Bay Area residents wary of new housing development

By George Avalos, gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com

POSTED:   04/28/2016 06:15:46 AM PDT | UPDATED:   106 MIN. AGO
Bay Area residents are all for more homes and plenty of them to help solve the region’s housing affordability and traffic woes — just not in their backyards.

Amid record-high housing prices, a sturdy economy and brisk hiring, a new poll released Thursday shows that by a strong majority — 60 percent — residents prefer that housing be built not in the crowded nine-county region but outside the Bay Area in places such as Yolo County, San Joaquin County and San Benito County.

“NIMBY is alive and well, and maybe stronger than ever,” said Russell Hancock, president of San Jose-based Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network, which tracks the regional economy and often advocates creation of affordable housing. “Many people say they are here in the Bay Area, and they don’t want anybody else to get in.”

 

An estimated 85 percent of residents polled by the Bay Area Council say they support developing mass transit networks to serve the Bay Area’s principal job centers, such as Silicon Valley. These future systems would connect the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Central Valley and speed employees between their homes and their workplaces.

 

“There’s now an entrenched misperception that our region doesn’t have the capacity to add the housing we need,” said Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, which polled 1,000 Bay Area residents.

 

Over the 12 months that ended in March, the Bay Area added nearly 121,000 jobs. That’s enough workers to be the entire population of a city the size of Concord or Santa Clara.

 

The need for housing to serve new workers is even acute in some of the Bay Area’s individual major urban centers, based on their job growth.

 

Over the same one-year period, Santa Clara County added 36,000 jobs, a 3.3 percent increase in total payroll jobs. That’s roughly equivalent to the population of Morgan Hill or Martinez. The San Francisco-San Mateo region added about 43,000 jobs, a 4.2 percent annual gain, and approximately the population of Newark.

 

“The lack of housing threatens the economic competitiveness of the Bay Area,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “Companies keep expanding in the Bay Area. The idea all the new workers can live outside of the region just can’t work. It would cost billions and billions of dollars to upgrade the transportation systems to the extent needed.”

The poll also found that more than one-fourth of all Bay Area residents are spending at least 45 percent of their household income on housing — well above the recommended range of 30 percent to 35 percent.

For people making less than $50,000 a year in household income, according to the poll, more than two fifths are spending at least 45 percent of their household income on housing. One-third of the people who generate household income ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 a year spend at least 45 percent of their income on housing.

Even for those with a household income ranging from $100,000 to $150,000 a year, more than one-fourth reported spending at least 45 percent of their income on housing, the poll stated.

“What’s unfortunate is that pushing housing outside the region still doesn’t solve the problem of supply and lack of affordability” of residences, Wunderman said. “It simply means that fewer working families and workers in lower-income jobs can afford to live here.”

Contact George Avalos at 408-859-5167. Follow him at Twitter.com/georgeavalos

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