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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 Grishnakh on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:38PM (1 child)
This sounds like something the free market should be able to solve, in theory, in a way: (warning: this does strain the definition of "free market")
As the OP to your post said, it'd be better if zoning were controlled at the state level, so that self-interested property owners wouldn't have as much control over local zoning decisions.
So, better-run states should pass legislation to make this so, and construction in those states should increase to meet demand, and housing prices should go way down. Workers and employers should then migrate to those states, away from crappy states that don't enact such legislation. Eventually, these asshole self-interested property owners should go bankrupt because their local economies will collapse, and their housing values along with them.
Unfortunately, I just don't seem to be seeing any such intelligent legislation in the US. They did pass something similar over in Japan though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @10:08PM
> So, better-run states should pass legislation to make this so
And that is a hard one to make happen for the same reason it is hard to get zoning boards to rezone - passing that legislation means fighting all of the same voters, but state-wide instead of just one locality at a time. It can still be done, but it's going to be an up-hill battle, you'd have to directly appeal to renters. But property owners are more likely to vote than renters.