Housing

We need to take a common sense approach to the housing problem. As long as more people want to live in the valley than there are houses and apartments to put them, there will be high prices. Subsidy programs make the problem worse, not better, because they increase the ability of a small portion of the population to pay the high prices, but these programs don’t increase the available units and, therefore, simply end up increasing the prices for everyone else.

A complicating factor is that the housing shortage affects all economic segments. The trend to push the working poor farther and farther out does little more than increase traffic congestion and make it more difficult for the retail and service industries to find workers.

There isn’t any "magic bullet."

Spreading the "Bay Area" farther out only eats up valuable cropland, increases traffic congestion, and increases commute times. High speed transit to suburbs down the coast or in the Central Valley can help with congestion and commute times, but don’t reduce sprawl. Communities that are on the edge of the commute are vulnerable to economic cycles, because they are overbuilt during boom times and left out when the economy contracts.

Housing policy needs to focus on the efficient use of land available within the valley given the realities of how poorly we have allowed it to be built to date. This doesn’t mean building thousands of "executive homes" on tiny lots in fire trap sub-divisions.

• We need to increase the availability of higher density housing available and attractive at all economic levels. This valley was built out on the assumption that everybody wants and will be able to afford a single family detached house. Higher density housing has tended to be focused on people who can’t afford a house or single engineers, but not on making an attractive alternative to tract housing.
• We need to recover the use of poorly built and decaying housing. Large sections of this valley where built out in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s as "starter homes" on large lots. A lot of that work was not of the best quality. We need to look at the feasibility (and impact on the current residents) of programs like:
  • Offering easy, low-cost, government-guaranteed bridge loans to property owners to repair/upgrade housing prior to sale (paid out of the proceeds).
  • Pre-packaged expansions plans for various tract home layouts. Rather than each homeowner having to hire a architect, the owner can choose a plan that is already designed and approved.
  • Programs for elderly homeowners to maintain their residences as a loan against the eventual sale of the property when they move or pass on.

Too much of the discussion of transportation issues in the Santa Clara Valley has centered on downtown San Jose revitalization. We need to worry more about helping people move to where they need to be than in social engineering projects to make them want to be somewhere else.

Many of the transportation problems in the valley can be attributed to simplistic urban planning a generation ago where the planners chose to put housing on one side of the valley and business on the other. However, reversing those decisions won't be easy.

We need to look at requiring business to have a telecommuting policy. Even if the policy is, "No Telecommuting," it requires the company to think about it and puts telecommuting on the table when people are thinking about joining the company. A major social barrier to increased adoption of telecommuting is that many people are afraid to ask about telecommuting at their job interviews because they don't want to risk not getting a job that they want.

Working with the labor unions, we need to find a way that works within their need to protect overtime, but also allows the freedom of choice to workers who may want to work out alternative work schedules, such as workweeks of four days of ten hours each day. Instead of ten commutes to the office, a four day/week worker only has 8 commutes, a 20% reduction in peak hour trips.

We need to look at the impact of regional shopping centers on overall traffic. Large stores are more efficient and can offer customers better selection at lower prices; however, they are inefficient from a transportation perspective because they require people to do more driving to get to them than to a neighborhood store. This isn’t a call to do away with regional stores, but to work with them to develop solutions.