Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, hears the same complaint over and over again about life in Silicon Valley: “This traffic is driving me crazy, but there’s no house here I can afford.”
Guardino, who spoke at the Rotary Club of Los Altos meeting Oct. 4, has a long career centered on developing transportation solutions. California governors have three times appointed him to serve four-year terms on the California Transportation Commission.
Housing and transportation are linked as the two greatest challenges Silicon Valley faces, according to the Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s 2018 Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project. Guardino compared Silicon Valley to the other top five innovative regions in the U.S. – Seattle, Southern California (including Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties), Austin, New York City and Boston – all of which are confronting location, relocation and growth issues.
“Housing in Silicon Valley is now in crisis,” Guardino said. “Due to escalating housing costs, people are moving away. For the first time in decades, we have a net loss of 42 persons monthly, as contrasted with our former gain of 2,000 persons per month.”
Over the past 10 years, Guardino noted, Silicon Valley needed 180,000 new homes annually, but only 80,000 homes were built. The situation of demand exceeding supply has pushed housing prices drastically higher because not enough homes have been built. In the six years between 2010 and 2016, the number of jobs in Silicon Valley increased by 29 percent while new housing stock rose only 4 percent. The result, he added, is that Silicon Valley homes now cost an average $1 million, while housing costs in the other five competing areas is lower.
“The average home cost in Austin, Texas, for example, is only $272,000,” he said. “Not only are we losing population, but we now have the second-worst average daily commute time of 72 minutes round-trip, close to NYC’s top 74-minute commute.”
Looming legislation
With the Nov. 6 election just weeks away, Guardino urged paying particular attention to two housing propositions on the ballot, noting that there are pros and cons to each of the measures. Proposition 1, the Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act, includes a benefit of $1 billion for veterans, but with a high interest rate, which would raise the total indebtedness from $4 billion to $6 billion. Proposition 2, the “No Place Like Home” measure, proposes spending $2 billion to provide housing and intensive services for the homeless population suffering from severe mental health problems. While the legislation would benefit the severely mentally ill, it would divert that financial support from the rest of the population with mental health problems.
Proposition 6 proposes repealing certain road repair and transportation funding. Currently $5.2 billion is budgeted for bridge and road safety, which the legislation, if passed, would eliminate. Guardino said that in 1923, the California gas tax was 2 cents, which is equivalent to 29 cents today. Last year, the state gas tax totaled just 30 cents, revealing that funding for road and bridge repairs has barely risen in the region for decades, resulting in unrepaired potholes and unsafe bridges.
The solutions to housing and traffic problems, he warned, are like a jigsaw puzzle – each proposition solves some problems but causes others.
Guardino founded and serves as executive director of the annual Silicon Valley Turkey Trot, which raises money for college scholarships and local charitable programs. With the goal of raising $1 million at the 2018 Turkey Trot, the scholarships aim to help students bear the brunt of Silicon Valley’s high cost of living.
For more information on the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, visit svlg.org.
Marlene Cowan is a member of the Rotary Club of Los Altos. For more information, visit losaltosrotary.org.
