Jobs/Housing Imbalance

Since 1980, the east bay cities of Livermore, Dublin and Pleasanton have been one of the epicenters of job creation for not only the bay area, but the entire country. Much of the early employment boom can be attributed directly to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory which created a great pool of highly educated workers in the Livermore Valley. With this base of skilled workers, hundreds of large and small companies were attracted to the area along with many startup companies created by the skilled workforce already residing in the area

Millions of square feet of office and light industrial space was built to house the many employers. Some housing was also built, but not nearly enough to accomodate the huge influx of highly paid workers. The early entrants to the region wanted to preserve the bucolic lifestyle of the area. Due to the nature of local government finance, commercial development--which generates far more revenue than expenditures--was encouraged while service intensive residential development was discouraged through growth limits and sky high development impact fees.

Consequently, much of the region's population growth was exported to east Contra Costa County and San Joaquin County. This exportation has been particularly acute over the past decade. In 1980, there were 97,005 residents living in Pleasanton, Livermore and Dublin. The three cities that have seen the greatest import of commuters (Manteca, Tracy and Brentwood) had a total population of 47,787. During the 1980s, the three job centers added a total of 33,518 residents while the commuter destinations (mostly Tracy and Manteca) added 34,107. During the 1990s, the population growth began to skew greatly to the east with the three job centers adding 36,449 residents and the commuter cities 47,595. Over the past nine years, the commuter towns have added over twice as many residents with a population increase of 71,887 versus 35,456.

In fact, the commuter towns now have nearly as many residents (201,376) as the job cities (202,428). Since 1990, Brentwood has been particularly impacted with its population increasing from 7,563 to 51,908. Most of this increase is due to Livermore's refusal to develop homes in the area north of the 580 freeway. It is just cruel that tens of thousands of Brentwood residents have to navigate narrow and dangerous Vasco Road every day for an hour with the last ten minutes of the commute going through vacant north Livermore land that could have housed every recent resident of Brentwood.

The social cost of requiring all of these commuters to spend most of the time on the road instead of with their families is incalcuable. Our state government, who allowed these cities to ignore their housing needs, has instead paid for billions of dollars in freeway improvements and schools which require huge ongoing subsidies. Our air quality has also suffered from the clogged freeways stretching from the east bay to deep into the valley. Thousands of acres of prime farmland has been gobbled up in order to save marginally useable land in the Livermore Valley.

So where am I going with all of this? Well, it looks like the state is beginning to take steps to address this imbalance. I believe that if there were a level playing field, we'd have a better chance of attracting jobs to the valley. Right now, the job centers collect over twice as much tax revenue per resident due to the huge amount of commercial development in their cities. This revenue advantage allows them to have the funds on hand to attract additional development without impacting their resident's tax bill. In other words, the current situation allows the rich to get richer. Here in the Valley, we are forced to either provide less services or tax our residents more to keep up our quality of life. We simply don't have the resources to compete many times for the high wage jobs.

In any case, a recent article in the "Pleasanton Weekly" gave me some hope. The article, which is mostly discussing a proposed upscale senior housing development, notes the following:

The city is currently under fire for its housing cap, with a lawsuit pending to invalidate it. Just hours before the Planning Commission meeting, California Attorney General Jerry Brown announced he was joining a San Francisco affordable housing coalition in the legal fight, which was filed in 2006.

"Pleasanton's draconian and illegal limit on new housing forces people to commute long distances, adding to the bumper to bumper traffic along (Interstates) 580 and 680 and increasing dangerous air pollution," Brown said in a statement. "It's time for Pleasanton to balance its housing and its jobs and take full advantage of its underutilized land and proximity to BART."

Click here for the entire article. The reader comments are worth reading as they show the anti-growth bent of many east bay residents.

A number of us have been pushing the Attorney General to stop picking on Central Valley planning practices and focus on the genesis of our growth challenges--i.e. the east bay growth policies. Let's hope that this is the beginning of a new day when Valley cities can start competing on a more level playing field. It is up to the state to finally put its money where its mouth is, and force all cities to create a jobs/housing balance.