is sensible. (It was previously unofficial policy enforced during discretionary review; now it's defined as an objective standard.)
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One of the things they wanted to do was try to change the tradeoffs developers face when building office vs housing. But when offices rent for $10/ft²/month and apartments rent for $4-$5/ft²/month, that's hard. They didn't do enough. And they also made things a lot worse.
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The city council had an effort last year to change zoning laws to encourage more housing. They made some tweaks in the right direction, but they really don't do much. (The law goes into effect May 2. Full text at cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/f… .)
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So the photo at the top of this article: that's University Avenue. Connects right to Stanford University. Second busiest station in the @Caltrain system.
Seems like a good place for urban infill. Replacing some of those 1 story buildings with 5?
Or so you'd think?
(Thread.)
High-profile California housing legislation aims to allow new mid-rise apartments near transit. But it also would allow for apartments in broad swaths of wealthy communities across the state — whether they’re near rail or not. My #SB50 take from Palo Alto. latimes.com/politics/la-pol-…
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
We tried to file taxes for a cashier who made $30k and a TaskRabbit house cleaner who made $29k... it didn’t go well.
w/ @JustinElliott propublica.org/article/turbo…
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On the flip side... this is saying employees who do software work bought 0.38% of the houses in San Francisco last year.
Imagine if the housing stock were expanding at 3% per year... maybe the effects would be different.
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
Alternate headline: employees in the tech industry bought 0.384% of the homes in San Francisco last year.
Yawn.
This tweet is unavailable
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
New piece, and new episode of Bite podcast! You don't have to be a vegan to be a climate-friendly eater motherjones.com/food/2019/04… via @MotherJones
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There's a reason SB50 considers "a ferry terminal served by either a bus or rail transit service" to be a major transit stop! (Note lack of conditions on service levels, just as for rail.)
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I think the Marin Headlands would fail the proposed GOV 65918.52 (b): "The residential development is located on a site that, at the time of application, is zoned to allow housing as an underlying use in the zone, [...], as defined and allowed by the local government."
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Yes:
"No statute restricting or eliminating the powers that have been restored by this Act to a city, county, or city and county to establish residential rental rates shall become effective unless approved by a majority of the electorate."
(end of section 8)
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Seems to allow vacancy control provided that the landlord is allowed at least a 15% increase across the vacancy.
Also forbids the legislature from fixing problems with the law, if, say, exclusionary cities use it to set rents to 0 to discourage rental housing...
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
On obstruction, the Mueller Report is a bit like a mystery novel - here's an effort to explain the most important and the most puzzling part. @R_Thaler @jonfavs
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
I still can't get over how comically crooked this is. It's almost like a joke version of how you could take a snippet of a sentence to mislead people.
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
It's not going to get much attention today, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that there were 1.4 million more people uninsured in 2018 than in in 2016.
cbo.gov/system/files/2019-04…
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
California will keep burning and its infrastructure will keep crumbling, but we’re not powerless to do nothing. New from me at @VICE. vice.com/en_us/article/qvyge…
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