Proposal to ease housing woes calls for 120,000 new units
Advocacy group makes recommendations to San Jose political leaders on how to add more affordable developments
SAN JOSE » Urban planning group SPUR issued a proposal Thursday to build 120,000 housing units in San Jose during the coming three decades as a way to ease the South Bay’s worsening housing crisis.
“The Silicon Valley economic miracle has become a housing nightmare,” SPUR stated in its report. “We aren’t building enough housing for all the people who want to live here.”
SPUR called on city leaders in the South Bay to alter their zoning rules to enable additional housing in an array of configurations.
“Cities that close the doors on new residents not only hurt the people who want to live in their city,” SPUR reported. “They hurt the entire Bay Area by worsening the imbalance between housing supply and demand.”
SPUR, a San Francisco- based group with a San Jose office, recommended five key strategies to make the 120,000 housing units possible and feasible.
The group urged San Jose political leaders to make it easier to build more housing in neighborhoods near transit or that can be easily walked; enable development of units that are smaller and more spartan and affordable by design; create more mixed-use neighborhoods that blend housing, retail, and public areas; improve each
city’s approval process; and create more funding for affordable housing construction.
The report focuses on what San Jose can do, but noted that many of the proposals could be applied to all South Bay cities. The report accused nearly every city in the South Bay of making the housing crisis worse.
“While most of Silicon Valley has a jobs-housing imbalance, with many more jobs than housing units, San Jose has the opposite problem,” the report stated. “San Jose is the only large city in the country to actually lose population during the daytime, because more of its residents work outside the city itself.”