This map is a bit dated, given that it is from 2014, but it shows the 95128 area code has a jobs/housing imbalance, like the rest of San Jose, but, at 96.4% is much better than the estimated 80% figure for the “Capital of Silicon Valley.”
This was obtained from the Census Bureau website. Unfortunately, the 2015 data (latest at the time of publication of this post) doesn’t seem to have this feature of showing where people live and work.
It will be her third move in three-years. Unfortunately, for this service worker and the surrounding community, this time the move is 200-miles away to a place where rents are affordable. Her departure, which is way too common in Silicon Valley, will reverberate in subtle ways throughout the community.
No longer will her nieces and nephews have her cheering in the stands. Her sister won’t have her to shuttle the kids to their various activities. There will be a hole in the school cafeteria where a diligent worker made sure everyone had a full stomach. There will be a missing volunteer at the fundraising events to support youth programs. Those blessed by her presence will miss her enthusiasm and good cheer.
Unfortunately, the above scenario, based on a true, unfolding story, plays out every day in Silicon Valley. The issue goes beyond housing affordability, however, as many people move to our beautiful and vibrant area out of college and, once they have kids, they return to their home towns. At the other end of the spectrum, we have seniors who cash out and move to be nearer to their children (who can’t afford to live here) or to a location that better meets their needs.
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“Housing Crisis” seems to be the daily headline. The issue is bigger than housing affordability, as alluded to above, as the crisis is one that threatens the foundation of our community and impacts all citizens of our great valley, regardless of demographic or socioeconomic status.
There is no silver bullet, but the elements that solutions will need to encompass include; affordability and quality, accessibility and vibrancy, and connectivity and mobility.
With those principles in mind, the following proposal could be accomplished today with cooperation from multiple public agencies, including School Districts, Cities, Counties and the State of California, combined with private partners. Although this proposal is for a specific location, it could be replicated at many of the hundreds of schools in Santa Clara County, creating potentially tens of thousands of new dwellings.
[Note: For an excellent discussion of the challenges and opportunities for redesigning Silicon Valley from auto-centric to human-centric, please see the white paper, Goals to Guide Planning and Development Along with the Eastern Stevens Creek Corridor in Santa Clara and San Jose.]
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Del Mar High School, part of the Campbell Union High School District (CUHSD) and located just beyond the borders of the Proposed South Bascom (North) Urban Village Community, is an important asset to the community it serves. With its recent accreditation as an International Baccalaureate school, it is attracting students beyond its borders.
Its contribution to the community extends beyond traditional academic topics, as it serves adult students at night, hosts theater productions throughout the school year, boasts a vibrant athletic program and even rents its facilities to faith-based groups on Sundays. The space is activated well beyond the normal school hours and is conveniently located near a VTA light tail train station.
Still, this approximate 41-acre site could yield much more than it does today. Simply, this is an excellent location to add a mix of retail and office and housing for teachers, staff and others in the community and would enhance the South Bascom (North) Urban Village.
The Teachers Village in Newark, New Jersey, which offers housing, retail and recreational facilities, is an example of a mixed-use community, which, according to this September, 2017 Curbed article, puts the teachers at the center of the community. As indicated on the Teachers Village website;
“Teachers Village is transforming former parking lots into a sustainably-designed (LEED-ND) dynamic new neighborhood that offers opportunities for teachers, students, professionals and visitors to live, work, shop, eat and learn.”
New levels of collaboration and learning among the teachers are some of the subtle benefits of the Teachers Village, according to this February, 2018 Yahoo! Finance article.
The California legislature understands the importance of this sort of development, as they passed, in September 2016, the Teacher Housing Act of 2016 (SB-1413) which, “aims to create affordable housing for teachers and school district employees by utilizing land owned by school districts for development of income-restricted housing.”
The method for allocating residential units would have to be determined, but the goal would be to create a diverse community that would include teachers and school staff and others such as seniors, city workers [See the “Adopt a Cop” proposal] and people in the private sector.
There would be a huge opportunity for the creation of common-use, public facilities, such as a library, pool, public meeting rooms, community garden, day-care space, recreation equipment and park structures that could be used by both the school and the community.
Further, programming could be developed that would facilitate mixing between groups that would traditionally be separated. For instance, Del Mar’s GenYes program could be extended to help seniors and others who live on the campus grounds better understand and use technology [there would be additional benefits gained from intergenerational living, as seen in this article]. This is the type of activity that could help overcome issues concerning digital literacy and awareness of the benefits of digital connectivity, as outlined in the City of San Jose’s November 2017 Digital Inclusion Strategy report.
Another benefit to building housing on school property is the potential for sharing the school’s broadband connection. Residential use of the Internet will have peak requirements later in the day compared to the school, meaning the size of the Internet connection to the campus will probably not have to change. The cost of providing Internet to the residential and commercial customers then could be directly related to the marginal costs of bandwidth, which should allow for lower access costs for the residences than traditional approaches [note, this model was used with a local school district and youth baseball league to add security camera monitoring to the latter’s fields that are on school property].
The low-cost bandwidth would allow for bundling of Internet with unit rentals, removing both cost and billing challenges that were identified as the two biggest barriers to broadband adoption in the aforementioned Digital Inclusion Strategy Report.
More importantly, the mixed-use approach, anchored by community programs and broadband, would activate the campus 24 hours a day, yielding a safer campus. At the same time, it would provide affordable housing for teachers and staff, reducing their Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), which is important to meeting State environmental goals.
By mixing elements of retail into the project, along with the proximity to transit, it would be possible to create a village that eliminates car ownership and its associated costs for many of its residents. More importantly, it would be a place where people move at human-scale, by walking or biking, creating chance interactions that often form the basis for relationships and a stronger community.
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For illustrative purposes, Panoramic Interests, a San Francisco developer, has a financing model whereby they build a module-based apartment building over a public parking lot, effectively making use of fallow air-rights. Like modular buildings that schools routinely install, Panoramic’s construction process is fast compared to traditional approaches and only requires 8 to 11 months. A high-level view of the financial model is depicted at this link and suggests a monthly cost for the construction and maintenance of the exterior of the building to be $1,000 per month.
The Panoramic model assumes a third-party service provider manages tenants, the interior of the building and works with third-party agencies, as needed, to provide rent subsidies. Assuming this 3rd party took a 20% commission for these management services, this would mean an average rent of $1,200 ($1,000 from Panoramic plus $200 for the service provider), which is 50% of the approximate $2,460+ per month average for a 1-bedroom apartment in San Jose.
It is important to note, that these would be new, fully furnished homes with high-quality fixtures, as seen in this video. These units would have broad appeal, regardless of socio-economic status. At an unsubsidized price of $1,200 per month, this would require an income of $48,000 to ensure rental to income ratio of less than 30%, which is a common metric to gauge affordability. One potential advantage the higher-density, mixed-use urban village approach would have is that it would be possible for a tenant to ditch their car, potentially saving thousands of dollars per year in mobility costs (AAA estimates $8,469 in costs per year for the average car).
Assuming a $1,200 rental price to cover costs (the effective rent might be lower for individuals who qualify for subsidies), a certain number of units could be rented directly at that price, while the rest could be rented at market-rate, generating a net-positive cash-flow for CUHSD. Additional revenue could come from businesses co-existing on the first floor of such a development.
Beyond providing quality housing at affordable rates at a profit, there are other more difficult-to-quantify benefits, such as having a space that is activated 24 hours a day, every day.
Again, the Panoramic example is not intended to endorse that specific developer, but to show that there is a potential public-private partnership opportunity without having to put public money at risk. DCG Strategies looks at different ways school districts can provide workforce housing in this April, 2017 presentation.
If CUHSD wants to make a financial investment instead of relying on a purely private financing approach, there are multiple sources of public monies available both to seed such a project as well as help maintain it once it is launched. In some of the cases, this might mean simply improving the value of existing spending through new relationships between disparate public agencies.
In addition to traditional federal and state low-income housing credits, here are some examples of public monies that could potentially be leveraged:
Neighborhood Services indicates that it needs $16.3k per acre per year to maintain a park, while they only have budget for $13.6k (see page 11 of the linked report). If the school district charged the city, say, $8k, to maintain these new parks, then everyone would win (assuming the marginal maintenance costs for the school district didn’t increase by more than $8k). Another synergy might be if one of the residential units were reserved for a PRNS worker to live in, this might help PRNS attract and retain talent, which is a major issue for PRNS (see page 4) .
Beyond financing, a huge benefit of the school district embarking on such a project is a huge reduction in time-to-market compared to a project requiring city permitting (granted there might be some local permitting required, but it would be a fraction of normal requirements).
As an example, Campbell Union School District will mostly likely make the decision to expand Monroe Middle School by 200 units at the February, 2018 CUSD board meeting. The new buildings will be ready by August for the 2018/19 school year, thanks to modular construction and streamlined permitting. That is the kind of speed we need to build the housing stock necessary to meet the demands of Silicon Valley’s workforce.
It’s 6:55 A.M. and Kerry has overslept from staying up too late with friends after the weekly Sunday Night Swing Dance event at the Del Mar Manor community room. It’s not a problem, as she has still has time to eat a piece of fruit she had picked a day earlier from the on-site agrihood and drink a strong cup of joe from the downstairs coffee shop prior to starting her peaceful 5-minute walk to work.
As she opens the door to her Del Mar High School office, she feels surprisingly refreshed for a Monday morning. She even has a few moments to reflect on the decisions made by the CUSHD and others that changed her life for the better;
She realizes that they indeed had built not just housing that is affordable, but a community where all are welcome.
The following are relevant links referenced above:
Special thanks to CJ Gabbe, Patrick Kennedy, Lonnie Soury and Kirk Vartan for their feedback and suggestions that improved earlier revisions of this proposal.
With land at a premium in Santa Clara County, we need to better utilize existing public land. It should be possible to produce housing that is more affordable on public land than in locations where the land has to be acquired from a private entity. When that land intersects with areas that could potentially have good transit options, such as an expressway, it is even better.
An example of a strip of underutilized land that should be further explored for development are the air-rights above San Tomas Creek, between Williams and Hamilton. The air-rights are presumably owned by the Santa Clara Valley Water District which has been investigating ways their properties can be utilized to help ameliorate the county’s affordability and homeless problems, .
By adding housing and associated open space in the form of trails, plazas and parklets, the exposed concrete channel would be covered, making the entire strip much more attractive than at present.
Funding for such a project could come from multiple sources, including monies from measures passed for open spaces, homelessness and, perhaps, even AB32, the cap-and-trade carbon tax program.
This approach. where a concrete platform covers public land, in this case a creek, is described by Patrick Kennedy of Panoramic Interests in this interview (note, the images of the modular micro-houses are courtesy of Panoramic Interests). He suggests that using a modular technique, high-quality housing could be built relatively fast and at lower-cost than traditional stick-built housing.
http://winchesternac.com/2016/08/16/10000-homes-in-a-year-on-underutilized-land-part-2/
Note, on April 26th, 2017, I sent the following message in an email to the board of the Campbell Union High School District with the idea of “capping” parking lots above schools to provide onsite housing for teachers and staff. This would reduce VMT, while providing eyes and ears at schools 24-hours per day. This kind of continual use would allow the schools to be opened to the community, instead of hidden behind metal fences as they are now.
April 26th, 2017 Message to Campbell Union High School District Board
I would like the district to investigate the idea of using its underutilized land for affordable housing for teachers and staff.
An example of a developer that can build relatively low-cost housing above an existing car parking lot (e.g. could be in the front or back of Del Mar) is seen in this video interview:
http://winchesternac.com/2016/08/16/car-free-micro-dna-and-modular-part-1/
As another example, here is a simple rendering and article I did of how this might work on existing, underutilized public land next to San Tomas Creek:
https://winchesterurbanvillage.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/turning-eyesores-into-housing-and-trails/
Lastly, I am the Vice President of the Winchester Neighborhood Action Coalition (WNAC). Our goal is to use innovation to improve the quality of life in the area bounded by Hamilton, San Tomas, Hedding/Pruneridge and 17/I-880. We would love to be able to discuss these types of things directly with the district.
The Winchester Urban Village 