The Whole Problem Is That There Is No Housing Boom In Silicon Valley

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/03/silicon_valley_housing_boom_there_s_no_such_thing.html

by prostoalex • 13 years ago

109 142 13 years ago

astrodust2• 13 years ago

Every time I've visited the Valley area I can't help but notice the enormous difference in density between San Francisco and the Valley in general.

Where parts of San Francisco are jammed with houses, every nook occupied, not unlike parts of Manhattan or Boston, there are large swaths of the Valley with nothing but parking lots.

Any time I've asked a local why the densities aren't higher, why a ten story apartment building is such an anomaly, I get some vague grumbling about earthquakes. San Francisco has a number very tall buildings with a few even built on the side of a literal mountain, and all of these have survived several significant quakes, so I doubt this is the actual reason.

It's absolutely surreal the amount of under-utilized real-estate one must drive past or around simply to get where they're going.

jseliger2• 13 years ago

Any time I've asked a local why the densities aren't higher, why a ten story apartment building is such an anomaly, I get some vague grumbling about earthquakes.

For whatever reason, very few people make the connection between supply, demand, and prices in metro areas, which is a point I wrote a lot more about here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/connecting-the-dots... .

rdouble3• 13 years ago

Where parts of San Francisco are jammed with houses, every nook occupied, not unlike parts of Manhattan or Boston, there are large swaths of the Valley with nothing but parking lots.

San Francisco is not unique in this regard. Every urban area in America is like this, including Boston and NYC.

San Francisco has a number very tall buildings with a few even built on the side of a literal mountain, and all of these have survived several significant quakes, so I doubt this is the actual reason.

The buildings on the hills are the ones that survive the quake. The buildings built on sand, like in the Marina or Mission Bay, are the ones that are vulnerable to earthquakes.

jjtheblunt2• 13 years ago

Why is that (sand vs hill)?

astrodust2• 13 years ago

You say "every" urban area, but I've been to enough American cities to know this isn't true.

Phoenix? Cleveland? Kansas City? Denver?

They're parking lots with buildings sprinkled here and there. Density isn't even a priority. Land values are too low to promote higher density.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that Boston, Manhattan, and San Francisco are geographically constrained, they're hemmed in by water. Chicago is like this to a degree, but has sprawled enough that it's irrelevant for the most-part.

It is shocking how many cities view their landscape as worthless, paving it over instead of constructing something that contributes to the betterment of the city. Though when cars rule, concessions must be made. Nobody seems to care about the people who live and work in a city.

masklinn• 13 years ago

> San Francisco has a number very tall buildings with a few even built on the side of a literal mountain, and all of these have survived several significant quakes

Also, Japan (after they set up seismic building codes, which was a decade or 2 before the Great Hanshin Earthquake, the number of older non-code buildings explaining the differences in destruction and life loss between the fairly similar Great Hanshin and Northridge quakes)

jjtheblunt2• 13 years ago

They don't mention ubiquitous EPA superfund sites?

nostromo• 13 years ago

It has nothing to do with earthquakes and everything to do with zoning laws, HOAs and general NIMBYism.

Here's a fun example: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_13512735. Palo Alto city council members falling all over themselves to stop LA to SF high-speed rail. They argued that the train should terminate in San Jose, no joke.

hapless2• 13 years ago

San Francisco actually has the same problem as the valley. Housing prices are going through the roof because the city REFUSES to re-zone for higher density. The last time there was significant re-zoning, there was a great deal of whining about "Manhattanization."

Manhattan has incredible population density, and residents have some of the lowest environmental impacts in america. What's bad about that?

The same slate columnist wrote about SFO real estate earlier: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...

_delirium2• 13 years ago

SF's population density isn't Manhattan's, but it's quite high overall, one of the highest in the US. The city in total has a bit over 17,000 people per square mile; that's 3x the density of Seattle and 6x that of Austin, for example. The parts where demand is highest (the eastern half) are even higher, e.g. about 25,000/sq. mi in the Mission.

Compare that to, say, Palo Alto, where housing is in strong demand (due to Stanford and startups) and yet they've only allowed density to reach a paltry 2,500/sq.mi. If they allowed high-density housing near downtown Palo Alto and Stanford, it'd not only improve things on the peninsula, but also reduce some of the pressure on SF housing from people who currently reverse-commute.

firefoxman12• 13 years ago

> the city REFUSES to re-zone for higher density

Call me crazy, but that's what I love about SF. It feels so much more (friendly? approachable?) than other cities because of the architecture and height of buildings. It's quite unique and I'd hate to see it go.

jacoblyles3• 13 years ago

One of my favorite opeds on this is "San Francisco can become a world capital. First it needs to get over itself"[1] in Pando Daily.

[1]http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-...

pfarrell• 13 years ago

But what is San Francisco jammed with? 2 and 3 story buildings. The land may be maxed out in coverage, but it's still totally underutilized. SF has 17k/sq mi as opposed to Manhattan's almost 70k/sq mi. It's a town that has decided it won't be any bigger (ymmv).

dyno123454• 13 years ago

San Francisco is actually still extremely conservative in terms of doing new building - not at all like Manhattan.

wiredfool• 13 years ago

6-10 stories is kind of the worst height for earthquake resistance, since the fundamental frequency of the building (tends) to be 10/stories, and there's a lot of energy in the 1hz area for earthquakes. Shorter buildings tend to move along with the earthquake, and taller ones just sway. It's 10x worse if it's unreinforced masonry, but that's not been to code in California since forever. (But it's what happens in less developed locations)

(That's of course, if they're built to code and don't have things like a weak wall, like buildings with one open wall on the ground floor for parking. )

That's not to say that it can't be done, but 4 stories and below can be just plain old code compliant architecture, but once you get up into 10 stories, you're talking about structural engineering and all that goes with it.

13b9f227ecf02• 13 years ago

Silicon Valley firms need young men to find their socialization at work and put in long hours. In a properly functioning urban society people have many strong local relationships outside work. In a normal place you leave work at 5:00 or 6:00 and connect with folks who will be around in 20 years, unlike the institution where you punched out. The monied interests arguably have incentive to perpetuate sprawl & anomie.

dyno123454• 13 years ago

They have no problem getting people to work 9am to 9pm in Manhattan, yet there are still plenty of things to do after work

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

An excellent comment on a compelling article from January:

"As a lifelong resident of Silicon Valley, I can only laugh. Our patented brand of NIMBY liberalism married to Asperger's-induced libertarianism makes this plan an utter pipedream."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/13/01/a-grand-...

Previous discussion of article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555

guelo2• 13 years ago

Weird to call NIMBY a liberal thing when many conservatives hate any kind of density planning or mass transit.

jacoblyles3• 13 years ago

How many conservatives live in San Francisco? 12?

modarts2• 13 years ago

I think the juxtaposition of the terms was intended by the commenter.

babesh• 13 years ago

People live in the Peninsula partly for the house with a yard. People live in SF for the city life etc...

Its been self selecting for a long time. You will get a lot of opposition to high rise apartments in those areas especially since the existing residents don't 'need' or even want these developments.

You don't even have BART in middle to lower parts of the Peninsula. Where you do see Bart, you see a little bit of the developments that you speak of (Millbrae, South San Francisco, etc...)

There is increased demand. It translates into higher prices for the Peninsula and increasing development and somewhat higher prices in the outskirts (East Bay, South Bay, etc...). Also, see a bit more in fill in the Peninsula. Previously, subpar empty lots are being bought and built on.

gojomo• 13 years ago

Every lot within 500m of a rail station should automatically be zoned to allow for 6-story buildings and ground-level retail. And, building to the max height should earn lots a lower property tax rate. Manifest density!

prostoalex4• 13 years ago

San Jose has been attracting all sorts of developers to build residential high-rises around downtown only to have them empty, with large banners "Selling Now! Prices Slashed!" hanging for years.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Which has always been an interesting dichotomy. Peninsula cities that could benefit from more housing don't.

Sunnyvale has a bunch of apartments near the CalTrain station that will come online this year so that will be interesting.

Androsynth• 13 years ago

its about efficiency. There simply isnt a demand for tech workers in san jose to fill the residential high rises.

(Also the hardware industry has gone down significantly in the past 20 years. san jose will never have the 70's and 80's again)

me2i81• 13 years ago

Like which ones, in particular? The San Jose condo market looks pretty robust to me. There are a few high end condos that have been sitting on the market for a while, but at around $750/sq ft plus HOA fees, they might just be priced too high.

roc2• 13 years ago

That would just see the NIMBYs shift to blocking the rail stations entirely.

simcop2387• 13 years ago

If they're like any other city I've been in, they're already trying to block them because it ostensibly leads to lowered property values since the cheaper transportation lets more people come in to the area.

WildUtah2• 13 years ago

That's what we should do. What we really do more often is surround train stations with nothing but surface parking over every lot within 500m. Surface parking not only fails to make use of the potential for density in appropriate places but creates traffic and makes it harder to build mixed use or medium density elsewhere.

BART is the single largest provider of off-street parking in the USA. CalTrain seems to be trying to match it.

uvdiv• 13 years ago

robg, I'm seeing your comment marked [dead], even though you are not hellbanned and there's no reason for anyone to downvote it. Perhaps it's a bug.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

That sounds downright Georgist. I like it!

rayiner4• 13 years ago

Most of the country handles rail stations in the most retarded way possible, by surrounding them with acres of parking lot that make them extremely unfriendly for pedestrians.

In New York, the commuter rail stations are surrounded by retail/residential. I live ~20 miles from Midtown in the suburbs, and I haven't driven my car in two months. I can go to the Costco, 27 miles from downtown, entirely on the train and walking (it's right next to the station).

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

how do you move your groceries? The problem for me has never been getting to the store; it's been taking my stuff back home from the store.

querulous2• 13 years ago

vancouver is actually doing a really good job with this. when the new rapid transit line from downtown to richmond opened land near the rail stations was immediately filled with medium and high density mixed retail/residential. prior to that it was a suburban wasteland. the corridor from new westminster to commercial/broadway went from run down and undesirable to filled with condos and townhouses. the cambie corridor is undergoing a similar transformation. even central surrey and brentwood are somewhat liveable now. neighborhoods i never would have considered living in 10 years ago are suddenly desirable.

i think the key is that outside of a couple of key stations in industrial areas (bridgeport, scott road and a few of the north burnaby stations) there is almost no street parking. the rail stations aren't sited and designed as collection points to funnel people downtown or to the airport. they were placed to encourage development of neighborhoods

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

I hope more startups move to Texas...

steve-howard2• 13 years ago

> Some people might get dispaced out of the individual house they live in, [...]

Exactly. Who is going to have a voice in community matters, particularly when it comes to eminent domain: local homeowners, or hordes of hypothetical people that don't live there yet?

cpursley6• 13 years ago

As a commercial real estate appraiser with a pretty good understanding of land economics, I completely agree. When land is pricy, there is no other logical option than to go up. The only thing zoning serves is the uberwealthy and those with political influence.

There should be no zoning at all. None. Just look at the best cities in the world including pre-zoning America - their growth was dictated by pure economic need, not by nimyism. To use startup jargon, zoning makes it difficult and costly to iterate real estate to the 'highest and best use'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Egm0j_p1A

salgernon• 13 years ago

"There should be no zoning at all. None."

Yea, that worked out great in West, Texas:

http://news.yahoo.com/why-did-west-texas-build-homes-school-...

cpursley6• 13 years ago

Rare. The market typically sorts this stuff out. You'd be surprised by the amount of due diligence is required for a bank to lend on a property or an insurer to insure it.

prostoalex4• 13 years ago

For short-term yes. For long-term, how do you deal with overbuilding and/or large groups of people moving away to the next up-and-coming city, leaving behind a ghost town of empty high rises?

Some overbuilt cities in China or Eastern Europe have that issue.

acgourley• 13 years ago

Is that clearly a bad thing? Maybe the market is correctly accounting for the cost vs value? I mean, is there some externality I'm missing?

tbrownaw• 13 years ago

How is this a zoning issue?

cpursley6• 13 years ago

Those cities we're built by bureaucracy, not the market. In fact, what you mention is a great example of failed social planning which is taking zoning to the next level.

mseebach3• 13 years ago

Overbuild cities in China or Eastern Europe are artifacts of planning gone wrong, not the opposite.

jmillikin• 13 years ago

The problem with completely dropping zoning is you end up with situations like the West fertilizer plant, where a building stuffed with explosives was placed next to a two schools and a retirement home.

mseebach3• 13 years ago

Well, zoning clearly didn't avoid that situation, either.

cpursley6• 13 years ago

Well, when you give up a little liberty/property rights for a little 'safety' you get a whole lot of inflexible shit in return. Zoning and its inflexibility hurts the people on the bottom of the totem pole the most as the article indicates. With no zoning, you can still have a lot of shit, but at least you're not married to it.

roc2• 13 years ago

Luckily there's a continuum of choices, rather than the false dichotomy of San Francisco vs Kowloon Walled City.

cpursley6• 13 years ago

Good point. But one thing to note about Kowloon was that there were questionable/weak property rights. That was the issue with that more so than no zoning.

mjn2• 13 years ago

It's quite possible to enforce anti-growth NIMBYism without municipal zoning. Houston has no zoning, and yet is completely sprawling and full of contractually agreed development restrictions, which are not zoning and do not involve a government but produce the same effect.

Say you're buying a nice suburban house in Houston. It has no zoning, so you're worried your neighbors might sometime in the future replace their house with a loud bar, or a factory, or subdivide it into rental housing. An enterprising subdivision developer realizes they can get more money if they can assure you that none of these things will happen. So when they're building the subdivision, they don't just sell you the property unrestricted. Instead, they draw up a set of rules governing future use of the property, and they require anyone who buys a house in the subdivision to sign a contract agreement to be bound by them. Now they can promise you that your neighbor won't build a factory on their land, because the subdivision rules don't permit it, and your neighbor has signed a contract agreeing to the rules.

The rules you agree to typically along the lines of what you'd normally get from suburban, Palo-Alto-style zoning regulations: you agree not to subdivide the property, not to redevelop it into anything other than a 1- or 2-story single-family house, not to build a structure on the property that doesn't meet certain design and land-occupation percentage requirements, not to operate an industrial or commercial facility on the property, in some cases not to rent it to tenants, etc., etc.

In short, the market demands and produces zoning.

cpursley6• 13 years ago

Exactly! This example of private contract law is really the right way. To be fair, Houston really developed post-car + cheap land which explains the low density.

WildUtah2• 13 years ago

Houston claims not to have zoning, but substitutes regulations that produce the same sprawling effect as zoning that mandates sprawl.

Houston uses building line setback rules, huge minimum parking requirements, street width minima, block size and platting rules, fire code regulations, and the whole panoply of laws that mandate sprawl everywhere else with the sole exception of Euclidian zoning. The result is mandatory sprawl.

Market based land use would not have built Houston. It would never have created $3000 basic studio apartments in Palo Alto either. Markets aren't a panacea but what we've mandated instead is a disaster.

taurath2• 13 years ago

What happens on the edges of said subdivisions? If there is open land that the subdivision owner doesn't own, someone can put in a chemical plant next to it no?

ebiester2• 13 years ago

Please, take a trip to Istanbul sometime. While there are zoning rules, they are easily subverted by a bribe or two. The architecture looks positively ghastly in many areas because of this.

On the contrary, make everything mixed use. Bottom floor (at the minimum) is business use, and above that is housing.

Ras_• 13 years ago

Can you really build efficient/reliable mass transit systems and other related services without zoning?

I agree that some part of zoning is pure conservation (skewed towards status quo and the interests of the majority of current owners) whereas no-zone is closer to plain economical interests and favors individual cases.

davidw• 13 years ago

He wrote an entire book on this subject:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/?tag=dedasys-20

Which wasn't bad. Pay the ratings no mind - when it came out, he'd just written something that pissed off a lot of folks for some reason and so they got it into their heads to try and trash his book.

patmcguire• 13 years ago

Yeah, said the taboo on speaking I'll of the dead was stupid and the world was a better place without Brietbart.

newnewnew• 13 years ago

I can't defend all of Breitbart's actions, but he did commit some acts of serious original journalism. A recent New York Times expose on $4 billion in waste in the Department of Agriculture due to fraudulent civil rights claims was based on original reporting on Breitbart.com[1]. By itself the traditional media doesn't report on these kinds of stories because they are afraid of being called racist.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/us/farm-loan-bias-claims-o...

SurfScore• 13 years ago

Could this have anything to do with the fact that abundant displays of wealth (I.e. a mansion) are frowned upon by some in the Valley? I honestly have no idea, but you hear stories about tech millionaires living modest lives in SV all the time.

Nothing wrong with that at all, but if they aren't spending the money they have then its not helping the economy (at least in this respect).

svachalek• 13 years ago

No. There are plenty of mansions too. But the prices here are all about the fact that demand keeps increasing while supply is not allowed to.

webjprgm• 13 years ago

Ugh, please no. The real problem is that startups can't decide to open up shop somewhere else, like Pleasanton or Napa. Somewhere that's just as accessible to all the VCs and conferences but not so short on housing.

I don't want mega city. I'm sure a lot of people who have made the Silicon Valley their home for many years agree. It's just the young crowd who has to live in apartments anyway that think more mega Apartment buildings would be great. I completely refuse to live in SF because of the density and turn down any job based in SF automatically.

icebraining• 13 years ago

But does anyone want to live in Pleasanton or Napa? (I wouldn't know, just curious)

steve-howard2• 13 years ago

I grew up in San Ramon (10 mins from Pleasanton), and I can assure you that -- mind-numbingly boring as I found the place -- many people want to live there.

steven20122• 13 years ago

It's easy to give objective evaluations about what should be done, but the reality is that given how many people have spent inordinate amounts of money for their homes already, they will likely fight tooth and nail to ensure that their houses maintain their values. The last thing current home owners will be is charitable towards newcomers, who would pay less for homes than what they had to, and at the same time dragging down their own home prices. I think the low density housing in the Valley is just a situation that people will have to live with for the foreseeable future.

The thing is, there are plenty of cheap housing in the outer-lying areas like Livermore, Tracy, Stockton, etc. They just need to invest in proper transportation options, like extending BART to those cities.

taurath2• 13 years ago

When people have to pay $4000/mo to rent a 3bedroom condo that the person next door pays $1300 on their mortgage (as is probably the case in many areas currently), won't companies eventually think that they can offer far more than just location to potential employees if they go elsewhere? I moved to the bay in 2004, and I was able to comfortably afford a few decent apartments in mountain view/sunnyvale. Those apartments have gone up by 200% in their price because of proximity to FB, Google and other firms.

Everything will continue to get more and more expensive as the cost of basic services goes up and up - eventually you'll start losing a lot of good creative people because nobody can afford to take an entry level job and work their way up. The bar for living "comfortably" in the bay area has been rising extremely fast, and those who have bought a home 20 years ago can live fine, but for young people especially it will be really difficult to catch up. I've had 7 or 8 friends in their 20s and 30s move to the Seattle area for purely economic reasons - a few to colorado and a few to Texas as well.

steven20122• 13 years ago

This is just a function of the markets. If people can't afford to move here, and vacancy increases, then housing prices will naturally drop. I've seen this happen more than a couple of times in the last 15 years. I have no doubt that rent prices will drop sometime in the next couple of years, because the rate of growth is unsustainable. One of my friends moved out of her 2br2ba apartment at Avalon Mission Bay because her rent was increased to 5100/month.

jameswilsterman• 13 years ago

Everyone should read the author's e-book (it's a really short ~30 min. read).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO

After reading his book, I am convinced that overpriced rent is a massively important problem that makes countless aspects of society worse.

I've read that people spend roughly 1/3 of income on housing, 1/3 on food and 1/3 on everything else. The long term trend in the U.S. has been to greatly reduce the % of our income we spend on food (due to agricultural and tech innovation). We need to do the same for housing prices over the next 20 years. A small space to live for one person in NY or SF should simply not cost ~30% of your annual income! The materials are very cheap to build a square box! And there is lots of vertical room in our nicest cities to build square boxes. The issue is solely constrained supply due to building regulations (many at the local level).

For tech leaders in SF, this seems like it should be the next big political fight (after immigration).

Steko2• 13 years ago

It's a great read. Don't be dissuaded by the low ratings at Amazon; they're from conservative trolls over comments he made after the death of Breitbart.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/andrew-breitbart-fa...

jupiterjaz• 13 years ago

The ironic thing it that deregulating zoning laws is something that conservatives commonly argue for. Well maybe not conservatives but libertarians do.

lucaspiller• 13 years ago

Looks good, but it's not available in the UK. Anything related?

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

The author has been a prolific blogger for around five years now. While he's moved around a bunch, his name is about as google-able as it gets (yg arrow pass the Norse world tree thing).

jseliger2• 13 years ago

Send me an e-mail, and you should have an e-mail address in your profile.

Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City covers the same ground in a more academic tone and is available in the UK.

err_badprocrast• 13 years ago

I'm guessing the only reason people don't spend a larger percentage of their income on rent is that most landlords require, as an absolute minimum, 3x rent as income per month.

Speaking of which, that rule will probably force me to get a job that I don't need just to rent an apartment as a student.

wes-exp3• 13 years ago

What about solving this on the technology side?

We have fantastic technology in many aspects of life, but housing seems practically unchanged. I mean, buildings are constructed by teams of men placing pieces of wood by hand. Is that really the best we can do?

Dear VCs, you think a billion dollars is cool? How about a trillion dollars? Housing is that big.

For instance: http://gizmodo.com/5045863/concrete+jet-printer-gets-caterpi...

If Caterpillar, a hyper-conservative, risk-averse organization can fund this kind of stuff, surely VCs can.

Tuna-Fish• 13 years ago

> We have fantastic technology in many aspects of life, but housing seems practically unchanged. I mean, buildings are constructed by teams of men placing pieces of wood by hand.

That's simply not true. The kind of high-intensity housing he is talking about is built by arranging large pre-fab pieces on steel frame. In modern tower buildings, the pre-fab pieces are built on an assembly line and actually finished and furnished before bringing them on site and placing them on buildings. It's a much more efficient industry than concrete jet printers ever could be.

moocow012• 13 years ago

Building technology actually has advanced at a really good pace and most construction has been significantly automated. Most homes and buildings go up amazingly fast due to a lot of prefab and modular designs as well as a lot of process mechanization. The guys you see on the construction site today are usually doing more assembling rather than "building."

The conceptual 3d printed type homes are interesting but they are limited in scope in that seismic and load issues require materials and configurations that are not per say printable. (In other words you would likely not want to live in a 3d printed home in SF).

guelo2• 13 years ago

I think you're missing the point. The cost of construction is already comparatively cheap. The problem is that construction to meet market demand is forbidden by zoning regulations.

mapgrep• 13 years ago

There is a cool system called ConXTech that uses robots to make big chunks of buildings that can be assembled on site with far less work than conventional steel-frame construction.

Think of it as a lego type snap-together system

http://www.conxtech.com/conx-system/manufacturing/

dionidium• 13 years ago

Outside the book, this is also a frequent topic on his blog. I highly recommend reading some of his previous thoughts on this. It's land that is valuable, not the construction on it. And we should be maximizing that value.

chipsy• 13 years ago

I think the whole thing is another symptom of the local government's dysfunctional incentives. There's no unified agenda for the Bay Area, and it hurts everyone. It shows in the approach to housing and transportation, in business development, and in the nature of political campaigns.

To some extent, I would venture to say that the region suffers from a form of Resource Curse - nice location and weather, and a tech ecosystem that, these days, spins money out of "nothing." Lots of wealth, lots of idealism, but nobody with both the privilege and the responsibility to organize it all in a way that would fix the issues.

gcb0• 13 years ago

1. get lots of land

2. bribe zoning people to not allow more people to grab land

3. instead of building/managing lots and lots of buildings, put the price of the few ones high up.

it's basic pricing. if you can limit the demand and charge more, its much safer than lowering the price and trying to scale. you guys talk about that all the time here with digital goods and service. but now get impressed that people do that with real world goods since the dawn of time?!

protomyth2• 13 years ago

I do wonder sometimes if standardized, truck haul-able modules of housing wouldn't be an interesting alternative to apartments. Build a building that you plug the modules. Want to move, haul the module to a new building.

I guess I wonder more about what could change to lower the cost of housing.

joonix• 13 years ago

That's called modular or pre-fab housing and it exists.

The problem here is not building costs, by any means. It's artificial restrictions on the market by local councils who refuse to support higher density living.

protomyth2• 13 years ago

true on the politics of it.

I am thinking something a little different than pre-fab, something more along the lines of plug-able module into building. More along the lines of cargo containers in a warehouse.

messick• 13 years ago

People with money (i.e. home owners) don't want an apartment on the 7th floor. They want a ranch style home with a front and back yard. Which is what they have right now in SV.

This argument has been going on for as long as there has been a "Silicon Valley" to make housing expensive, so decades. Nothing will change, because the people who actually live there now like it the way it is.

cmbaus• 13 years ago

I don't agree. There are plenty of people with money who want an urban lifestyle.

saosebastiao2• 13 years ago

That is an incredibly bad generalization. Not only are the wants of wealthy people not absolute, but the general trend of housing for the last 20 years are the exact opposite.

mixmastamyk• 13 years ago

I'm generally pro-density, but after reading about the toxic waste there, I'm not excited about new development in the area.

daniel-cussen• 13 years ago

I feel like Santiago, Chile is what the valley would be like if it didn't have zoning. An intense, urban environment with nice neighborhoods and a downtown. A real downtown, with a real nightlife, high quality walking, good public transport, cheap taxis, low taxes, low crime, all without sacrificing fantastic weather.

At the same time, Santiago, while vibrant, requires you speak Spanish, and is not the Valley.

pconf• 13 years ago

Good luck with that. Problem is the Valley has been a real estate developer's dream for 60+ years and it has not had the effect this (opinionated but poorly researched) article espouses.

Rezoning alone is "dumb planning". Rail, transit, bike friendly streets, greenbelting and farmland preservation all must be in place first in order for density rezoning to work.

Problem is Santa Clara County has been all about cars and freeways for as long as they have existed. Just last month they closed the San Thomas Creek bike trail for the convenience of the 49er stadium construction. Now cyclists at the Santa Clara Amtrak station are forced to ride on Tasman which has no bike lanes, Sharrows or shoulders. It's exactly this kind of dumb planning that allowed developers to demolish the downtown that Santa Clara once had and perpetuate the kind of auto-centric sprawl that characterizes Silicon Valley.

snambi• 13 years ago

There is only one problem. "Land is limited". And people like to live in single-family homes.

The Whole Problem Is That There Is No Housing Boom In Silicon Valley

Related Stories