Not In My Backyard

Yesterday, when I stood on my front porch, I could see the mountains to the east of San Jose above the houses across the street.
Today, in the space of just a few hours, someone built a three story house that blocked that view.
The townhouses that are being built on the east side of our neighborhood are problematic in many ways, and this is just the latest way. They’re three streets away from me, but they still stick up over our neighborhood, looming. They are being built on a street that until recently was home to warehouses and businesses, a street that my neighborhood fought to have closed off from ours because of the intense traffic that swamped our tiny neighborhood and its narrow streets. But now that street is the focus of developers, with two high density housing developments underway and three more proposed. With through traffic blocked, there are going to be a lot of new homeowners over there who have to drive down and around our neighborhood to get out to the freeway — and they’re going to be putting pressure on the city to reopen those barriers.
The city is allowing this high-density development because of BART — Bay Area Rapid Transit — which they have been planning to bring to this neighborhood for decades. It is still nowhere in sight, and probably a dead issue considering that voters defeated a tax to help fund it. Still, they’re concentrating development in a place where, in the best scenario, a BART station wouldn’t be built for 20 years. It’s overwhelming the neighborhood, and the streets and intersections here are not designed for that much traffic. Amusingly enough, Pulte Homes, the builder of the development now going up here, promotes a non-existent BART station in its sales materials.
How will these high-density, large square footage homes this affect our neighborhood of single-story, small bunglalows? How many of those new neighbors will be parking on our extremely narrow streets rather than drive the long way around barriers to get to their new houses? And how will the kids in my neighborhood, who are used to riding bikes and scooters in the street, fare?