In many places in America, you do not have to be anything close to wealthy to live in a house. Unfortunately the market in SV is so skewed that everyone who lives in a house is "the rich," who we don't mind making things more expensive for - without realizing that we're actually adding to the gigantic stack of unnecessary distance between ourselves and home ownership. Instead of moving home ownership from "fabulously wealthy" to "wealthy beyond compare," we should pursue policies that move it away from there.
It’s structurally impossible for house ownership to be affordable in a place this popular and geographically constrained. Affordability will require multifamily development.
The regulatory environment currently has its thumb on the scales in favor of single-family homes. Shifting the pendulum the other way, even a little bit, is a good thing. We shouldn’t be building anything less than 4 stories tall, and if we do, costs like this can and should be spread across several tenants.
You could keep the single-family homes if the corporate campuses were spread out into the countryside. There's no good reason why one tech company should be five minutes away from their competitor but three hours away from the nearest affordable housing.
>There's no good reason why one tech company should be five minutes away from their competitor
I disagree strongly. I think the most valuable thing about silicon valley is that I can walk to tens of small employers, from my house, and at least two big employers who could reasonably hire me.
In bicycling or uber distance, there are thousands of small places and hundreds of large employers.
Because I live in the silicon valley, I can switch jobs almost on a whim; I don't have to move, I don't have to upset my social circles, etc...
I think this is actually a big part of why Silicon Valley is valuable both to the workers and to the employers; there's a huge pool of people and a huge pool of jobs that we can match up without inconveniencing anyone. You don't have to settle for the job that is nearby or for the employee who is willing to move.
Correct. Not sure why Facebook to Netflix can't have some of their teams work from Morgan Hill instead of everyone sitting in the same HQ creating really bad traffic patterns.
The only reason I think is that owners of these companeis don't give shit.
Riding crowded mass transit and living in apartments with your neighbors 4" away should be a choice and there should exist reasonably priced alternatives. The target is a society so wealthy that the median person can own a home where they want and commute in their luxury car if that's what they want to do.
(And before everyone complains about pollution I would like to point out that achieving that level of wealth is so far off that home heating/cooling and transportation are likely to be basically all electric and the grid will be what determines the environmental impact of that)
That’s not geometrically possible for metros beyond a size threshold we’ve long surpassed. There are diminishing/negative returns to road expansion and a finite supply of land within natural barriers.
It’s relatively straightforward to alleviate transit crowding, and to sound-isolate apartments, with money. But no practical amount of road expansion fixes congestion, and we’re not likely to remove the mountains or fill in the Bay for more tract housing.
