Much has been written in these pages recently about regional and state initiatives to encourage more housing development in the Bay Area, such as the CASA Compact and Senate Bill 50 (“Burlingame City Council fends for local control” in the April 3 edition of the Daily Journal). As a Burlingame resident for the last four years, I have seen firsthand the deteriorating quality of life that follows when cities, including my own, continue creating far more jobs than they do homes: increased traffic, strained parking and rising rents that limit opportunity for young people and families and displace longtime residents. Our cities have to drastically improve how they manage the jobs/housing balance, or they only have themselves to blame for the state stepping in to manage it for them.
As a former teacher, I most recently spent three years working for an education nonprofit in Redwood City and, in that time I noticed a disturbing trend: Most of my colleagues who planned to stick around the Bay Area for the long term were married to someone who worked in tech, myself included. Having a tech salary in your household was basically the only way to afford a decent-sized apartment on the Peninsula within reasonable commuting distance of your job. My friends who happened to fall in love with someone who also worked at their nonprofit or also taught at their school inevitably left for more affordable parts of the country when they wanted to start families. Losing this kind of civic-minded talent is a huge blow to our communities.
There are plenty of levers policymakers control to address this jobs/housing imbalance. We should be encouraging commercial growth in mixed-use developments in our downtowns that are complementary to local businesses, not in giant self-contained office parks that are disconnected from the hearts of our cities. We should be insisting that large corporations bear the true costs of doing business here, rather than skating by paying minimal fees that understate their local impacts. And city councils need to plan sufficient housing at all levels of affordability in their downtowns to support the job growth they do approve.
Yet, many local officials appear unwilling to take the steps necessary to bring job creation and housing creation into proper balance. In Burlingame, the City Council passed a new General Plan in January that, to its credit, envisions adding 3,000 homes to our city in areas that are well served by public transit. This kind of transit-oriented development is essential to creating the vibrant, walkable, sustainable neighborhoods of the future that will help us lower carbon emissions and avert climate catastrophe.
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Unfortunately, right as the city is about to dig itself out of this hole, the General Plan also envisions adding more than three times as many jobs — 9,731 is the estimate — to Burlingame over the next two decades. And given our region’s very successful tech industry and the economic pressures it creates, it’s no surprise that developers are clamoring to build those commercial properties first.
Already, there is more than 1.5 million square feet of commercial development projects approved or in the application stage, according to the Burlingame Planning Department website at burlingame.org/departments/planning/majorprojects_new.php. This includes both a new hotel and an enormous new Facebook campus on the Bayfront. Altogether, a fairly conservative estimate suggests at least 5,000 new workers will be employed in Burlingame in just the next few years, far outstripping the 1,300 new residential units in the pipeline.
The consequences of ignoring this jobs/housing imbalance are clear for Burlingame residents: more traffic on highways and local roads, even tighter parking downtown and on our residential streets, and escalating rents that limit opportunity for residents of all ages. How many young people graduating from Burlingame High School will ever get the chance to raise a family of their own in the city they grew up in? How many seniors on fixed incomes will still be able to afford to live here five or 10 years from now? The consequences of inaction on this problem are devastating.
Preserving our cities as places of opportunity necessitates that city councils use every tool they have to bring job creation and housing creation into balance. When they neglect to do this, local leaders have nobody to blame but themselves when the state steps in to do it for them.
Mike Dunham is an education data consultant and affordable housing advocate who lives in Burlingame.
I think public school teachers need to realize they are not some sort of protected class. Everyone finds it difficult to afford this area and they are just as important as teachers. The positive about the article is the author didn't hammer a regional approach to solve the issue. I will give him that.
I am apalled Burlingame approves the FB Oculus Monstrofity...100 employess and 1300 housing units is scary.. No exit entrance to 101 bringing more maelstrom traffic was not an issue for the Burlingame Planning Commission...Good article and well written plus informative..
1500 employees 1300 housing units..I think this FB is too big a monstrosity for such a quiet sleepy Burlingame suburb. not to mention the effect on the whole peninsula traffic, housing bayfront use , education, etc..
We place our children's lives and brains in the hands of teachers 9 months out of the year for say for 6-7 hours a day 5 days a week. What does a babysitter make a week now per child? Just pay them babysitter wages. $150.00 a week per child times 30 students.
The City of Burlingame needs thriving auto sales, purchased by growing families; and brisk non-food retail sales, purchased by same. It's pretty basic. People need to get out of the mindset that everyone with a desire to live in California, or on the peninsula for that matter, needs to be accommodated. It is not a right to live near Hillsborough, or be able to live near San Mateo central park. Student:teacher ratios, water tables, traffic, density of vehicles with electronic gadgets and impact on psychology (ie, reckless driving) etc. need just as much or more consideration than housing for everyone who wants to live here. The peninsula is simply not a place where everyone from seemingly boring parts of the US can live (read: be accommodated in). We especially do not need the nation's drug addicts here as well. We see their behavior in San Francisco, and their impact when they drift onto the peninsula - it is in the blotters. It may very well be boring to live in a small town in Iowa, but it's not my business to care that you can't be accommodated in Burlingame. Our parents and grandparents never thought like the nouveau riche who live here now. Up and down the peninsula, there are blocked views of the Belmont hills (belle monte) by new corporate buildings. It's idiotic. For what?? Basically, companies that make money off of mobile Ads made off of sales of mobile devices. I'll grant you that Gilead and other biopharma companies are here; but realistically the beginnings of tech were placed in the former Santa Clara county orchards for a reason. The corporate buildings were not put next to Crystal Springs reservoir for a reason.
Unless and until we cut the head off the Plan Bay Area development snake, and cities continue to say YES to all business without stepping back to assess impacts, everyone will continue to suffer. The middle class. Teachers. Emergency personnel. People whose families have lived here for generations. The lower class. All of the myriad of people who made our area diverse, and who we all need to thrive as a community. The big, fat lie is that all this Plan Bay Area development somehow solves that problem. Look around. It doesn't. And it won't. Regardless of who is approving it. Forcing cities to continue to build housing that fails to deliver is still a fail.
5 000 employees 1300 housing units. my computer numbers 6 and 5 are broken..I have to use the small calculator and forget to do that. I apologize for crazy numbers.
Bravo! Run for City Council - you'll have my vote. Apart from the required build-out demanded by State, every new office building we choose to add simply increases the demand for job seekers, resulting in the problems you so clearly identified.
Great post! Would love to see the city of Burlingame address this issue quickly by changing the jobs/housing balance and approving less office space, more affordable housing. Since those who agree with the author have been beating this drum for years with little to no change, I do think a regional solution like SB50 makes sense at this point. I will support the regional solution until I see a similarly aggressive local solution. Haven't seen one yet in any Peninsula city.
In all of this discussion about building more housing, I rarely see anyone talk about building more schools. It concerns me that we keep building and yet do not build more schools. As a former schoolteacher, I was hoping that this article would contain some perspective on the schools since it was written by another former schoolteacher. The district superintendent recently spoke at the city Council meeting and said that our schools will be at capacity in another year and a half. We already have so many apartments that will be completed or are in the pipeline, but no new land has been acquired to build a new school. Of course even if land had been acquired, the school would not be finished in time to accommodate the students from these apartments anyways. Anytime new housing is approved, I think the city and the school district should be also ensuring that we will have space for the children who will come. Overcrowded schools brings down the quality of education which will bring down home prices.
An additional thought: Mr. Dunham does shine a much-needed light on the crux of the problem - approving more commercial without the housing to support it. Failure on the part of cities to fulfill their duties to maintain a balance (in pursuit of income to fund their pension debt?) is exacerbating the problem. However, the powers that be already have their finger in the development pie as each city receives their mandated growth numbers via the the Regional Housing Needs Assessment. We need to stop being dictated to by the MTC, ABAG, tech-financed YIMBY groups, and the likes of Scott Wiener (SB50/CASA Compact). For example, we don't need to build 30 buildings with 10% so-called affordable housing, if we can think outside the box and get/support development of fewer buildings which actually provide true affordable housing, not just a minuscule amount of the joke we call 'below market' housing. With all the brain power in our region, this can be possible if we are not shoved off-track by those who stand to benefit from the status quo.
So, you said, "if we can think outside the box and get/support development of fewer buildings which actually provide true affordable housing"....
...but from everything I've seen, we can't. Everything gets shot down. And this very logic sounds to me like "lets hold out for some perfect solution in the future - and use that as a reason to shut down all development, forever, since the perfect solution is always something else".
At this point, I'm for basically anything that leads to more housing being built. 10% affordable and 90% market rate is better than nothing being built.
Sorry, but supporting shoddy state/regional solutions like SB50 which is opposed by a variety of tenants and environmental groups just because local governments have failed to do their job in protecting tenants and making developers pay their fair share into our communities is disaster capitalism at its finest. Accepting solutions spearheaded by politicians in the pocket of developers like Scott Wiener is not how we solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area, despite the careful veneer of social justice that he has made sure to wrap his legislation in in order to dupe well-meaning progressives who genuinely want to see real change.
I'd support other attempted solutions besides Scott Weiner's too. But the thing is, everything I hear is always *negative*, not proposing solutions! I've seen years and years, across many different cities, many different proposals, that sound something like "Yes, housing is a problem... but THIS isn't the answer. Something else is." (Always the "something else" that is hypothetical, or far in the future, or somewhere else on the peninsula...)
So at this point, I'm supporting not just the things I think are the best solutions, but anything that's at least a step in the right direction. If it gets more housing built it's probably a step forward. If it doesn't, it's not.
Facebook is also adding office space in Menlo Park with minimal housing suggested. Two new city councilmembers raised the matter of whether to impose a moratorium on such major non-residential development. On June 11, the current mayor of Menlo Park offered to put them on a committee to work out the DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT WITH FACEBOOK. Gee, doesn't that suggest someone plans to move forward?- At his talk in Palto Alto on June 7, state senator Scott Wiener mentioned the proposed expansion of Facebook in Menlo Park. Wiener did not criticize Facebook or the project. Facebook is in on the Wiener plan to EMPOWER DEVELOPERS TO BUILD HIGH-DENSITY, high-priced HOUSING WHEREVER THEY LIKE.
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(22) comments
I think public school teachers need to realize they are not some sort of protected class. Everyone finds it difficult to afford this area and they are just as important as teachers. The positive about the article is the author didn't hammer a regional approach to solve the issue. I will give him that.
I am apalled Burlingame approves the FB Oculus Monstrofity...100 employess and 1300 housing units is scary.. No exit entrance to 101 bringing more maelstrom traffic was not an issue for the Burlingame Planning Commission...Good article and well written plus informative..
1500 employees 1300 housing units..I think this FB is too big a monstrosity for such a quiet sleepy Burlingame suburb. not to mention the effect on the whole peninsula traffic, housing bayfront use , education, etc..
We place our children's lives and brains in the hands of teachers 9 months out of the year for say for 6-7 hours a day 5 days a week. What does a babysitter make a week now per child? Just pay them babysitter wages. $150.00 a week per child times 30 students.
The City of Burlingame needs thriving auto sales, purchased by growing families; and brisk non-food retail sales, purchased by same. It's pretty basic. People need to get out of the mindset that everyone with a desire to live in California, or on the peninsula for that matter, needs to be accommodated. It is not a right to live near Hillsborough, or be able to live near San Mateo central park. Student:teacher ratios, water tables, traffic, density of vehicles with electronic gadgets and impact on psychology (ie, reckless driving) etc. need just as much or more consideration than housing for everyone who wants to live here. The peninsula is simply not a place where everyone from seemingly boring parts of the US can live (read: be accommodated in). We especially do not need the nation's drug addicts here as well. We see their behavior in San Francisco, and their impact when they drift onto the peninsula - it is in the blotters. It may very well be boring to live in a small town in Iowa, but it's not my business to care that you can't be accommodated in Burlingame. Our parents and grandparents never thought like the nouveau riche who live here now. Up and down the peninsula, there are blocked views of the Belmont hills (belle monte) by new corporate buildings. It's idiotic. For what?? Basically, companies that make money off of mobile Ads made off of sales of mobile devices. I'll grant you that Gilead and other biopharma companies are here; but realistically the beginnings of tech were placed in the former Santa Clara county orchards for a reason. The corporate buildings were not put next to Crystal Springs reservoir for a reason.
Teaching is a noble profession. There are many other jobs that don't have the money nor the benefits (personal & financial) teaching offers.
Unless and until we cut the head off the Plan Bay Area development snake, and cities continue to say YES to all business without stepping back to assess impacts, everyone will continue to suffer. The middle class. Teachers. Emergency personnel. People whose families have lived here for generations. The lower class. All of the myriad of people who made our area diverse, and who we all need to thrive as a community. The big, fat lie is that all this Plan Bay Area development somehow solves that problem. Look around. It doesn't. And it won't. Regardless of who is approving it. Forcing cities to continue to build housing that fails to deliver is still a fail.
5 000 employees 1300 housing units. my computer numbers 6 and 5 are broken..I have to use the small calculator and forget to do that. I apologize for crazy numbers.
Bravo! Run for City Council - you'll have my vote. Apart from the required build-out demanded by State, every new office building we choose to add simply increases the demand for job seekers, resulting in the problems you so clearly identified.
There should be a state law that cities have to allow one unit of housing to be built for every job that they allow to be created.
We have RHNA counts for a reason. They just come too slow and don't have teeth.
Starting when?
Great post! Would love to see the city of Burlingame address this issue quickly by changing the jobs/housing balance and approving less office space, more affordable housing. Since those who agree with the author have been beating this drum for years with little to no change, I do think a regional solution like SB50 makes sense at this point. I will support the regional solution until I see a similarly aggressive local solution. Haven't seen one yet in any Peninsula city.
In all of this discussion about building more housing, I rarely see anyone talk about building more schools. It concerns me that we keep building and yet do not build more schools. As a former schoolteacher, I was hoping that this article would contain some perspective on the schools since it was written by another former schoolteacher. The district superintendent recently spoke at the city Council meeting and said that our schools will be at capacity in another year and a half. We already have so many apartments that will be completed or are in the pipeline, but no new land has been acquired to build a new school. Of course even if land had been acquired, the school would not be finished in time to accommodate the students from these apartments anyways. Anytime new housing is approved, I think the city and the school district should be also ensuring that we will have space for the children who will come. Overcrowded schools brings down the quality of education which will bring down home prices.
I agree with Craig. Everything has a capacity. Everyone cannot live on the peninsula!
An additional thought: Mr. Dunham does shine a much-needed light on the crux of the problem - approving more commercial without the housing to support it. Failure on the part of cities to fulfill their duties to maintain a balance (in pursuit of income to fund their pension debt?) is exacerbating the problem. However, the powers that be already have their finger in the development pie as each city receives their mandated growth numbers via the the Regional Housing Needs Assessment. We need to stop being dictated to by the MTC, ABAG, tech-financed YIMBY groups, and the likes of Scott Wiener (SB50/CASA Compact). For example, we don't need to build 30 buildings with 10% so-called affordable housing, if we can think outside the box and get/support development of fewer buildings which actually provide true affordable housing, not just a minuscule amount of the joke we call 'below market' housing. With all the brain power in our region, this can be possible if we are not shoved off-track by those who stand to benefit from the status quo.
Well said. Lisa!
So, you said, "if we can think outside the box and get/support development of fewer buildings which actually provide true affordable housing"....
...but from everything I've seen, we can't. Everything gets shot down. And this very logic sounds to me like "lets hold out for some perfect solution in the future - and use that as a reason to shut down all development, forever, since the perfect solution is always something else".
At this point, I'm for basically anything that leads to more housing being built. 10% affordable and 90% market rate is better than nothing being built.
Sorry, but supporting shoddy state/regional solutions like SB50 which is opposed by a variety of tenants and environmental groups just because local governments have failed to do their job in protecting tenants and making developers pay their fair share into our communities is disaster capitalism at its finest. Accepting solutions spearheaded by politicians in the pocket of developers like Scott Wiener is not how we solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area, despite the careful veneer of social justice that he has made sure to wrap his legislation in in order to dupe well-meaning progressives who genuinely want to see real change.
I'd support other attempted solutions besides Scott Weiner's too. But the thing is, everything I hear is always *negative*, not proposing solutions! I've seen years and years, across many different cities, many different proposals, that sound something like "Yes, housing is a problem... but THIS isn't the answer. Something else is." (Always the "something else" that is hypothetical, or far in the future, or somewhere else on the peninsula...)
So at this point, I'm supporting not just the things I think are the best solutions, but anything that's at least a step in the right direction. If it gets more housing built it's probably a step forward. If it doesn't, it's not.
Well, Mike. You aren't planning running for a public office now, are you?!
Facebook is also adding office space in Menlo Park with minimal housing suggested. Two new city councilmembers raised the matter of whether to impose a moratorium on such major non-residential development. On June 11, the current mayor of Menlo Park offered to put them on a committee to work out the DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT WITH FACEBOOK. Gee, doesn't that suggest someone plans to move forward?- At his talk in Palto Alto on June 7, state senator Scott Wiener mentioned the proposed expansion of Facebook in Menlo Park. Wiener did not criticize Facebook or the project. Facebook is in on the Wiener plan to EMPOWER DEVELOPERS TO BUILD HIGH-DENSITY, high-priced HOUSING WHEREVER THEY LIKE.
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