[ad_1]
Billionaire Silicon Valley kingmaker Marc Andreessen, who railed against NIMBYism in the Bay Area, came under fire Friday when a reporter uncovered evidence that he fought housing development in his own backyard.
In his draft plan to meet California’s housing needs, Atherton — home to about 7,000 residents, many of them ultra-wealthy — proposed rezoning some properties for multifamily housing.
But more than a hundred residents voiced opposition during public comments on the plan — including Andreessen, a Netscape co-founder and influential early investor in companies like Facebook and Lyft.
Andresen’s comments, first reported by The Atlantic, were signed by him and his wife, philanthropist Laura Arrillaga-Andresen. This explains the couple’s “IMMENSE opposition” to multi-family housing.
“Please remove all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the housing element immediately,” the couple wrote. “They will greatly reduce our home values, our own and our neighbours’ quality of life and significantly increase noise pollution and traffic.”
Neither Marc Andreessen nor Laura Arrillaga-Andresen immediately responded to requests for comment Friday.
The Atlantic said the comment came from an email address using the andreessen.org domain, and city officials confirmed its authenticity. Another city official told The Chronicle that it was impossible to confirm exactly who wrote the comment.
While the comments generally echo the sentiment of Bay Area residents who want to block new construction in their neighborhood — as well as the comments of 300 other Atherton residents — they contradicted sentiments previously expressed by Andresen.
In the year In the 2020 article, “It’s Time to Build,” he wrote that the financial housing shortage is keeping people from being foreclosed on as housing prices in the Bay Area skyrocket.
“We can’t build nearly enough affordable housing in our cities — which has caused housing prices in places like San Francisco to skyrocket, making it impossible for regular people to move in and do the jobs of the future,” he said. He wrote.
He went on to say that the problem is lack of interest.
“The problem is desire. We must *want* these things. The problem is inability. We must seek these things more than we want to prevent them,” he wrote.
At Atherton, Andres fell on the side they wanted to defend. The City Council decided to remove the multi-family redevelopment feature from the housing bill in order to meet the requirement to develop 348 new housing units in response to “overwhelming community feedback.” In the next eight years.
The new plan will go back to public comment.
Daniel Echeverria is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: danielle.echeverria@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Daniel Ichev
[ad_2]
Source link