"And yet, it’s also in places like Seattle where this generational imbalance could be hitting a tipping point. As urban housing markets become less hospitable for millennials, more and more members of this supposedly apolitical generation are realizing they’re “going to have to fight for affordability,” says Robert Cruickshank, a veteran Seattle housing activist. How long that fight will last isn’t clear. But given that the millennial generation is the nation’s largest demographic group, it’s reasonable to imagine not only that they will win this fight, but that, in doing so, housing in urban America will never look the same."

In my early work life, I had a commute of over an hour both ways. I carpooled to a station, had a 30 minute train ride and then a 20 minute walk. Most of my work colleagues had similar commutes, a few longer. Of course that was not in the Bay Area.

In different places I have still had a long commute and worked with others.

I am very surprised that nowadays the mantra of working in walking distance has come into vogue. The idea of a 10 minute walk to work sounds like Eutopia!

In other more forward thinking countries the government/authorities understand that where the jobs are and where the places for housing is not always very close. As a result, the thinking is to expediate the ease of commuting between the two. Express bus lines, improving suburban rail, and satellite parking lots with dedicated shuttles are the norm.

But then, they are not dealing with several different transit agencies and several different city/county authorities that can't cooperate with each other.

Until we can get transportation as a high priority with express service between places where there is space to build housing (Tracy, Livermore, Morgan Hill, Half Moon Bay) we are not going to make a sensible dent in traffic. City boundaries and County boundaries are invisible lines and to get something that works these invisible lines have to be ignored and the boundaries of transit agencies have to be ignored also.

Get BART down to San Jose parallel to 280. Get high speed Google buses on our Freeways that are for everyone. Get satellite parking lots near freeways with dedicated shuttles to meet the express highway buses. Get innovative with solutions and stop attempting to solve problems piecemeal city by city.

FWIW, here are some quotes from the article, which I think depicts a very similar parallel to what is happening here. In a nutshell, young techies are confident that the single-family home lifestyle is outdated, and should be replaced with higher-density options that will house more people and support more diversity. And they are agitating very effectively politically to make that happen.

- When homeowners say they’re fighting to protect neighborhood character, Lubarsky says, “it really feels to me like they just don’t want young people in their neighborhood.”

- “I really don’t see why people can’t see past the aesthetics argument when we have this huge housing shortage.”

- The $290 million Seattle recently committed toward subsidized housing will produce only a few hundred housing units a year over the next decade, or barely a tenth of what the city needs for its low-income residents, by some estimates—and none for the many middle-class workers also being priced out of the city. For urbanists, the only realistic solution is a hybrid: Use your limited public funds for the people the market cannot reach, but allow the market to produce as much “market-rate” housing as fast as it can, wherever it can, for everyone else. Or, as Lubarsky puts it, “Up-zoning costs zero dollars.”

- These positions [e.g., opposition to high BMR requirements and to rent control] haven’t gone over well with some of the city’s more traditional housing advocates, some of whom dismiss this pro-market stance as too closely aligned with landlords and other players in the development sector.

“What the free-market urbanists don’t acknowledge is that density just for density’s sake doesn’t in itself create more affordable housing,” says Grant. “It creates more market-rate housing.”

- given that the millennial generation is the nation’s largest demographic group, it’s reasonable to imagine not only that they will win this fight, but that, in doing so, housing in urban America will never look the same.

The way I see it is that if a young tech type person or just a young person grew up in a single family home with a yard, then that is what they will want for their future family. They will move somewhere that they can afford to have that for their children. They will not be satisfied with pack and stack no matter how close it is for them to walk to work.

For someone who grew up in a pack and stack either here or abroad, or grew up in an area where indoor plumbing and not having to sleep with a parent or a grandparent is the norm, they will see stack and pack as being an upgrade to what they had growing up.

Yes, techies may be happy with pack and stack while they are young, single and free from kids who need to be able to run off steam, but give them time and they will want a bit more space with a yard.

If we build pack and stack, we will not get diversity, but I suspect we will get younger people. The diverse families will move to where they can get what they had as children.

And then the young techies will leave when they too are aged out of the tech jobs, something that's happening earlier and earlier.

@Resident -- the article claims the young families move to the 'burbs. But Palo Alto and Mt View used to be that. Once it densifies here, where will they go? Already the people who grew up here, who used to catch frogs in the creeks running through Palo Alto, have noticed it's irrevocably changed. I guess we'll build in the parks (no cost, right?), and kids soon won't be growing up with any real nature, just a few small manicured parks with fake grass, so we can support our ever-growing population.

Anyway, the two things that really struck me from this article are (1) the claim that "upzoning has no cost", and (2) that this is without a doubt a push for market-rate housing, and all claims otherwise should be ignored.

According to the Daily Beast, “the Midwest is booming...” - in *secondary* cities — for millenials. Places like Columbus, Ohio.

Density Push, No, I think you are wrong. They will move to Morgan Hill, Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay, Tracy, Livermore. Places with a 2 hour commute to their jobs so that their children can run and play, just like they did.

We need to get on with more trains, more express buses, public transportation. So that these long commutes can be more productive - even if the productivity is sleep.

This article is based on an idea unsupported by evidence. While there is indeed a neo-yuppie boom amongst tech workers, the vast majority of millenials actually prefer a house themselves,
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Companies have gravitated to cities where they can take advantage of public investments and never pay back (through their taxes), now they want the public to bear the cost of their choices. Why aren’t a few of them using data to find places where a few new towns might make sense? (Answer, because they want the public to bear the costs, including of density, for their entry level workforce, and heaven forbid they pay for the company towns themselves.) The world is getting more populated but we lose towns and think the cities we have must always absorb more residents. This is a bad strategy for global warming.

The example of Hong Kong is important because they used density to bring in more and more workers because they are land limited. Densifying did not lead to affordabilty, because as they created more places to live, they also made it possible for companies to hire more workers. The demand continued, they did not get ahead of it, they made it worse. Now they are literally building dwelling units called coffins that are not a lot bigger, and that isn’t making HK affordable. HK also has the best transit in the world, used by like 90% of the population. It has not meant that people can live near their work, and average commute times are still pretty high. The 10% who don’t take transit are the wealthy who prioritize their time.

And that’s the sober lesson here. No one is prioritizing people’s time and productivity in the Bay Area. The push to densify has paradoxically made that situation far worse. I know I find myself driving instead of walking places I used to because things are now so unpleasant and dangerous, and often I have to save time because other car trips I cannot avoid take so much more time these days because of the mindless densification causing so much congestion. (And the congestion caused by mindlessly attacking car traffic.) The congestion has also seriously affected my opportunities as much as my family’s quality of life. And I suspect retailer opportunities. Many people on my side of town just wil not shop downtown anymore because corporate caused congestion has ruined it. That and the loss of resident-serving retail which frankly I valued more than hunting for much of this stuff online (and often not finding it, that’s a story people aren’t appreciating).

Just this morning KQED had a story about how polluted Bay Area cities are becoming from exhaust. USA Today reported than California has eight of the nation’s ten polluted cities.
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Acting irrationally against their self-interest because of a corrupt moneyed special interest argument (densifying will help affordability, which is simply not true) has become as much the domain of the left as the right these days. The claims that densifying and making car trips harder would be environmentally friendly have only made things desperately and obviously worse, yet the moneyed interests nevertheless get liberals to buy anything they say because of a deceptive argument about “affordability”. At first they used false arguments about environment but then they realized they didn’t have to, liberals completely abandoned any pretense of caring for the environment much less considering environmental issues (real ones, not the false ones they’ve been buying hook line and sinker) if the word “affordability” gets used, no matter how dishonestly.

The combined utter lack of attention to traffic circulation in planning relative to existing infrastructure, the delusional predictions of planners (e.g. densifying at Arbor Real is okay because most of the occupants - of these tall skinny homes with lots of stairs - will be seniors, they won’t contribute to our schools - Destroying retail at Alma Plaza is okay, we’ll give you a park and mixed use is just as good - who is accountable when that never happened?)

The fundamental problem is that the world is more crowded, and companies attract workers to the same number of cities where the public has created a nice infrastructure in the past that moneyed interests have gotten more and more used to not paying taxes for at the same time (not coincidentally) that the richest have more and more of the wealth.

The cities grew to capacity and are shooting themselves in the foot allowing corporate growth to be entirely laissez-faire but making housing the public’s problem, as well as the many urban and environmental consequences of unfettered growth. San Francisco is a case in point. They depend as a city the most on tourism, but the growth and problems are a looming threat to tourism, with longtime attendees of conferences, for example, considering pulling out. My family goes to SF far less because of how unpleasant it has become, just as we stopped shopping in downtown Palo Alto. Other reports recently about the dangers of too much high-rise density being seriously dangerous in an earthquake present almost unsolvable risks for the public, yet still the building continues because of this manufactured “housing crisis” that will never be solved by the building (remember the example of Hong Kong).

The answer is for governments and companies to get together and come up with a solution, or, governments to make companies do this if the won’t voluntarily. Companies growing in these areas should pay into a fund that helps improve standalone cities that ask for but don’t have amenities that are driving the corporate growth, and even establish new cities in areas where it makes sense (less damaging to the environment, if anyone still cares about that). This is not to create lots more cities, just a few, connected with existing large cities by good transit. Those cities will need real amenities that attract workers, cultural, university/education, etc. it will require thinking about the future in ways no one has so far considered.

The nation is only getting more crowded and yet it’s harder to go from California to Utah because the area between is so utterly desolate (save for the mines, prisons, and gambling). If you drive today between, there isn’t even enough places to reasonably use the restroom or stop to eat. Unlike Hong Kong, we do not HAVE to keep densifying, the better environmental, affordability, prosperity, and rational choice would be to found a couple of new cities or fund a couple of small ones who want to grow. But then at some point we also need to consider whether we want everyone in the US to pile into California, as - what is it now? - 1/12? 1/8? of us already do.

Perhaps California should be parnering with many western states to come up with answers.

Saying that we should focus on single family homes instead of apartments because young people will eventually want to move into one when they get older is like saying we should focus on funding college instead of high school because students will eventually want to get a degree. If you don't support the first part, it becomes much harder to obtain the next one.

From today's NYT, an article on Amaxzon's quest for a second headquarters and how it can help the communities avoid the congestion, paralyzing traffic and escalating housing costs it brought to Seattle which is now considering a $75,000,000 "Amazon tax" to offset those costs.

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By the same token, we need a "Palantir tax" but you know our the developer-friendly majority wants to shift the costs from businesses creating our congestion to the residents.

@Housing,
During the '80s, the housing crunch was as bad or worse, because interests rates were so high. I had a one-room (not one-bedroom, one-room) space for around $900/month in Sunnyvale, that filled with someone's barbecue smoke frequently. Imagine doing that not on today's tech salaries but on a new engineer's $28k a year. Most people I knew just expected to double, triple, quadruple up or even have 5 roommates. I realize people are doing this now, I just want you to realize we've been through this before, more than once. The economy cycles, and building lots of short-term housing for entry-level workforce creates a tremendous amount of problems, especially when it's to make money for a developer class while creating almost unaddressable problems for the cities. San Francisco in particular will probably live to regret the tall buildings (which have not made it affordable) because of the seismic dangers (see recent reports on that) of tall buildings close to one another like this and a lack of standards even today, and because there will come a downturn eventually, and the thing that would help SF through, the tourism, is being irreparably damaged to some degree by this overbuilding.

People above are bringing up the issue of single-family homes because we already went through this with the yuppies. They wanted the urban living, but then when they got older, they wanted the homes with the yards. This is what drove up prices in Los Altos, which used to be a better value than Palo Alto at one time. If you don't have good single-family neighborhoods available, with amenities nearby, people can and do move far away and commute long distances for the family quality of life. I've know more than one person who, in the past before this boom, had homes as far away as Santa Rosa, worked in Silicon Valley part of the week by living in small apartments with lots of people, then going home and telecommuting as much as possible and on weekends. This was because they could not get the single-family homes nearby, or even if they could afford a condo or apartment, their families wanted a suburban lifestyle and to have room to grow in communities with family amenities and less congestion, etc. These neo-yuppies will at some point want houses - as surveys already show that millenials already prefer, it's just a myth that they prefer urbanscapes - and this will create real problems if everything has been permanently upended in order to serve the company-town ambitions of the Amazons and Palantirs. Nice to see Amazon having some sense of responsibility for it, though they may be operating on wrong urban planning ideas that brought us this current congestion and pollution and lower quality of life.

What is happening in Palo Alto, as well as in many other places is that the more density is allowed, the more employees companies will hire, and they will always hire more employees than housing units increased density would allow, resulting in even greater job'housiong imbalance.

Increased density does not only ruin preferred life styles, quality of life, esthetics, air quality, etc, but it actually worsen the problems it's supposed to solve.

Problem with comparison's to Washington State, major city Seattle. That is an area that has a huge amount of open land. And yes - CA has a huge amount of open land - you can fly over it any day on the trip to LA. However CA has a major earthquake problem with a major fault line running through it. And it has a water problem. Not so the state of Washington - they are in a different zone regarding available open land and water. There has to be the basic topography available to building and infrastructure. Add to that the availability of hydro-electrical power sources.

"However CA has a major earthquake problem with a major fault line running through it. And it has a water problem. Not so the state of Washington "

Uh, no. Seattle is in the middle of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Their Big One could be larger than ours.

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