Our little town on the San Fran Peninsula still has 2 hours free parking on the street and in two parking plazas behind either side of Main Street. Those parking plazas have been there for 80 years and they work great.
Now the bastards on the city council want to convert one to a city park and there were plans to build multi-story housing on the other. The developer won’t even be required to put enough underground parking in the project. Governments at every level are so brain-dead and corrupt.
The STATE of CA has demanded that every town must accept its “fair share” of housing. You cannot simply declare “we are all built out and we aren’t going to play that game.” The state sues towns to oblivion to comply. Our town went through FIVE revisions to its “housing element” of the plan and the state rejected them all. The legal costs were killing us. The town finally gave up and did what the state wants. Now there’s a HUGE 5-story building topping-out on Main Street; since incorporation 75 years ago, the town has had a strict 2-story height limit. The state created what they called a “bonus” for developers to build bigger buildings. It’s all infuriating and sickening.
Absolutely with you. Same all over CA. State law overriding local land use regulations, design review, etc., all in the name of ‘affordable housing’, of which there will never be enough. No local hearings, no need to comply with zoning regulations, etc. Our cities are being destroyed by centralized planning. People are becoming multimillionaires as a result. They have excellent lobbyists, and our ‘leaders’ in Sacramento generally aren’t very bright. And many are corrupt beyond belief.