Dwelling on negatives

Californians’ myriad reasons for opposing new housing in their communities range from the familiar to the innovative.

Character study: “Proponents of the city’s small-town feel” have played a big role in stalling a Brisbane development, The Chronicle reported recently. “We would like to exist as we have existed in the character of our community,” said resident Clara Johnson.

This land is jobs land: in rejecting proposed teacher housing this month, San Jose officials argued that the land had to be reserved for commercial uses. “City officials said converting ‘jobs land’ to housing sets a dangerous precedent,” the Mercury News reported.

Shadow of a doubt: San Francisco officials required a redesign of a proposed South of Market apartment complex, The Chronicle noted in May, after neighbors and advocates complained that it would increase the amount of shadow cast on a nearby recreation center by one percentage point. Creative differences: Oakland activists successfully demanded a $100,000 concession from a developer proposing to build an apartment tower on a downtown parking lot, the San Francisco Business Times reported last year, because it would obscure a mural. With apologies to Potter Stewart: A Planning Commission member struggling to explain why a mixed-use development would not suit Los Gatos was quoted by the Silicon Valley Business Journal as saying, “i’d rather go to the Supreme Court definition of pornography: i don’t know what it is, but i know when i look at it. it (the proposed development) doesn’t look like anything i’ve seen in Los Gatos . ... i can’t connect the dots between the subjectivity and the data, but it doesn’t look like anything i’ve seen in town.”