I've been in Silicon Valley for close to 20 years, and I have been concerned about this for a long time. I want to say it was somewhere around 2010 that I began noticing a sudden increase in the number RVs I see in non-RV places, such as large parking lots and along industrial area roads. Now it seems like I hardly go anywhere and not see several RVs that are clearly out of place - they used to only be found in sideyards, RV parks, or driving down the highway.
Next, the homeless situation has truly grown to epic proportions. Take a peak into any of the inbetween areas, and you'll find a small encampment. How many of these exist, I can't say, but once I began to understand where the homeless go, I started to venture and take small peaks - they're everywhere.
Next, the homeless started showing up, en masse, in large public places. The most obvious is the parks near San Pedro square in San Jose. Yes, this area has always had an "element" to it, but that element used to live in the nearby housing. Now, the element is in the park.
I was talking with a friend who lives in a very expensive and beautiful home near this park, and this friend was really annoyed at how the homeless population around this house has really exploded. At the same time, this friend had not identified any link to the homeless population and crazy median home prices, now approaching $1 million for San Jose. I asked this friend to please consider the statistic of a $1 million median home price in a city with a population of 1 million, and what does that really mean for its residents?
My feeling is that, in time, this is going to be incredibly bad. The first problem is an increase in property crime. When people are forced out of their shelter, they will become desperate. Some percentage of any population is going to be pre-disposed to considering crime, so increasing the number of people who are desperate will increase the absolute number of people who will turn to crime.
Police forces do not exist to protect - they are really just for cleanup, and currently there is a new trend that will eventually get reported of how the nature of burglaries, especially in the San Jose area, have changed. It used to be that perps would case and then burglarize when owners were out for a weekend or vacation. Now, the owners are out for only a few hours and return home to find they have been burgled. Obviously they are using some more sophisticated surveillance or network tech of some sort. In at least one precinct, the police have yet to catch anyone performing burglaries in this manner.
With this new trend, a group of, say, five clever people can do 10s of millions in property damage annually. As these small groups are increased, the dollars in damage become very real, plus the emotional impact of feeling insecure in your own property will often push people over the edge to sell their homes or at least move away, converting their residence into a rental unit.
The second trend that I fear will begin to occur is the less clever criminals who simply mug, loot, and smash-and-grab.
Finally, there will simply be violence against the property owners. People are not dumb, as we can see by this article that even the politicians and bureaucrats are beginning to get concerned for their jobs. In San Francisco, there was the violent demonstrations against the Google buses. I don't know in exactly which way the violence comes out or is directed, but when you force enough people in to desperate circumstances, you will eventually have enough of those who are pre-disposed to violent "solutions" that they will find a target.
In all of this, people will begin selling and moving out. The property values will drop, not because of increased supply of housing, but because of an exodus of existing buyers coupled with a sharp reduction in new buyers. Eventually, companies start moving jobs or entire companies to other areas (owners, executives, and managers don't want to live in all of that), and demand for residential housing falls yet further.
As the prices drop, people will consider selling to get equity, so the prices drop further (selling encourages selling). Getting things to go up from here will be a serious problem. All of the governments are maxed out, credit-wise, and their revenues will tank.
At this moment, today, it seems like increasing housing is a bad idea for cities and property owners because they will lose at least some of the current equity in their homes, but depending on the property owner's time-horizon, they may well lose all of their equity.
There's a very simple solution here: build more housing and pay better wages in the first place, so as to avoid the awful dilemmas of French Revolution-style situations.
Inadequate wages is not the issue. There simply isn't enough housing. In the most recent 6-year period for which there is data, 500,000 net new jobs were created in Silicon Valley, but only 65,000 new residential units were built in the same area.
You are twisting what people want to do. I don't think the goal is to force people out of the homes they own, but to allow property owners to build on the property what the property owner wants to build. If that ends up being a condo or apartment complex where there used to be houses, that is the choice of the property owner.
Standard critique of TPM includes pointing out that manufacture is a black box of trust. The ability to completely control both software and hardware seems like it would make this scheme more desirable.
I'm thinking when Windows 7 expires in 2020 and I have to migrate to Linux because Microsoft hates having paying customers such as myself, I'll probably move to either Mint or Ubuntu and install a local Sphinx Search server specifically so I can search Thunderbird emails.
At least on the South Bay, I think that drivers are more impatient because the cities have failed to do anything real to improve traffic. They focus on highly visible things, like a new overpass or adding a lane to an onramp, or something of this nature.
Then they'll spend something like $1 billion on a new library or town hall or $100 million on a rec center or whatever.
Meanwhile, the actual road infrastructure cannot support the incredible increase on net new job creation. This makes for traffic jams, everywhere, so people become impatient and increases the number of irrational decisions they make.
I live in the hills, several miles down a very narrow, curvy country road. Nobody goes less than 10 mph above the speed limit, which is genuinely unsafe on this road. They do it because traffic is much lighter than the rest of their commute, and they just want to get home. Of course, they're only shaving somewhere around 28 seconds of travel time off of their total commute while increasing the probability of a deadly encounter with a hapless bicyclist who ignorantly thinks they are riding on a quiet, back-country road.
I am quite certain that the cost of adding a separate bicycle/pedestrian path is quite high, as it would require bulldozing parts of moderate sized hills, and compared with the fanfare of a new police station or city hall, a new bicycle lane for some back road just doesn't compare.
However, knowing the residents of this back road and the town in general, I'm quite certain such a path would generate a lot of real use and potentially save lives. But I'm quite certain this kind of project will not hapen in my lifetime.
You honestly have more power to make this happen than you think you do. Write a petition, see whether you can find any people who think it's a good idea, go to a town hall with your evidence, call a contracting company to ask how much the path would cost/how long it would take, and try to get it into the next municipal budget. You CAN do it. It's been done.
What I truly hate about the bicycle push is that some of us cannot ride bicycles for very legitimate reasons including medical problems or a job that requires a vehicle.
The issue in my area is that the "push" is coming through social engineering tactics, such as reducing road capacity and granting special privilege on existing roads to bicyclists.
If the change in road infrastructure were to occur after the bicycles became a more popular mode of transportation, that would be fine, but doing it before makes the whole situation miserable, especially for those of us who simply do not have the option of switching.
The other thing I hate about the bicycle push is the self-righteousness of many involved and the complete lack of consideration for people who cannot ride bicycles for various legitimate reasons, plus they are down-voting cowards.
Lack of consideration? I don't know what consideration you want but the roads are completely car dominated so there's no consideration necessary in my opinion.
I usually ride to work 4 days a week, and drive 1 day, depending on weather. I'm a driver but I still want proper separated bike paths. And I can't be the only one. People are scared to ride and I don't blame them. It's scary riding on a road with so many tired/oblivious/terrible/selfish drivers who actually don't follow the road rules even while driving a deadly weapon.
I can't understand why it's so difficult to provide facilities actually. Bike paths don't have heavy vehicles ruining them so need way less maintenance than normal roads.
A bike path for 2 way traffic only takes the width of a single car lane. You could just make one road per suburb one way, and there you go. I'm oversimplifying but I'm not a town planner, I'm just a dumb commuter.
At least where I live, it's laughable that you'd be complaining about a "bike push", as there are no real facilities for bikes at all. Just crappy unconnected paths that never get you to anywhere useful. You always have to go on a road with cars to get anywhere.
This is a real shame. I am going to have to find a different solution, as it turns out that pfSense is one of those projects that happily moves on without you, and I just can't understand why.
My Atom board has been perfect, but there is no hardware upgrade option.
I guess I'll have to find another project. And, yes, I used to recommend this project to everyone I know, even donated. Oh, well.
Next, the homeless situation has truly grown to epic proportions. Take a peak into any of the inbetween areas, and you'll find a small encampment. How many of these exist, I can't say, but once I began to understand where the homeless go, I started to venture and take small peaks - they're everywhere.
Next, the homeless started showing up, en masse, in large public places. The most obvious is the parks near San Pedro square in San Jose. Yes, this area has always had an "element" to it, but that element used to live in the nearby housing. Now, the element is in the park.
I was talking with a friend who lives in a very expensive and beautiful home near this park, and this friend was really annoyed at how the homeless population around this house has really exploded. At the same time, this friend had not identified any link to the homeless population and crazy median home prices, now approaching $1 million for San Jose. I asked this friend to please consider the statistic of a $1 million median home price in a city with a population of 1 million, and what does that really mean for its residents?
My feeling is that, in time, this is going to be incredibly bad. The first problem is an increase in property crime. When people are forced out of their shelter, they will become desperate. Some percentage of any population is going to be pre-disposed to considering crime, so increasing the number of people who are desperate will increase the absolute number of people who will turn to crime.
Police forces do not exist to protect - they are really just for cleanup, and currently there is a new trend that will eventually get reported of how the nature of burglaries, especially in the San Jose area, have changed. It used to be that perps would case and then burglarize when owners were out for a weekend or vacation. Now, the owners are out for only a few hours and return home to find they have been burgled. Obviously they are using some more sophisticated surveillance or network tech of some sort. In at least one precinct, the police have yet to catch anyone performing burglaries in this manner.
With this new trend, a group of, say, five clever people can do 10s of millions in property damage annually. As these small groups are increased, the dollars in damage become very real, plus the emotional impact of feeling insecure in your own property will often push people over the edge to sell their homes or at least move away, converting their residence into a rental unit.
The second trend that I fear will begin to occur is the less clever criminals who simply mug, loot, and smash-and-grab.
Finally, there will simply be violence against the property owners. People are not dumb, as we can see by this article that even the politicians and bureaucrats are beginning to get concerned for their jobs. In San Francisco, there was the violent demonstrations against the Google buses. I don't know in exactly which way the violence comes out or is directed, but when you force enough people in to desperate circumstances, you will eventually have enough of those who are pre-disposed to violent "solutions" that they will find a target.
In all of this, people will begin selling and moving out. The property values will drop, not because of increased supply of housing, but because of an exodus of existing buyers coupled with a sharp reduction in new buyers. Eventually, companies start moving jobs or entire companies to other areas (owners, executives, and managers don't want to live in all of that), and demand for residential housing falls yet further.
As the prices drop, people will consider selling to get equity, so the prices drop further (selling encourages selling). Getting things to go up from here will be a serious problem. All of the governments are maxed out, credit-wise, and their revenues will tank.
At this moment, today, it seems like increasing housing is a bad idea for cities and property owners because they will lose at least some of the current equity in their homes, but depending on the property owner's time-horizon, they may well lose all of their equity.