Some say Hamann set a goal of making San Jose the biggest city in the Bay Area, a goal that was eventually reached though not in his lifetime. In that year, the San Jose city council hired a former automobile executive named A.P.
Though San Jose is California’s oldest city, it was quickly eclipsed by San Francisco, which by 1950 had eight times as many people while Oakland had four times as many. Unless these laws are repealed, Silicon Valley effectively has no choice but to build high-density housing projects even though those projects mean housing will simultaneously be less affordable and less desirable to potential residents The first has to do with tax policy: a fifty-unit condominium will generate less taxes than fifty single-family homes, but the taxes generated per acre will be much higher.Ī more important reason has to do with the sixty-year-old debate over urban sprawl and the laws that were passed in response to that debate. There are at least two reasons why government officials favor high-density housing projects. San Francisco Senator Scott Wiener has introduced bills in the state legislature that would abolish any limits to such projects in major transit corridors which, maps indicate, pretty much includes all of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and other Bay Area cities. Yet San Jose and other cities in Silicon Valley are eager to promote the construction of such high-density housing projects. High-density, mid-rise and high-rise housing is more costly to build and most homebuyers and renters consider it less desirable than single-family homes.
#NEW HIGHRISE CITY OF SANTA CLARA HOW TO#
In his exclusive report for Opportunity Now, Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute explores how New Urbanist thinking and misguided anti-market policies created one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world-and how to fix it.
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