City of South San Francisco General Plan 2040 Joint City Council and Planning Commission Study Session set for April 29th

It has been brought to my attention that there has been dismay expressed in both ESC and Nextdoor that those of us demanding responsible development in South San Francisco are hostile old folks or NIMBYS as some like to label us. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If it has escaped the naysayers attention, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, of development have been constructed or are in the planning stages in SSF. This city can’t be expected to solve the housing problems for the entire Bay Area. No one is saying no to new development but it needs to be responsible. When a developer rolls out fifteen story high rise plans you bet there is going to be resistance. While we are totally sympathetic with those in need of housing, residents of this city chose to live in the suburbs, not a high-rise, high-density city. We made a deliberate decision to do so. Let me offer you an analogy. It’s like signing the paperwork for a $300,000 Ferrari and you go outside and find out the salesman handed you the keys to a Volkswagen. It’s not what residents bargained for. If you want to focus your anger, go after the Salesforces, the Facebooks, the Googles, the Twitters, the Genentechs, etc., business entities that have expanded without regard to the fact that the San Francisco Bay Area is geographically finite and has limited infrastructure to accommodate the personnel that comes with this expansion. Know well, that should our economy go “south” as it appears that it currently is unsustainable, these same titans of industry will just as quickly abandon the Bay Area leaving behind ghettos or ghost towns.
So YIMBYS call us NIMBYS if you must but set your sense of entitlement aside, entertain some objectivity, and try to see the problem from our point of view.