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A City in Egypt

By | | Housing, Urban areas
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In a state of the city address last week, the mayor of Cupertino, Darcy Paul, said that the housing shortage in his city was “not dire” and recommended against approval of a planned mixed-use housing project to replace a former shopping mall called Vallco. Developers wanted to convert the 1.2-million-square-foot mall into 2,400 units of housing along with some retail and offices. Paul thought the retail and offices were fine, but opposed the housing.

Just how dire is Cupertino’s housing shortage? The median home value, according to Zillow, is $2.158 million. The median family income is $158,000. That’s a value-to-income ratio of 13.7. Palo Alto’s is higher ($3.01 million to $167,440 for a value-to-income ratio of 18), but I’d still say that Cupertino’s housing market is pretty dire considering that fifty years ago the value-to-income ratios in the Bay Area were less than 2.5.

Paul is being rightly criticized for his insensitivity to the housing problems faced by newcomers who earn $158,000 a year. But the truth is that almost everyone in Cupertino, Palo Alto, and the rest of Santa Clara County are suffering from a blind spot–more of a blind mountain–when it comes to housing issues. Continue reading →

The Transit Industry Needs Structural Reform

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Another transit agency is having financial problems. The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District is seeing ridership decline and both transit fares and sales tax revenues are falling short of expectations.

BART’s staff has given the board a laundry list of things it can do to make up the shortfall: raise fares, crack down on fare evaders, increase advertising revenue, increase parking fees, charge companies that send buses to pick up employees at BART stations, and automate trains to eliminate drivers. Even if they do all of these things, however, they “will not be able to address the deficit we are facing” without major service cutbacks, BART’s budget director told the board.

Another thing BART could do, but probably won’t, is hire more employees so it won’t have to pay so much overtime. Last November, Transparent California found that a BART janitor whose base pay was $57,000 a year actually earned $270,000 in 2015 with overtime and benefits. To get this, he supposedly worked 114 hours a week, which is more than 16 hours a day, every day of the year. But a local television station tracked this worker and found he was spending several hours a day hiding in a storage closet, while the stations he was supposed to keep clean remained filthy.

Continue reading →