> Housing in Silicon valley doesn't grow at the same rate as number of people coming here
Bingo. And why not?
Bingo. And why not?
Because California property owners don't want it to. The artificial scarcity drives up property values. Take a look at Brisbane, they fought residential development tooth and nail claiming that people should just work in Brisbane but live in San Francisco.
The Bay Area's population has grown by 8.5% in the last 10 years. [0] Please, that's not "Manhattan". That's one person on your block converting their garage into a rentable unit.
Those "existing homeowners" are really messing things up for everyone because they don't want Bob to turn his garage into a rental? Somehow I think there's more to it than that.
[0]: https://www.kqed.org/news/11741275/map-the-bay-area-leads-ca...
600k people is about as much as Seattle proper. Which happens to span 83.94 sq mi. In less than 10 years. That's _a lot_ of construction.
No residential neighborhood in the Bay Area needs to turn into "Manhattan" to house 600,000 extra people. If every block added a house we'd have extra housing to spare. Zoning prevents a ton of development, and everyone pretends they're fighting "Manhattan".
At Manhattan densities, the Bay Area would house 468 million people. That's not what's happening, and no one is advocating for that.
We don't need to build Seattle in the Bay to house everyone. We just need cities to stop dragging permits out years and every planning committee to stop saying "no" to any small increases in density.
How much construction it is isn't super relevant -- if it's profitable, it will happen!
Of course I wouldn't mind becoming more like Manhattan in some ways. Compared to how pedestrian hostile the Bay Area is, Manhattan is heaven.