My dear Comrade Queeg,

Well spoke, as has been your custom. Did you know that in Russia, the first five floors of an apartment building are reached only by stairways. Elevators are available only from the fifth floor up.

As for the troubles of our friends in Northern California, if you stick with your southern comrades, we won’t abandon you. But we would sure like it better if you stopped bossing us around. Please don’t expect us to abandon our back-country ways.

Go to shop worn Socialist Spain

Little parking in cities and the worst of the worst looking serf filled apartment dumps.

Not as bad as Russia apartment gulags though!!!!

Northern California better wake up….between getting crispy fried by utility miscues or becoming mobility/domicile helpless due to continual feel good land planning disasters….pretty sorry-

Ample parking at BART stations is far more important than housing. Most commuters can easily drive – even several miles – from their home to BART. (They can’t from BART to their job site.)

Outlying BART stations can thus be farther apart, making the rapid transit trip much faster and more viable.

With development around the station, surface parking can go into structures; land becomes available for commercial use without razing homes and disrupting neighborhoods.

Robert S. Allen
BART Director, District 5, 1974-1988.
223 Donner Avenue
Livermore, CA 94551-4240
925-449-1387, but email contact is far better.

Tried to add three units to a huge two unit lot.

Approved by planning department….but whoa…, the neighborhood beautification zealots wouldn’t approve without $38,000. of added nonsense hardscape and plants.

Well. I walked. No negotiation. No comment. Walked

The property is now, a few years later, part of a dastardly, declining, unsafe neighborhood ghetto.

First of all, Property Rights, being sacred because given by God as a right inherent in Liberty (human instinct includes a territorial imperative, and the Ten Commandments says we are not to steal or covet our neighbor’s house or land), are not an open-ended license to do whatever we wish with our property.

Most importantly, we may not cause harm to our neighbors or their property. This goes both ways. In ancient times, land use decisions were worked out mostly one case at a time and if the neighbors did not want a tannery in the middle of town, they would make sure that it was built outside of town, and downwind.

In principle, zoning is not an unreasonable policy to establish orderly development. On the one hand, it protects property owners who are already there. On the other, it tells potential real estate and business interests what may or may not be done on a particular site so they can make rational decisions. It is meant to prevent unnecessary disputes and save, time, money and hardship.

Limits on new development have been hard won by homeowners, neighborhood associations, local governments, preservationists, conservationists, and community activists. This is only way we’ve had to protect our homes and neighborhoods from bad land use decisions for the past seventy years. Even so, local government officials tend to overthrow existing law to allow inappropriate development around residential, rural, agricultural and recreational areas, anyway.

That is because they have been trained by the National League of Cities to view the people they represent as tax-revenue generating units instead of citizens with rights. In California, from the 1950s to 2011, the Redevelopment Bulldozer–a.k.a.: the eminent domain-abuse machine–was in the business of destroying viable neighborhoods to make way for sports arenas, hotels, movie theaters, big box stores, shopping centers, auto malls, high-rise offices and other large-scale private projects.

Most were a dismal failure at generating additional tax revenue–most of them merely displaced existing local businesses and residential areas. Even the residential projects. And now, after eight years without Redevelopment to smooth the path for building affordable housing in all the wrong places, government officials are still brainwashed with the notion that without their ministrations local economies would fail.

This makes it easy to convince them that single-family residential homeowners objecting to allowing their neighbors to build second units and apartments are unreasonable. Because the bottom line in all this, the proposed affordable housing policy is not about building more housing. It is about increasing tax revenue for the local treasury at the expense of the well-being of the taxpayers, people like you and me. The destruction of viable communities is not good for a city, either.

So, the next time somebody is called a “NIMBY” (not in my back yard), maybe Libertarians should think twice before complaining about zoning restrictions. The next property owner to suffer from unregulated development may be you.

Government is here to protect our rights, not threaten them. And all our rights and Liberty are reciprocal–your right to do what you want extends only as far as somebody else’s. If you respect one another’s rights, then Liberty can prevail. If the government favors one of you over somebody else’s, then it is abusing its power.

Liberty and the Golden Rule are both considered principles of reciprocity. We are not talking about material equality, but of equality in the sight of the Law.

“Liberty is a power to do as we would be done by.”
John Adams, 1819