In an editorial that TRANSDEF believes to be the best policy work of a generation, Bay Area News Group Editorial Page Editor Dan Borenstein takes on the housing crisis. “Stop deepening Bay Area transportation, housing crisis” takes on the stale thinking that has powered Bay Area decision making for decades:
It’s time to stop digging this housing deficit hole deeper. We need more housing. But we need it in the right places.
Bay Area cities with housing shortfalls – San Francisco, Cupertino, Menlo Park and Palo Alto, for example – should stop adding more buildings for jobs unless they provide commensurate new housing.
And he gets transportation policy brilliantly:
We keep raising taxes to increase commute capacity, but long-term that’s an exorbitantly costly fool’s errand – especially when we ignore underutilized capacity in the counter-commute direction. We are only making the situation worse.
The key is to put jobs next to housing and housing next to jobs.
TRANSDEF sincerely hopes that elected officials take this editorial to heart.