The Silicon Valley identity crisis in in full-swing.
Last month, former Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commissioner Kate Vershov Downing became an internet sensation thanks to her resignation letter lamenting the lack of affordable housing in the city. The mayor has since responded, placing the blame on runaway jobs (yes, you read that right) and a behemoth tech industry whose expansion knows no bounds.
“Palo Alto’s greatest problem right now is the Bay Area’s massive job growth,” Mayor Patrick Burt recently told Curbed SF.
Go ahead and file that under ‘things you never thought you’d hear a mayor say ever.’
While on the surface, too much growth might seem like a good problem to have, the mayor insists it’s anything but. The explosion of tech is pricing regular people out of the market and “choking off the downtown,” he says. “It’s not healthy.”
Now, the mayor is ready to take his exasperation one step further by trying to enforce an obscure zoning regulation prohibiting businesses whose primary mission is research and development, including software coding companies.
Uh, what?
“This is crazy,” said Downing, who has been pointing to restrictive land-use policies as the primary cause of Palo Alto’s troubles. “This is Silicon Valley. We’ve been writing code here for decades.”
It’s like banning cheesemaking in Wisconsin or gambling in Vegas. You just don’t do it…. Right?
It all underscores the severity of the problems at hand. The housing situation is dire. There’s no doubt about that. Where the great minds diverge is on what to do about it.
Image Credit: Flickr User mastermaq, https://flic.kr/p/mybzqQ via (CC BY-SA 2.0)