With all this pressure to build-build-build, it’s so important to have these organizations protecting our natural environment. Without them, our foothills would probably be built over and our precious open space would be sacrificed for mega-mansions.

It’s not just our foothill and
bayland open spaces that are vital to protect, but also space in our urban environment so as to maintain and add to our tree canopy.
Trees cool our city’s heat island and sequester carbon.
That we protect our trees from removal and provide space for more to grow is critical to ensure a livable city in the future.

Thank you to these environmental warriors! The environment should not take a back seat to unbridled development today more than ever.

Why do we still have a Bay Area “housing crisis” that blows away environmental concerns? The idea of a “crisis” that unbridled laissez faire growth will somehow solve has allowed unhealthy overdevelopment that threatens the environment and wellbeing/opportunities of residents. Permanent degradation in quality of life from unhealthy growth exacerbated shocks from pandemic population changes—which will be even worse after a big earthquake if we keep this up.

Why?

“The number of vacant homes skyrocketed from 40,000 in 2019 to over 60,000 in 2021…an estimated 15 percent of all homes in San Francisco are empty, by far the highest rate among major cities”

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That’s nearly equal to the entire population of Palo Alto! Yet it did not solve the “crisis”.

“The San Francisco office market ended Q3 2022 with a vacancy rate of 25.5%”

Web Link

SF and SJ had some of the greatest population losses, compared to other US cities THAT ALSO GENERALLY HAD POPULATION LOSSES.

Web Link

“Big cities saw historic population losses while suburban growth declined during the pandemic

“…with unprecedented losses across the 88 U.S. cities with populations exceeding 250,000 residents.”

There is no earthly reason we’ve had to respond to growth pressures as if we were Manhattan or Hong Kong. A recent Atlantic article had the premise: how much more do we need to build in the Bay Area so that everyone who wants to can move there? It’s not even healthy for our democracy to think that way, much less for the future health of the Bay Area.

If the goal is affordability & economic diversity, we must stop seeing laissez faire development as a proxy—it isn’t, quite the opposite—but instead we must have harder conversations about how we civically support economic diversity here.