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from the need-more-land-where-the-water-is dept.
California's Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the fruit and nuts consumed each year. Yet today, backcountry places such as Patterson, population 22,000, are experiencing an increase in homelessness that can be traced, in part, to an unlikely sounding source: Silicon Valley.
The million-dollar home prices about 85 miles west, in San Francisco and San Jose, have pushed aspiring homeowners to look inland. Patterson's population has doubled since the 2000 census. Average monthly rents have climbed from about $900 in 2014 to nearly $1,600 in recent months, according to the apartment database Rent Jungle, compounding the hardships of the foreclosure crisis, the shuttering of several local agricultural businesses and surging substance abuse rates.
"The rents in Patterson are crazy," said Romelia Wiley, program manager of the local not-for-profit organization Community Housing & Shelter Services. "Why? I-5."
The freeway offers commuters access to high-paying job centers near the coast, and the number of people commuting to the Bay Area from the portion of the Central Valley that includes Patterson more than doubled between 1990 and 2013, to about 65,000 people, or at least 15% of the local workforce, according to an analysis by the University of the Pacific.
Why don't they build up instead of out?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:01PM
Well that is the point. I have lived in the Bay Area, in Livermore and Fremont, and I live in Brooklyn now. The Bay Area's real estate prices are crazy out of control, and it doesn't have to be that way. The population density there is nowhere near what it is in NYC (inner core of SF notwithstanding). It's all low-rise sprawl. That also means their infrastructure usage is inefficient. More roads, more pipes, more schools, more everything. That means more traffic and more water usage. There are parts of San Francisco or maybe Oakland that are walkable, but for most of it you need to drive and sit in traffic for hours. Every day.
All of that is a choice folks there have made, and have codified in their zoning. If they chose to build up instead of sprawl, they would begin to realize better economies of scale with many aspects of their communities, housing prices and commute times among them.
Washington DC delenda est.