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There is no human right to live in Palo Alto, but something is amiss when housing in a metro area is so expensive that people making middle class salaries (we'r

There is no human right to live in Palo Alto, but something is amiss when housing in a metro area is so expensive that people making middle class salaries (we're talking around $60K-$100K) find themselves "driving until they qualify" 60+ miles away to places like Tracy, Manteca, and Los Baños to find an affordable place to life. For various reasons, Bay Area governments have decided not to densify to the degree necessary to accommodate all the people who work there, which means that development has sprawled out to the closest far-flung places that are willing to build homes. Sprawl is politically expedient compared to density, even if this sprawl means more traffic on our roads, more money needed to be spent on serving an ever-sprawling metro area, and more money individuals have to spend on transportation. (Admittedly, with more people working from home, the downsides of this sprawl could be mitigated, but not everybody can work from home.) I reiterate that there's no human right to live in Palo Alto, but companies based in Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley locations who demand that their workers work on-site may increasingly find it difficult to hire people if their housing options are limited to situations that require multiple roommates to bring the cost down to affordable levels, or commuting from far-away areas. If enough people refuse to work in Silicon Valley, then this decreases Silicon Valley's desirability as a place to work, which in turn may decrease the property values there since there will be less demand to live there. The Bay Area has to be very careful not to kill the goose that has been providing it golden eggs.

foogazi 5y ago
> but something is amiss when housing in a metro area is so expensive that people making middle class salaries (we're talking around $60K-$100K) find themselves "driving until they qualify" 60+ miles away to places like Tracy, Manteca, and Los Baños to find an affordable place to life. Why is it Ok to live in Palo Alto, but it’s wrong to live in Manteca ? People are making a choice that best fits their needs, and they choose affordable housing over commute distance California is expensive because everyone wants to live there - you can’t make that affordable. How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ?
- linguae 5y ago
  California's coastal metro areas are expensive due to high demand caused by its job market combined with artificial restrictions on supply. There is plenty of room for the Bay Area (and Los Angeles for that matter) to densify. The reason why these areas aren't densifying are largely political. It is politically easier to offload housing construction to Central Valley and thus promote urban sprawl than it is to densify the Bay Area. Tokyo and its suburbs are a great example of how densification could work. Roughly a quarter of Japan's residents live in the Kanto region of Japan where Tokyo and its suburbs are located. While the inner core of Tokyo is quite expensive, there are many affordably-priced neighborhoods just 30 minutes away from Tokyo via normal commuter trains. Even with Japan's falling population, Tokyo's population has been growing before the pandemic due to population drain from Japan's rural areas. It seems that Tokyo is better able to accommodate its demand than the Bay Area; there are very few people commuting 60 miles into Tokyo.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  > How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ? It doesn't necessarily need to be cheaper, but comparable when including transportation costs. And I think the answer for that would be, not very many, as a percentage of the land area. By definition, if we took 1/10th of the already residential area of San Jose, and increased the density 10x, we'd be able to almost double the housing capacity (1.9x). That's not hard to do if we build 6-7 stories high and the entire surface area covered is housing without lawns and so on. If our goal is a more modest 5x increase in density, which is easy with typical 4+1 story apartment builds, we could re-zone 10% of the residential area for that and capacity would be 1.4x what it is now. For a city like San Jose with a population of over 1,000,000, that means it could support a further 400,000 people. We could also add some residential mini-skyscrapers in downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and other smaller cities, possibly with reduced parking, for people who want to live, work, and shop downtown. According to Wikipedia, the 9-county "SF Bay Area" has a population of 7.76 million. If we remove San Francisco and Oakland from this, plus round that up to removing 2 million let's say for the areas that we can consider "sufficiently dense", that still means about 6 million people live in areas that are suburban-like and could be densified. By increasing density 5x in 10% of already residential areas of these cities by building upward, more than another 1,000,000 people could live in the Bay Area. And obviously we could apply this to 20-30-40% rather than just 10% to support much larger populations, and build slightly higher as well.

foogazi 5y ago

> but something is amiss when housing in a metro area is so expensive that people making middle class salaries (we're talking around $60K-$100K) find themselves "driving until they qualify" 60+ miles away to places like Tracy, Manteca, and Los Baños to find an affordable place to life. Why is it Ok to live in Palo Alto, but it’s wrong to live in Manteca ? People are making a choice that best fits their needs, and they choose affordable housing over commute distance California is expensive because everyone wants to live there - you can’t make that affordable. How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ?

linguae 5y ago
California's coastal metro areas are expensive due to high demand caused by its job market combined with artificial restrictions on supply. There is plenty of room for the Bay Area (and Los Angeles for that matter) to densify. The reason why these areas aren't densifying are largely political. It is politically easier to offload housing construction to Central Valley and thus promote urban sprawl than it is to densify the Bay Area. Tokyo and its suburbs are a great example of how densification could work. Roughly a quarter of Japan's residents live in the Kanto region of Japan where Tokyo and its suburbs are located. While the inner core of Tokyo is quite expensive, there are many affordably-priced neighborhoods just 30 minutes away from Tokyo via normal commuter trains. Even with Japan's falling population, Tokyo's population has been growing before the pandemic due to population drain from Japan's rural areas. It seems that Tokyo is better able to accommodate its demand than the Bay Area; there are very few people commuting 60 miles into Tokyo.
epicureanideal 5y ago
> How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ? It doesn't necessarily need to be cheaper, but comparable when including transportation costs. And I think the answer for that would be, not very many, as a percentage of the land area. By definition, if we took 1/10th of the already residential area of San Jose, and increased the density 10x, we'd be able to almost double the housing capacity (1.9x). That's not hard to do if we build 6-7 stories high and the entire surface area covered is housing without lawns and so on. If our goal is a more modest 5x increase in density, which is easy with typical 4+1 story apartment builds, we could re-zone 10% of the residential area for that and capacity would be 1.4x what it is now. For a city like San Jose with a population of over 1,000,000, that means it could support a further 400,000 people. We could also add some residential mini-skyscrapers in downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and other smaller cities, possibly with reduced parking, for people who want to live, work, and shop downtown. According to Wikipedia, the 9-county "SF Bay Area" has a population of 7.76 million. If we remove San Francisco and Oakland from this, plus round that up to removing 2 million let's say for the areas that we can consider "sufficiently dense", that still means about 6 million people live in areas that are suburban-like and could be densified. By increasing density 5x in 10% of already residential areas of these cities by building upward, more than another 1,000,000 people could live in the Bay Area. And obviously we could apply this to 20-30-40% rather than just 10% to support much larger populations, and build slightly higher as well.