Living in fantasyland

In thinking about Disneyland, it occurred to me that, in a way, its prepandemic problems mirror our local housing issues. Just as Disneyland has become too popular for its own good, so has the Bay Area. In both cases, demand has outstripped supply, resulting in real inequities both in who can go to Disneyland and who can live here in the Bay Area.

When supply and demand are out of balance, normally you increase supply, decrease demand or both. With both Disneyland and Bay Area housing, increasing supply is made difficult by the fact that essentially all developable land has already been developed. Unlike with the Bay Area, over the years Disney has been able to purchase a couple of surrounding properties, giving them some options for expansion. But their largest option came from increasing density in a fashion; by replacing existing surface parking lots with massive multistory parking garages. Just one of those garages — the seven-story, 10,250-car Mickey & Friends parking structure — enabled the creation of Disney California Adventure, which increased resort capacity by an estimated 60%.

The Bay Area can do something similar, although not all in one fell swoop, and likely not to the same degree. We have countless surface parking lots that could be replaced with parking garages. For instance, although the giant parking garage the county is currently building in Redwood City isn’t actually freeing up land, it is addressing future anticipated demand from the county office building soon to rise along Marshall Street. And up and down the Peninsula we’re seeing increasing number of high-density housing projects, making more efficient use of the limited land we have and increasing our housing supply.

Dealing with supply helps, but that alone won’t solve the problem. Thus, we also have to address demand. Being a corporation, Disney can take direct steps — such as closing its park gates — that governments cannot. Instead, governments have to rely on the natural consequences of overcrowding, such as increased traffic, to decrease the quality of life and thereby reduce our area’s desirability. Of course, this works for Disneyland as well: A crowded park is a real turn-off. But both here at home and at Disneyland, demand has so outstripped supply that even the inconveniences that overcrowding brings have not been enough to put demand on a level with supply.

Pricing is another major mechanism that is often used to bring demand and supply into balance. Disney has done this by raising ticket prices steadily for a number of years now. In the Bay Area, housing prices have risen more organically, but to similar effect. In both cases, prices are now so high that only the privileged few can afford them. Disney has tried to alleviate the resulting inequities by instituting variable pricing; on days with less demand, tickets are more affordable. But without a similar ability to directly control rents and selling prices, governmental agencies have fewer options to bring down housing prices. Forcing developers to include affordable units in their otherwise market-rate developments is one, as is encouraging affordable housing organizations to build and manage affordable developments. But creating affordable units costs real money, and that has to come from somewhere, be it from taxpayers, from donations or from inflated prices of the “market-rate” units. Those costs ultimately limit the number of affordable units that can actually be created.

Disneyland is a wonderful place. In many ways, I wish the Bay Area was more like it. Unfortunately, Disneyland is an elaborate fantasy, while the Bay Area is real. Both have real problems, with no magic solutions. Once the pandemic is largely behind us, and life returns to something close to normal, I for one will be watching both to see how they deal with them.

Greg Wilson is the creator of Walking Redwood City, a blog inspired by his walks throughout Redwood City and adjacent communities. He can be reached at greg@walkingRedwoodCity.com. Follow Greg on Twitter @walkingRWC.