Thoughts on how High Density Housing is Destroying Silicon Valley

If you're on the road these days, you can't help but notice one inescapable fact -- traffic in the Bay Area just keeps getting worse and worse. Increasingly, we're seeing gridlock on our roads. During rush hour, there are times and places where you have to wait through a green light because you can't make it through the intersection -- there isn't any room for your vehicle on the other side. All of these vehicles and increased traffic density means longer drive times, lost productivity, and increased stresses from time pressures, bad drivers, and road rage.

Commuting home the other day, I took a route that was similar to my commute a couple of years ago and I was shocked by where I experienced traffic back-ups, and by how much traffic there was. My rough estimate, based on where I was seeing the back-ups, is that we may have double the number of cars on the road compared to just two or three years ago.

But where did all of these cars come from? Why are there more cars here?

I have one simple answer -- high-density housing. Over the past five years or so, there has been a trend to transform areas of land that once held one and two-story buildings into high-density residential and multi-use/residential structures. In the photo above (that I happened to take about three years ago), what was once a Santa Clara technology campus with about three 2-story buildings was being transformed into a multi-story, high-density multi-use housing facility. The same transformation is also taking place in a couple of blocks in every direction from here.

The big joke with these places is that they make the claim that these high-density residences won't significantly increase traffic because they're close to the train station and public transit. The reality is that, with most of these places, you need to estimate an additional 1.5 cars on the road.

It's surprising to me that so many of these developments have been approved (and continue to be approved) by local city councils. While there are always calls for more affordable housing (and claims that a lack of housing is the problem), these developments are simply eroding any semblance of quality of life in the area. Here's my latest analogy for the problem:

Imagine the Bay Area like an awesome Internet Cafe, good food, nice environment, good Internet connectivity. Then, people start having meetings there and more people keep coming in. Soon, there is no space to sit, all of the tables are occupied and all of the chairs are full. 

Troubled by this, the patrons call for more chairs, more places to sit. Comfy chairs are changed to benches and counters are added to walls, so more people can fit in, but soon there is no place for coffee cups and few places for computers. 

But the worst is that, while the number of patrons has grown significantly, the cafe's Internet connection is still running on the same DSL line that provided reasonable broadband 15 years ago. The Internet Cafe has no Internet.

The Bay Area is collapsing under the weight of too many users while the roads, our broadband connectivity.

It would be one thing if we had the infrastructure to support the human density that they are building for, but we don't. We have no subways, no metro train system. And if you look at San Francisco as an example, we're going on 10 years and they still haven't completed the Muni line from Union Square to the Caltrain station.

And just when you thought they couldn't pack any more in, there's more high-density housing on the way...