Go to the profile of Phil Wolff
Phil Wolff
Synthesist, Strategist, Sensemaker. Phil helps teams and orgs hug both forests and trees. +1.510.343.5664 http://linkedin.com/in/philwolff @evanwolf
Letter of Resignation from the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission
Kate Vershov Downing
1.2K78
  1. Not sure why market forces haven’t swamped the Bay Area, especially PA, with new housing as prices rise. What’s keeping the capital markets from working? What’s keeping developers from diving in?
  2. I was born in a tough neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen that’s been turned over so many times it’s now Manhattan’s genteel Chelsea. Does a political unit like a city have any claim to a particular demographic mix? Against my heartstring’s better impulses, it seems history has always been about booms and busts that force migrations and displacement. Wasn’t that what happened to Shanghai, Manhattan, and London decades ago, the amazingly rich pushing out the merely rich? I don’t know how much any municipal elected officer might have done standing in the way of a tsunami like that.
  3. One analyst of Seattle housing (shortage there) said they should be encouraging high end condo construction first. As the upper middle class upgrades, the middle middle class drafts into their old housing, lower middle drafts them, and so on. So housing for the rich opens housing for the poor a few years’ later. Strange, but it sounds like it could be true.