This says it all ...
Teslas in the Trailer Park: A California City Faces Its Housing Squeeze
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/b...california-confronts-housing-crisis.html?_r=0
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — If there is anything that just about every Californian agrees with, it is that it costs too much to live in the state. Over the last few years, the price of buying a home or renting an apartment has become so burdensome that it pervades almost every issue, from the state’s elevated
poverty rate to the debate about multimillion-dollar tear-downs to the lines of recreational vehicles parked on Silicon Valley side streets. he town of Mountain View, Google’s home, wants to do something about that. Given new marching orders from a reform-minded City Council that was swept into office here two years ago, Mountain View is looking to increase its housing stock by as much as 50 percent — including as many as 10,000 units in the area around Google’s main campus.
“We need to provide housing because there’s a housing shortage,” said Lenny Siegel, a Mountain View councilman. That may seem an obvious tautology, but it turns out to be highly contentious in a state where most cities and suburbs are still dominated by anti-growth politics that seek to maximize the construction of tax-generating offices while minimizing the number of budget-depleting residents. Mountain View’s political evolution, combined with some limited cases elsewhere, suggests that as rent and home prices have reached the point where even highly paid tech workers are struggling — the median home here costs $1.4 million, according to Zillow — the tide is slowly shifting away from resisting growth at all costs and instead trying to channel it.
This Silicon Valley city of about 80,000 people is also a reminder that, despite the outsize attention given to big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, any solution to California’s housing crisis is going to rely heavily on suburbs as well. This was underscored by the results of last week’s election, when voters across California passed various affordable housing measures along with new transit funding, and, in some cases, rejected efforts to restrict or cap development. In Palo Alto, several pro-housing candidates were elected to the City Council. Residents in Mountain View approved rent control.
Tesla in the driveway of a home in the Santiago Villa trailer park in Mountain View; and, right, a tree marked for removal in Mountain View, which is trying to increase its housing stock by as much as 50 percent.Damien Maloney for The New York Times “Housing used to be about ‘them’ — like poverty or unemployment,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “But it has become so expensive in the Bay Area that housing now touches enough people to win elections.”
For all its imagination about the future, Silicon Valley’s geography looks a lot like the past. Today’s college-educated millennials might be crowding into city centers, but each day employees at companies like Google and Facebook endure hours in cars or on buses commuting to squat office complexes that have all the charm of a Walmart. Many employees say they would prefer to live closer to work. But these companies reside in small cities that consider themselves suburbs, and the local politics are usually aligned against building dense urban apartments to house them.
Take Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley city that has become emblematic of the state’s reputation for rampant not-in-my-backyard politics. Palo Alto has one of the state’s worst housing shortages. With about three jobs for every housing unit, it has among the most out-of-balance mixes anywhere in Silicon Valley. But instead of dealing with this issue by building the few thousand or so apartments it would take to make a dent in the problem, the city has mostly looked to restraining a pace of job growth that the mayor described as “unhealthy.”
Farther up the peninsula near San Francisco, the smal city of Brisbane told a developer that its proposal for a mixed-use development with offices and 4,000 housing units should have offices for about 15,000 workers, but no new housing. Play that out a thousand times over and the crux of the state’s housing crisis is clear: Everyone knows housing costs are unsustainable and unfair, and that they pose a threat to the state’s economy. Yet every city seems to be counting on its neighbors to step up and fix it.
Top row, two homes at Santiago Villa, whose residents are a mash-up of retirees, families and young tech employees looking to live close to their jobs. Other employees put up with long bus commutes to come from more urban settings.Damien Maloney for The New York Times The results are strange compromises like the one made by Rebecca and Steven Callister, a couple in their late 20s who live in a double-wide trailer in a Mountain View mobile home park whose residents are retirees and young tech workers.
Mr. Callister is an engineer at LinkedIn, the sort of worker who, in most places, would own a home. But given the cost of housing in Mountain View and the brutal commute times from anywhere they could afford, a trailer makes the most sense and lets him spend more time with the couple’s two young children.
“We joke that it’s the only mobile home park with Mercedeses and Teslas in the driveway,” Mrs. Callister said. “It’s like the new middle class in California.” In contrast to Palo Alto, Mountain View is trying to wedge new apartments into its office parks. Much of the action centers on the North Bayshore area, a neighborhood of low-slung office buildings surrounded by asphalt parking lots. Each weekday morning, North Bayshore fills up with cars and young Google employees. They pack the narrow sidewalks and zip around on multicolored bikes. But then the day ends, everyone goes home and there is not much left besides sounds from the nearby freeway and overachievers working late.
Traffic moving along Highway 101, one of the main arteries of Silicon Valley, toward San Francisco. Damien Maloney for The New York Times
