Editor,
“The pipes are bursting! Water is pouring into the house! We’ve tried drilling holes in the floor, but they don’t drain fast enough. We’ve purchased very expensive pumps to get rid of the water, but they just slow down the flow. Whatever shall we do?” Well, um, maybe we should turn off the water and fix the pipes.
And so it is with the housing situation here. “Why cities are planning for new levels of growth” (Daily Journal Feb. 22) points out what we all know, but nobody is doing anything about its root cause. “Job growth has outpaced housing production.” “The Peninsula saw 11 jobs created for each new unit of housing built.” I’ve said it here before, but I’ll say it again: if the “jobs-to-housing ratio” is a problem, then stop building so many new office buildings.
Instead of approving these giant new biotech campuses, or multistory office buildings, we should be converting existing office buildings into housing.
Others have proposed that cities could actually purchase (and convert) these buildings and make them available to low-income families. In my opinion that would be a good use of available housing funds.
And, if I recall right, some older affordable-housing provisions came with expiration dates, so some of our existing stock is going away. City ownership of these properties can protect their low-income status in perpetuity. Instead of adding thousands of new homes every year to an already-impacted area, let’s fix the root cause of the problem (too many new offices) and attack the true problem (affordability) with a rational solution.
D.M. Goldstein
Foster City
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(1) comment
D.M. – interesting points in your letter. Let’s take your points further… What is the root cause as to why developers are more willing to build offices rather than housing? Is it easier to get office buildings approved? How do building and development fees for offices compare to building and development fees for housing? It stands to reason that if fee amounts are high enough for housing, there’s no way a developer can make as much money building “affordable” housing vs. market-rate housing. A root cause that should be looked at since many folks writing/calling for affordable housing don’t broach the cost of building.
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