It's 90s/2000s tech and finance leadership money - excluded from Woodside and Portola Valley so Atherton was the next best thing back then.
Not being around Asians played a huge role as well - in the 1990s and 2000s, Saratoga, Cupertino, the Fremont Hills, and the parts of Palo that fell under Gunn High became "Asian" and we were viewed negatively by Silicon Valley types back then. I remember the white flight first hand [0]
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." (2005)
Their kinds still populate HN.
> Woodside is a nice horse community with hills and sequoias
Older money (1950s-1990s)
> Palo Alto is next to Stanford
Palo Alto was much more "middle class" (think like Fremont or Dublin is today) back then
I liked the government structure of the ACT when I lived there with a territory government that also had all the local government responsibilities for bins etc.
The slop & aggressively poor argumentation, the kind that I think would have caused me to fail it if I tried it in speech & debate in middle school, leaves me feeling empty.
They keep saying $400M, $400M, $400M, $400M, and the only cost they came up with is $20M. It makes me uncomfortable to support the overall cause if this is how it'll be played, because, setting aside morality of tactics, it's not playing to win. Anyone who is at the margins will see it plainly and be given a reason not to listen.
Andreessen family 2 years later: "IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development! I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton... They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values"[1]
[0] https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
[1] https://therealdeal.com/san-francisco/2022/08/08/marc-andree...
People in my town, Fort Worth, have been saying the same things for years. People were moving in too fast causing home values to sky rocket, so everyone was saying they need to build houses faster to prevent a property tax explosion. You can only build single family homes so fast, so then came the hundreds and hundreds of multi-family apartment campuses and home values immediately tanked. They got what they wished for. Now we have traffic, electric grid, and school system over crowding because they still can’t build everything else fast enough. Even still people keep moving in, about 65 new residents a day.
Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?
In fact the article comes dangerously close to admitting that there is correlation without correlation, it opens with:
> Here is the short version. In 2012, Caltrain budgeted its electrification project — the backbone of the Peninsula's transit future and a prerequisite for high-speed rail to ever reach San Francisco — at roughly $1.5 billion. By 2017 that number had ballooned to $1.9 billion. In between, the Town of Atherton sued.
While I don't agree with what Atherton did here (in general, I did not look at the specifics), you have to be fairly negligent to think you're going to build something in California without a massive legal headache. This is a legislative problem which it sounds like, for this narrow case, the legislature actually solved (shockingly to me). I find it hard to blame the residents of the city for exercising their rights.
Filing frivolous lawsuits is also a right but we don't withhold our criticism of that practice. What Atherton did seems like the wealthy person's equivalent of that, down to it being dismissed. Legal? yes. Cynical and amoral, also yes.
that's not fair. the question was: did the legal headache cause the budget-overrun. predictable or not, your response does not show that it didn't.
It is peak irony that a piece of environmental regulation is being used here to delay the upgrade works. On brand for California, of course.
Define "AI generated".
Whole article generation? LLM draft with human finish? Human draft with LLM finish? Is proof reading OK? Or is it permanently tainted the second an LLM touches it?
What's interesting is that many who defend our current mode of production (capitalism) either don't know or have forgotten that Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations fame obviously) had a very negative view of landlords, calling them essentially parasitic. I mean this is where the term "rent-seeking" comes from. Landlords and landowners essentially extracted value from the economy for no productive economic output. In other words, they were parasites.
Fudge has written papers on what he calls the "Housing Theory of Everything" [2] and calls the property market a "rentier black hole". When property becomes the best-performing asset, it redirects all capital that might otherwise go to producing things and (in his opinion) this is what really hollowed out British industry. He also argues for a land value tax, similar to what France has (IFI).
I find this interesting because it's an area where capitalism theory and socialist theory agree yet protecting house values has somehow become the entire focus of our economy. Even the term, the "tragedy of the commons" was a 1968 invention [3] and this still dominates discourse even though it was disproven with empircal evidence, work which garnered the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [4].
So land accumulation is both capitalist and socialist so how did we get here? I guess the landowners. So when people defend the likes of Atherton doing this, it's not based on any ideology at all. Oh and the poster-children for rent-seeking still have to be the Resnicks [5].
CEQA was a well-intentioned law. But as we've seen it's been effectively weaponized by the billionaires, the propaganda has been created NIMBYs and we now have an economy that most rewards land-hoarding with no economic output. And that's the real reason this happens and will keep happening.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@henryfudgeofficial/video/76460341810...
[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory...
[3]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...
[4]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
[5]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
> > Atherton didn't have to win. A CEQA lawsuit doesn't need a strong legal theory to do damage — it just needs to introduce enough risk that funders freeze and clocks keep running. The delay is the weapon.
In my opinion, this construct is massively overused by LLMs and is extremely jarring to read. The pithy followup "The delay is the weapon." feels like Year 8 Debate Club and is very melodramatic and cringy.
It must be possible to steer the LLM away from this?
Maybe California is not as hopeless as it may look.
Back about 15-16 years ago, there was an international incubator BlackBox based out of one of the properties in Atherton.
The state should be able to collect damages for frivolous NIMBY lawsuits. I don’t care if they’re ashamed. If they’re fine paying more taxes to behave like idiots, who cares.
Atherton is a vibe, but it's an older demographic of tech and finance successes (the 1990s-2000s scene).
Atherton is wealthy. But it’s surrounded by the Bay Area. Atherton is uniquely civically engaged, but that’s about it. Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Cupertino and San Francisco can each muster more capital than it can, to say nothing of LA.
Atherton, along with Hillsborough, Ladera, Potola Valley, and Woodside represent old and oldish money who were much more engaged and locally entrenched.
These are peers of Draper, Ellison, Conway, Steyer, Newsom, Getty, Schiff, Pelosi, Sobrato, Panetta, and Siebel and are an entirely different social and political strata.
There is a money as well as a racial component, which is ironic as a significant portion of the community were Italian, German, and Irish Catholics who were excluded by descendants of the Hearsts and Stanfords barely 70 years ago.
Edit: I completely agree with you. The issue is organizational though - California local and state government is structured in such a way that local priorities can override collective goals, and this goes well beyond weaponized environmental reviews or NIMBYism.
There is value in local control - with some glaring exception.
Local control is desirable, the question is the proper granularity of local control in the modern era. The structure of places like the Bay Area with dozens of little towns that have veto power over everything is too granular. Planning should happen at the granularity of entire metro areas.
I gather that "Bumfuck XX" is the approved term for a region within XX state that is a bit out of the way and I heartily approve of that.
If you live in Bumfuck AQ (for example) you might have local issues that you might think are better served with a local rather than state or federal approach.
Some of your states are quite large. For example TX is nearly three times the land area of the UK which manages to cram three separate nations within its islands, one of which is minority shared with Ireland and the rest is even more complicated!
If you are happy with big govt then all is fine. That is what you'll get if you try to remove the old ... glue. Those old sub divisions are communities ie groups of people who are effectively the civic or regional version of families.
I suggest you strive to keep those webs of community together rather than try to tear them apart in the name of administrative efficiency or you will discover what bumfucked really means.
Which is obviously a bit sus, because the actual lawsuit froze everything for only around 18 months from Feb 2015 to Sep 2016.
outside1234•1h ago
surfmike•1h ago
JoshTriplett•59m ago
> expand that exemption from CEQA to include a public project for the institution or increase of other passenger rail service, which will be exclusively used by zero-emission trains, located entirely within existing rail rights-of-way or existing highway rights-of-way.
sroussey•58m ago
loeg•57m ago
JumpCrisscross•50m ago
sandeepkd•55m ago
mlyle•46m ago
We're talking about how it exempts many things from CEQA litigation. Since it's been less than a year, I'm not sure how well we can gauge its effectiveness.
sandeepkd•32m ago