Perhaps the subtlety of the sentence is being missed. It says: San Jose has taken the rare step of publicly opposing the project, saying it would add far too

Perhaps the subtlety of the sentence is being missed. It says: San Jose has taken the rare step of publicly opposing the project, saying it would add far too many jobs, exacerbating the region’s housing shortage. In my opinion, the motivation is that the San Jose City Council is assuming that most of the workers would live in San Jose, exacerbating their housing price pressure while denying them any of the developer-fee benefits or tax base improvement. And that's true. This has been the pattern throughout the history of the valley: San Jose's traditional business-unfriendliness has resulted in the major Silicon Valley names locating their businesses in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino (Apple!), and Mountain View (Google!) over the decades. San Jose's emphasis was always on grabbing all the land they could (incorporating county lands) without creating a business-friendly environment there. (Look at San Jose city boundaries in, say, 1950 versus now.) It's another side-effect of one-party rule (for all but one mayoral dynasty) during this period. Another demonstration of this nimby-ism is that San Jose and surrounding cities tend to dump problematic development on each other's borders. For example, Santana Row and Valley Fair straddle the San Jose - Santa Clara border. Neither felt any incentive to consider traffic effects of dumping all of this retail in less than a square mile. Result: gridlock so bad that it actually backs up onto the neighboring freeways (280 and 880/17) during November and December, at least. Yay.