rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] Henry Grabar of Slate on the San Francisco rent crisis (Reply)

Slate hosts this plausible-sounding argument.

In the Bay Area, the cities that have shut their doors to housing are the suburban municipalities that contain most of the region’s population. “The smaller communities, in my opinion, need to step up, and I don’t see that happening,” San Francisco planning director John Rahaim says. “There’s such a huge demand in general and that can’t be met just by the big three cities.”

Nor should it be. Once upon a time, a forward-thinking planner might have conceived of the region as three high-density nodes of housing and jobs, in San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland, with quiet bedroom communities strung like beads along commuter rail lines and highways.

But that vision has long since been dashed by the Bay’s unusually sprawling geography of employment. Of the 1.75 million jobs within 35 miles of downtown San Francisco, only 45 percent are within 10 miles. That’s 12 percentage points lower than average for a big U.S. city. Adding new housing only in the big three cities, then, will only exacerbate the region’s transportation woes.

To some extent, job sprawl in the Bay has the same causes as elsewhere. Manufacturers sought cheap land and highway access. Pulled by emigrating executives, white-collar work shifted to campuses and office parks. Retail and services followed consumers down the highway.

In this part of the country, though, this phenomenon played out with special intensity because of Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot referendum that froze California’s property tax rates. David Dowall, a professor of regional planning at the University of California–Berkeley, was one of the first to observe how the law skewed small-town zoning priorities. “Caught in a fiscal squeeze,” he wrote in 1982, “many towns have stepped up efforts to increase their tax base by attracting more commercial, office, and light industrial development. While attempting to attract economic development, most communities have not concomitantly adjusted their zoning to provide housing for additional employees. Consequently, new employees, particularly those migrating to the region, find it extremely difficult to acquire affordable housing.”