Gil and Michelle Castuera want what thousands of families in the Bay Area near San Francisco want — a new house near a good school at a price they can afford.
So the Castueras plan to sell their townhouse at a handsome profit, buy a house some distance away and become commuters.
“We could never afford a house in the Silicon Valley,” Michelle Castuera said. “It’s crazy there.”
Ironically, they’ll drive each workday past a 496-acre piece of property just approved for a large office complex and 581 houses.
That’s a fraction of the houses needed to accommodate the 3,000 new workers expected to take jobs there as a result of the commercial development.
“It’s absurd,” said veteran Bay Area environmentalist John Chapman. He said the property is next to rail and bus service, a freeway, a business park and downtown.
“It should have been approved for much higher densities. Somehow we have to make the connection between sprawl and congestion, and rethink how we build our cities,” he said.
Communities all over California say they want to get smarter about how and where they grow so families such as the Castueras can find affordable housing close to where they work.
But the Bay Area is not building enough houses to keep up with the job market.
And there is little agreement about where to put the houses.
In one camp are environmental and grass-roots groups who got a record number of growth-control initiatives on statewide ballots in November and saw voters pass 65 percent of them.
Fueled by anger over traffic congestion and lost open space, many of these measures promise to curb sprawl, protect open space and force growth into existing cities.
“Basically, if you keep doing things stupidly for a long time and you build sprawl after sprawl and you overburden the transportation system, people eventually get tired of it,” said Mike Daley, conservation chairman of the Sierra Club. “The developers make a huge amount of money on sprawl and the taxpayers suffer the consequences.”
On the other side are housing advocates who say the anti-growth campaign exacerbates the Bay Area’s housing shortage, drives up real estate prices and clogs the roads with commuters.
Instead of targeting housing, government should focus on building roads, expanding schools and improving water and sewer facilities, they say.
“California has failed for the last 30 years to provide the necessary infrastructure to accommodate this growth and people are rightfully upset about it,” said Tim Coyle, senior vice president of the California Building Industry Association and the former director of the state’s housing department.
“But that has nothing to do with our responsibility to provide housing for our children and our workers. Does the Sierra Club now get to decide who stays and who goes?”
No one disputes the fact that Bay Area housing is scarce and expensive.
Its housing is among the most costly in the nation, and prices continue to rise. In September, the median value of a Bay Area resale home was $371,000, up 22 percent from 1999.
As a result, only 17 out of every 100 Bay Area residents can afford to buy a median-priced house, according to the California Association of Realtors.
Even if someone has the cash to buy, it may not be enough.
Ponderosa Homes, for example, has to have lotteries at one of its new subdivisions in Union City.
“We’ll get 150 people competing for 12 houses where the starting price is $870,000,” said Dick Baker, president of the builder. “It’s terrible when you have to disappoint so many people.”
Barring an economic setback or a major shift in land use and housing policy, experts say the crisis is going to get worse.
“I think we’re going to see higher home prices and no reduction in traffic congestion because of the long commutes,” said Phil Serna, vice president for the Home Builders Association of Northern California. “Our population is growing, we’re adding jobs and people have to live somewhere.”
California’s population has grown by more than 500,000 a year for the past three years, according to the state Department of Finance.
Much of that growth is not from foreign or domestic migration but is the result of births outnumbering deaths.
To meet the demand, California home builders need to construct 220,000 houses a year through 2020, according to UC Berkeley planning professor John Landis.
That’s much higher than the 141,000 units the state has built on average since 1987, Landis wrote in “Raising the Roof: California Housing Development Projections and Constraints.”
“Should annual rates of housing production during the next 12 years mirror those of the last 12, the future of housing in California will be one of extreme shortages,” Landis said in the May report.
He argues that although the Bay Area is in the best position to address its housing needs — a good economy and wealth — its fragmented political institutions and anti-growth public sentiment are likely to make its problems worse instead of better.
“Unless and until the Bay Area `un-hardens’ its institutional arteries, housing will become less and less affordable,” he said.
The Bay Area and San Joaquin regions could fall short by 12,000 to 15,000 houses a year for the next 20 years, according to the report.
The problem is heightened by the Bay Area’s hot economy, which is generating thousands of new jobs but only a fraction of those workers can either find or afford a house close to work.
The region added nearly 100,000 new jobs in the first nine months of this year, but issued building permits for only 20,776 houses.
To house the new workers, the region needed to build 50,000 to 66,0000 units.
But in today’s political climate, that number is unimaginable.
Many communities have adopted urban growth boundaries, including Livermore, Pleasanton and Dublin.
Voters in Alameda County were loud and clear — they don’t want to see their cities expand, especially in North Livermore where a 12,500-unit development was barred under the successful initiative.
Earlier this year, Contra Costa County leaders responded to public outcry and tightened its urban limit line. That put 15,000 acres off-limits to housing east of San Ramon and near Brentwood and Antioch.
In Tracy, where the Castueras hope to buy a house in one of more than 30 subdivisions under construction, voters cut the pace of growth from 1,500 to 750 houses a year.
“I guess if people think their town is getting overcrowded, they have a right to do something about it,” Gil Castuera said. “I’ll try to get in and if I can’t, I guess we’ll have to look further east.”
It doesn’t have to be this way, says Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown.
The Bay Area can provide affordable housing without destroying its open spaces or paving over its farmland.
He calls it his “elegant density” initiative, a plan to bring 10,000 new residents into a revitalized downtown Oakland.
“There is plenty of room in our older cities where we already have the roads and sewers and public transit,” Brown said. “I invite all those people who are looking in the Central Valley or Livermore to come to Oakland.”
The mayor is one of many who believe rebuilding run-down neighborhoods, re-using vacant lots, cleaning up old industrial sites and putting up mixed-use development around transit stations — called “smart growth” techniques — are the keys to stopping sprawl.
It’s also referred to as infill development, and it is not without controversy.
Neighbors frequently object because they don’t want the traffic or the added impact on local schools and public services.
The parcels usually are small, which makes them expensive to develop because a builder cannot spread the costs of streets and utilities among a large pool of buyers.
But most agree the stalemate must end soon or the Bay Area could suffer serious consequences.
More families will be forced to live farther away from their jobs and the roads will grow more congested.
Hoping to find common ground, more than 40 groups including the Bay Area Council, environmentalists, home builders and government agencies recently formed the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development.
The group is writing a regional smart-growth strategy and hopes it can convince the Bay Area to go along with its recommendations.
“If we adopt an aggressive program, we believe we can accommodate about half the housing we need in existing cities,” said Sunne McPeak, executive director of the Bay Area Council, a regional business coalition.
“The rest of it is going to have to go on the edge, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it the old way. We have to come together and end the divisiveness. We have no choice.”
