Tag Archives: San Jose

Silicon Valley’s Housing Crisis

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photo by Smitha Murthy

Drop in the Bucket?

Realtor.com quoted me in Could There Really Be Relief Ahead for Silicon Valley’s Housing Crisis? It opens,

Finally! A glimmer of hope has appeared in Silicon Valley’s housing crisis. Amid gloomy and downright terrifying stories about astronomical home prices and tighter-than-tight inventories forcing well-paid tech workers to live in vans, pay $2 million for a tear-down shack, or ponder commuting to work from Las Vegas, there seems to be some good news for a change: City Council members in Mountain View, CA, approved plans to build 10,250 new homes in the area.

Given that Mountain View has only about 32,000 homes total, this will increase its housing inventory by a whopping 32%—all purportedly within “walking distance” (possibly a bit of a long walk) of tech giant Google, which has long been lobbying on this front and will no doubt break out the Champagne once developers break ground. Sure, it may be years before these homes become a reality, but even the idea of them may have many locals (or those moving there) daring to dream. Might this new influx of housing cause home prices to drop within reasonable reach?

As logical as this renewed optimism about Silicon Valley’s housing market might seem, experts aren’t so sure home prices will budge all that much.

“This news in itself will not drive down prices much,” says David Reiss, research director at the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School. “While a 10,000-unit commitment is significant, Silicon Valley as a whole has about 3 million people living there.”

So if you consider the population of the entire area—many of whom would likely kill to move to Mountain View—10,000 new houses would house only 0.3% of these people. For you math-challenged, that’s less than a measly half-percent! 

And even though the number of homes may be edging upward, so are the number of people moving there.

“Silicon Valley remains a booming economy, so it’s likely that the population will continue to grow, further driving up prices,” Reiss continues.

As further evidence that more homes doesn’t necessarily lead to cheaper home prices, Florida Realtor® Cara Ameer points to another historically hot market: New York City.

“In New York, more new buildings has had no impact on housing prices or rents,” she says. If anything, the only change New Yorkers noticed is their neighborhood got a lot more cramped. The same will likely be true for picture-perfect Mountain View.

“The biggest thing people will see is increased congestion,” says Amer, “with many more residents, cars, and the need for schools and additional services.”

In fact, fears of overcrowding might even galvanize current homeowners in the area to show up en force at future City Council meetings to fight the greenlighting of additional developments—that is, unless they’re out-muscled by employee-hungry firms such as Google.

“As key businesses realize that the lack of housing is hurting their ability to recruit and retain good employees, it is possible that Mountain View’s decision is a harbinger for more pro-development decisions throughout Silicon Valley,” Reiss explains. “Current homeowners, called ‘homevoters,’ tend to make their anti-growth views known to local officials, but once the interests of local businesses focus on the lack of workforce housing, it can change the dynamics.

“These are powerful companies. The result is that those decisions can become more pro-growth than is typical for suburban communities.”

Cool Mortgage Tool

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The Urban Institute has created a cool interactive tool to map mortgages in the United States. Enterprise describes the tool as follows: it

maps 12 years of data on more than 100 million mortgage originations throughout the U.S. by race and ethnicity, illustrating how the housing boom and bust affected borrowers of different backgrounds by metropolitan area. According to the data, not only were African-American and Hispanic communities particularly damaged by the housing bust, but they have also been the least likely to recover since the recession. The map also shows how geographically uneven the housing recovery has been. For instance, while mortgage originations have only decreased 18 percent in San Francisco and San Jose since 2005, they have fallen by 39 percent in Detroit.

The Urban Institute argues that

For a full mortgage market recovery, we need to expand the credit box again. A number of reforms can be undertaken to encourage lending to creditworthy borrowers who would have qualified before the housing boom. A return to 2005 and 2006 lending practices would be ill-fated, but the pendulum has unquestionably swung too far. Today’s tight standards have locked out many prospective borrowers from homeownership, disproportionately preventing African American and Hispanic families from building wealth and benefiting from the recovery.

There is a growing outcry to loosen credit. It is important that those calling for that loosening also support reforms that ensure that new credit is sustainable credit.  The last thing that people need is a mortgage that has a high likelihood of ending up in default. The Urban Institute acknowledges this point, but it can get lost in the political fight over the future of housing finance.

Policy folk also need to better understand how homeownership helps households build wealth, particularly given the rapid changes in the mortgage market. If households can readily access the equity in their homes through home equity loans, homeownership’s wealth-building function becomes more of a consumption spreading one.  That is, if homeowners access equity in the present in order to supplement current income, they will not be building wealth over the long term.

The robust Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should protect consumers from predatory attempts to get them to refinance, but people may not protect their future selves from their current desires. This may just be the way it goes, but we should not make claims about wealth building until we know more about how homeownership in the 21st century actually promotes it.