Building affordable housing is all but impossible in California’s Bay Area | Letter
Your story ('It's a perfect storm': homeless spike in rural California linked to Silicon Valley, April 13) on a spike in homelessness in California's Central Valley highlights an important problem, but some additional context is needed. The skyrocketing housing costs that are pushing workers east and bidding up prices in the Central Valley are not just a Silicon Valley phenomenon. The entire Bay Area region is suffering the same, the result of constrained housing supply from decades of underproduction. Local and state leaders have refused to address the problem at its core: reforming rigid and outdated laws and regulations that make building affordable housing all but impossible and help arm anti-growth zealots with the tools they need to block new housing.
The Bay Area Council does not, as your story wrongly suggests, view the Central Valley as a "bedroom community" for the purpose of enabling these policy failures. Although, without meaningful statewide housing reforms, we must build strong transportation links to respond to the continuing migration of lower- and middle-income workers from Silicon Valley to the Central Valley. A report by our Bay Area Council Economic Institute (The Northern California Megaregion, June 2016) examines this issue, and also makes recommendations for enhancing educational, workforce and economic development capacity in the Central Valley to support the expansion of the tech industry and jobs there.
Micah Weinberg
President, Bay Area Council Economic Institute