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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 8bits who wrote (62786)	4/26/2005 3:14:04 AM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

The water would come from Hetch Hetchy. Lake San Andreas is used for storage. Lake sits on top of the earthquake fault. The contribution of the San Mateo watershed isn't that large. I'm in Mountain View and we get about 80-90% Hetch Hetchy water. Schwab is in Atherton, and the alway entertaining Larry Ellison is now in Woodside, pretending to live like a Japanese warlord. (Note to parents: Limit your child's viewing of samurai and kung-fu movies, or they will end up like Larry, or worse yet, Quentin Tarrantino.) Hillsboro, Woodside, Portola Valley, Atherton have the most large estates. >>>"Townships can collect real estate tax on business properties but do not have to spend on serivces such are fire, police, and education. THAT is the real reason that property values became skewed in Silicon Valley and the SF peninsula and much of the other hot markets of California. After residents realized what had happened they decided to shut the door on newcomers. Kind of a gated community on a more massive scale." Yep, that's the main driver - every city wants the property taxes + sales taxes of a Sun Micro, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Genetech, Siebel, Yahoo, Ebay, Google, etc. And they want to avoid getting stuck with lots of residents, especially poor ones, who need services and cause problems. By the way, there is a big fight to keep the Atherton train station open - which is interesting, since there are almost as many Atherton residents with NetJets access as use the train. But the help uses the train... In the defense of the cities on the Penisula, they had some reasonable, growth oriented plans back in the middle 1970s. Silicon Valley grew so fast it skipped the 1978-79 recession, took a dip around 1983, then keep growing... By the middle 1980s, everything had grown way past the year 2000 and 2010 targets. Land use, highways, many other things have been in catch up mode every since. The boom of the late 1990s pushed everything back to reactive mode. >>>One positive effect is the high housing prices push people to try to get rich in a start up or high value consulting - this keeps the Bay Area innovative. None of this leaving work at 6:00 pm business like you have in places like Texas. You can still get a good house in most areas for 1.5 million. ;-)