D.O.P.-T.

[weofodthignen]

We ran a couple of errands in the car yesterday. That entailed negotiating a corner near extensive roadworks, so I had plenty of time to notice a huge apartment development that I hadn't seen before: the variety with wood veneer on the balconies and greenery at the base, rather than the ochre, cream, or grey fortress variety. I looked it up on Google Street View and it had been a mobile home park. Mixed feelings.

Comments

[dubhain]

Ah, Gentrificaiton. Here, they're building massive luxury tract housing: Pick a house from a limited set of floor plans. Here's the option list. If you like, you can build a "custom" house, which is a slightly expanded set of floor plans, and you can have the power outlets where you want them, and an extra one, if you like. For only half again the price of the non-custom house.

Meanwhile, the elderly and low-income folks who lived in the mobile home parks have no place to live, but who cares about them, anyhow, so long as we can make a bundle?

The most amusing bit of all this, down here, is that they're also "developing" the swamps and pastures. This drives the local wildlife out, but once the houses are built, they tend to return. Which is why The Villages has a massive rat problem. (And, as they don't trim the dead foliage off of their palm trees (it looks better if they don't,) every single one of those stupid palms they planted (to make it look like Florida postcards!) has a massive rats' nest in right under its crown.

[weofodthignen]

Yeah. Not to mention they save on the palm-trimming, which can be a dangerous and nasty job. I hadn't thought of rats nesting in [a;m trees, but of course they'll nest anywhere. Maybe that's why our neighbor took out the palm tree on her front lawn.

Here they're still building those single-family house developments with about 5 different floor plans way up to the north of us, both luxury and for the people priced out of the Bay Area proper. I imagine by now they form a great ring up to past Sacramento, like the way London grew between the wars. Horrible, gas-burning commute of course.

Unfortunately we are also still sucking people into this area from all over the country; I believe the only places that lost population at the last census were San Francisco and San Jose, and the latter was probably undercounting. As a result the state is really putting the screws in about building housing, accelerating the process of destroying what cheap housing there was in order to put in expensive apartment blocks. The poor blighters in Cupertino have lost their last legal challenge, too—the Vallco mall site will become a mixed-use office and apartment complex with hardly any retail. They'd been asking for more housing, real shops, and no more offices. (Cupertino never had a downtown, the mall was effectively its center, and the effort to make a new downtown retail area has just produced a series of big box stores and some restaurants that mainly fed Apple employees at the many, many Apple office buildings—they have never all worked in the Spaceship—and horrible traffic. But since it was developed as tract housing, the locals are demonized as anti-housing.) If course it's a different story in each of the little towns and cities: in Santa Clara, where the city government never met a developer whose boots they didn't lick, this (on the site of a seedy and slightly shady car dealership and rental operation, a bit of the older El Camino) got torched and reduced to this in early summer 2019.Not sure what's happened since May 2021; I wouldn't be surprised if it's re-completed and up for leasing.