SV@Home chief discusses effort to find housing for all in Bay Area.
backing from Silicon Valley businesses and developers concerned about the housing shortage. Its goal is to advocate for housing development in Santa Clara County, including controversial developments such as Vallco Mall in Cupertino and Google Village around the Diridon train station in San Jose, and to work with regional groups to promote pro-growth laws in the state capital.
The nonprofit also deploys a platoon of staffers to key hearings in Silicon Valley cities, making sure a pro-development voice is heard in rooms often filled with vexed homeowners opposing new construction.
“We endorse projects, we endorse policies, and we
camp out at those meetings,” Corsiglia said, “depending on whatever it is that they’re doing.”
The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q
How has the housing situation changed since you’ve been in San Jose?
A
It’s always been challenging, but it’s much more challenging now. When I first started (in the 1990s), we used to subsidize affordable housing at a rate of about $25,000 per unit. Slowly, it increased, to now the city has a goal of $125,000 per unit. The cost to subsidize housing has really increased.
The complexities around housing development have increased. Land costs themselves have just skyrocketed.
But the biggest piece of development is hard costs, which is the construction and labor piece. That has just really, really shot up. We’re an expensive place to live, so our labor costs are higher.
Q
What role has Proposition 13 played in getting us where we are today? A
It’s more profitable for a local government to have sales tax-producing uses (for properties). So they’re more likely to build a big box store than they are apartments for people who would work in that big box store to live. It has really taken away what I would call more intentional planning to try to ensure that we have the jobs and housing balance that we need in this area. Because job-producing uses are so much more valuable to a city, that’s what they’re more likely to build. The result is that we have more jobs than we have housing units.
Every day, in Santa Clara County, 100,000 people who live here drive outside the county for work. Two hundred thousand people come in. We have net 100,000 people who come in.
The argument that people will say sometimes is, “People live where they want to live. They just don’t want to live here.” And what I say to them is, even if those 100,000 want to live here, there’s no housing for them.
What we’re trying to do at Silicon Valley at Home is to ensure that as jobs are added, that the homes are added for those jobs. Now that’s not helping the imbalance that already exists, but it’s making sure that we’re not losing jobs.
Q
How do you define “affordable” around here?
A
One of my board members said, I repeat this all the time, that we work on affordable housing. We work on Affordable Housing with a big “A” and a big “H” which means housing that’s restrictive, its rents are restricted to people who earn typically 60 percent of area median income and below. Median income for a family of four here is about $125,000 a year. So 60 percent is somewhere around $80,000 a year.
Then we’ve just got affordable housing with a small “a” and a small “h,” which is housing that’s just affordable to people. We recognize there are people who are living here … who are struggling to be able to afford the area’s high rents.
It’s referred to as “the missing middle.” It’s people who are construction workers or teachers or nurses or paramedics and others that make what you would consider to be a good wage, and years ago would have been able to buy a house and live a middle class lifestyle. But now they’re struggling to find a place to stay.
Q
Would you like to see what happened in North Bayshore — where Mountain View is allowing developers to build up to 10,000 housing units near Google — be replicated at Vallco and other sites?
A
That’s what we’re pushing. We’re wanting to make sure that cities maximize the number of housing units and they have a minimum of 20 percent affordability, depending on what’s possible.