Why San Jose Cyclists Must Vote No on Measure B

Around this time three years ago I moved to California from Connecticut. Every warning I got from friends about how problematic the housing situation was true or was too limiting in its scope in describing the madness. There are too many jobs being created here and too few homes to fit all the workers, so people move two hours away or further or crammed with a ton of roommates.

Oh, sorry: I forgot I'm in Silicon Valley. Instead of "crammed with a ton of roommates" I meant to say "co-living."

Worse than that: the tight demand for apartments is raising rents faster than incomes, so teachers, restaurant workers and even small business owners have to move farther from the homes they grew up in. 

The need for affordable housing is severe but we have to break down the words "affordable" and "housing" to understand what's really going on here. The median sale price for a home in San Jose is around $1 million and the median rent is north of $2,500 a month. If you add a thousand - two thousand or event five thousand units it won't add to the supply enough to bring the rents down. 

So if you add, say, 900 homes, it's not enough to bring the rent or sale prices down. 

So the proposed addition of 900 homes in the Evergreen neighborhood in San Jose - which the Measure B San Jose ballot initiative wants to do - won't bring prices down. In order for housing to be affordable, homes that are for sale or rent have to only be available to those who make below a certain income level. 

These 900 homes will not be - and even if they were it does not speak to a bigger problem.

San Jose had a bunch of annexations in the 1960s that made it not grow up, but out. This city is huge, and with suburban homes everywhere cars were (and still are) the preferred way to get around. Frequently, my wife and I - who have successfully gotten away with owning only one car between us for the nearly thirteen years we've been married - feel environmentally coerced into getting another one. It's the same old story: there aren't enough trains, not enough buses, where-I-need-to-go-isn't-walkable-or-bikeable. Using a car is almost always easier and cheaper even though their wear on the environment is harder and more expensive than most drivers know. 

That brings me to my next beef with Measure B. Look at Evergreen on a map. Then look at downtown San Jose. 

More of the same environmental coercion. 

In other words, building 900 homes far from transit with a garage and a Tesla flanked by a GMC Suburban in every driveway is a bad idea on multiple fronts: as I've said before if you enable cars, you get traffic, you get pollution, you get road deaths, you get local governments going insolvent trying to pay for all the infrastructure. 

So when some rich goofballs want to build a new suburban land mass on the outer edge of a city we have to say no. Not only is none of this "affordable" but we have to get used to the idea of not calling the suburbs housing. Suburbia is something San Jose experimented with and is failing at - just like any other city. 

San Jose's own housing plan isn't perfect as it is (why I'm also recommending Yes on Measure C) but giving a green light to developers to build a replica of "The Real Housewives of Orange County" neighborhood isn't the way out of a housing crisis. Homes that are part of multifamily structures that do not require the need for the occupant to own a car is the only way this city can move forward. 

And it isn't just me who's saying this: The Bay Area Council (I know, I know: I gave them some heat last year for talking about housing and traffic as though they were separate issues) recommends building dense housing near transit. Since we do have to "build our way out of" the housing crisis let's not force tens of thousands of dollars a millennial can't afford anyway into car-related infrastructure they'd rather not use.

The Bay Area Council has also found, again in their survey, that the number of people who want to leave the Bay Area has gone up once again this year. Not only that, but outgoing governor Jerry Brown is starting to put permanent water conservation rules in place - hardly the time to build places that involve the water-suck and time-suck of a lawn.

And the final reason to give Measure B a big thumbs down: as much as the backers yammer on about "senior" housing and "preference for seniors" we have to recognize the long-term dangers of that. Sure, a home out in the suburbs might be nice for someone in his or her sixties, but what happens when they push up against their eighties and can't drive anymore? The organization Strong Towns probably put it best in a piece they wrote last year: car-based living isolates the seniors living in car-based places - and worse than that: the streets themselves become scary, pedestrian and wheelchair-user unfriendly places that can't be navigated easily even if they could. 

So this is what you need to do by or on June 5: Vote no on Measure B - not because it is for billionaires (it is) and not because the backers are cynically using the need for affordable housing in the most irresponsible way imaginable: but because it wants to keep San Jose in a backwards place: with a car wash next to every train station, a boatload of car loan debt on every adult, and a two-hour car commute for everyone who commits the sin of earning less than six figures a year. 

To hell with that and to hell with them. Vote for our future. Vote no on Measure B and Yes on Measure C. 

P.S. - Also vote yes on Regional Measure 3.

Thanks for reading and thanks for riding - especially if you're in San Jose.