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Timothy B. Lee, Contributor
I write about how technology shapes society
Tech|5/10/2012 @ 4:41PM |959 views
Why The Bay Area Should Have 11 Million Residents Today
1 comments, 1 called-out + Comment now + Comment now Wired covers an angel investor who has decided to stay on the sidelines as the market becomes less and less favorable for investors:
“As an investor Hartz points to the usual signs of too much money-chasing deals. The billboards on highway 101 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley touting startups no one has heard of. The bus stop signs in tech-heavy locales like Mountain View and Palo Alto advertising scads of engineering jobs.
“Everyone is competing for the same people, going after the same real estate, the same support services,” Hartz says. “The natural resources of the startup world are getting scarcer and scarcer, and the cost is getting higher and higher. It’s all an outgrowth of an abundance of capital.”
There’s an interesting question here that’s totally unaddressed in the article: why are “the natural resources of the startup world”—people, real estate, and support services—getting scarcer and scarcer? Silicon Valley is part of a large and highly-educated nation that currently has a high unemployment rate. If Silicon Valley firms are desperate to hire more engineers, and investors are desperate to invest in more startups, why don’t more engineers move from other parts of the country, where demand is depressed, to Silicon Valley?
Obviously, many have. But since 1990, the population of the Bay Area has grown by less than 20 percent. That’s slower than the growth rate for the country as a whole. Silicon Valley is creating new opportunities at a rapid pace, but relatively few people are moving there to take advantage of them.
Probably the most important reason, as Ryan Avent has pointed out, is that housing regulations make it impossible to build a significant number of new housing units. A variety of regulations—minimum lot sizes, maximum building heights, parking mandates, restrictions on renting out basements, and so forth—place an upper bound on the number of units of housing that can be built in any given municipality in the Bay Area. And developers have simply run out of new places to build that are within a reasonable commuting distance of Silicon Valley or San Francisco...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothyl...sidents-today/
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I totally agree. Beginning in the 1960s, we systematically zoned ourselves into a stand still as far as growth.
In the Bay Area its not uncommon to drive through large swaths of undeveloped land that separate larger population centers. The East Bay and Peninsula both have tons of developable land that should have made way for tens of thousands of homes.
I read an extremely interesting book in the Moraga town library several years ago when I was kid. It was from the 1930s and it was a regional blueprint for development. Planners back during that time envisioned a sea of development across the entire East Bay Hills all the way to where the San Ramon and Diablo Valleys are now. There was supposed to a second "Caldecott Tunnel" and major freeway that ran from present day Danville thru the East Bay Hills that burrowed its way out to where the Oakland Zoo currently sits, and so on.
They actually predicted that the Bay Area should have had 13 million people by 2000(or 1990, cant remember). You look at the Bay Area's intensely robust economy which at last count is over half a trillion dollars($544 Billion in 2010) and one gets the impression that our economy is actually supposed to support many more people that what we currently have.
Furthermore, if we expand out of the Bay Area and look at the 100-120 mile radius around Downtown SF, we see that there is a large megalopolis-like region that is currently home to 12 Million people. Here's a chart I made a while back regarding supercommuting comparing the number of persons commuting into the 11-county Bay Area Combined Statistical Area vs those commuting into the 5-county Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area:
I created this chart in response to a recent report about 'super commuting' cities where a report put together by a group from a NY university hypothesized that Los Angeles actually had 35,000 persons from the Bay Area commuting there, and I knew that this was a flat out inaccuracy, so I researched the data and it became clear that not only was there data inaccurate but also, the Bay Area has twice as many persons commuting in the bay area to work than the far larger LA Area(of course we need to keep in mind that the LA Area has 33,000 sq miles so if LA counties were tiny like NorCal counties, places like Temecula and Adelanto and Santa Clarita might be considered outside the CSA borders so LAs numbers would probably increase exponentially), nonethess the Bay Area is the supercommuter capital of the West Coast but their report stated otherwise. I eventually had a cordial exchange with the author of the report.
My findings confirmed what I already suspected, that based on county-to-county flows, the Bay Area had twice as many SUPERcommuters from within California than the Los Angeles Area. At least it did in 2000.
Here is the data for each county in CA:
Los Angeles Area to San Francisco Bay Area: 9,178
Los Angeles 5,099
Orange 1,909
Riverside 812
San Bernardino 791
Ventura 567
San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles Area: 4,984
Alameda 847
Contra Costa 896
Marin 237
Napa 82
San Benito 29
San Francisco 642
San Mateo 451
Santa Clara 946
Santa Cruz 157
Solano 362
Sonoma 335
Remaining California Counties
Bay Area: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Benito, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano and Sonoma Counties
Los Angeles: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties
Alpine
Bay Area 10
Los Angeles 2
Amador
Bay Area 470
Los Angeles 24
Butte
Bay Area 1,143
Los Angeles 131
Calaveras
Bay Area 1,100
Los Angeles 30
Colusa
Bay Area 114
Los Angeles 5
Del Norte
Bay Area 9
Los Angeles 0
El Dorado
Bay Area 1,688
Los Angeles 180
Fresno
Bay Area 1,729
Los Angeles 530
Glenn
Bay Area 112
Los Angeles 0
Humboldt
Bay Area 315
Los Angeles 60
Imperial
Bay Area 24
Los Angeles 846
Inyo
Bay Area 0
Los Angeles 161
Kern
Bay Area 300
Los Angeles 9,022
Kings
Bay Area 113
Los Angeles 108
Lake
Bay Area 2,933
Los Angeles 15
Lassen
Bay Area 42
Los Angeles 4
Madera
Bay Area 382
Los Angeles 145
Mariposa
Bay Area 237
Los Angeles 17
Mendocino
Bay Area 1,504
Los Angeles 46
Merced
Bay Area 4,899
Los Angeles 121
Modoc
Bay Area 7
Los Angeles 12
Mono
Bay Area 15
Los Angeles 188
Monterey
Bay Area 15,988
Los Angeles 225
Nevada
Bay Area 922
Los Angeles 52
Placer
Bay Area 2,712
Los Angeles 249
Plumas
Bay Area 22
Los Angeles 27
Sacramento
Bay Area 10,930
Los Angeles 764
San Diego
Bay Area 2,293
Los Angeles 28,759
San Joaquin
Bay Area 34,117
Los Angeles 439
San Luis Obispo
Bay Area 603
Los Angeles 981
Santa Barbara
Bay Area 259
Los Angeles 4,224
Shasta
Bay Area 630
Los Angeles 78
Sierra
Bay Area 41
Los Angeles 13
Siskiyou
Bay Area 105
Los Angeles 21
Stanislaus
Bay Area 13,761
Los Angeles 236
Sutter
Bay Area 484
Los Angeles 14
Tehama
Bay Area 173
Los Angeles 14
Trinity
Bay Area 118
Los Angeles 7
Tulare
Bay Area 275
Los Angeles 442
Tuolumne
Bay Area 765
Los Angeles 72
Yolo
Bay Area 4,920
Los Angeles 71
Yuba
Bay Area 197
Los Angeles 29
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