Palo Alto Loved Big Government Until It Came for Palo Alto

A friend's modest Palo Alto 3BR sold for $1.3MM in 2011.
$300K was put into it. Zillow's current value is $3.3 MM.

Liberals often turn conservative, that is, anti-big-government, on issues that affect them personally. The latest example is deep-blue Palo Alto's resistance to State directives to build multifamily housing:

Housing advocates say the city has a unique opportunity to change the course, and embrace multifamily housing rather than individual lots to help counteract housing and school segregation. But an uphill battle is on the horizon.

Shortly after the Palo Alto City Council tightened restrictions against multifamily housing, a group of anti-growth homeowners and politicians held a town hall arguing that more housing could lead to problems and urged attendees to challenge a state directive for the city to approve 6,000 new homes by 2030.

To halt construction the usual bag of tricks are being employed: insistence on time-consuming environmental studies and protests against traffic and "developer giveaways." But this time the tactics are being used against the Progressive dream of dense housing along mass-transit corridors.

One surprise is denigrating the Sacramento housing directive as "Soviet economics", which I didn't think had any traction in the town that is home to Stanford University. One would think that the woke who dominate the campus and the town would welcome a chance to bulldoze single-family homes and small shopping centers to create a demonstration city of high-rise apartments. So far the lack of enthusiasm is shocking.