SANTA CLARA — Solutions to the Bay Area’s increasingly brutal traffic and housing woes won’t necessarily arrive with ease, said business, government and political leaders Friday, at a conference focusing on Silicon Valley’s ability to compete against other innovation hubs.
The Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project conference, held in Santa Clara, focused primarily on solutions to the region’s toughest challenges, but also brought sobering revelations about the area’s difficulties.
“For the first time ever, we are seeing more people leaving Silicon Valley than are migrating into this area,” said Brian Brennan, a senior vice president with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which sponsored the conference.
During 2016, Silicon Valley and several other innovation hubs experienced a net exodus of residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates. Silicon Valley endured the departure of an average 42 residents a month.
Solutions discussed at the conference included finding ways to create increased synergy among jobs, housing and transit links.
“We have to do more than move people to destinations; we have to move destinations to where people are,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told the gathering. “We have to create a plan for proximity.”
Future BART lines in locations such as Santa Clara County were touted as crucial components to create the proximity approach urged by Mayor Liccardo. He also suggested that regional planning and a system of incentives are needed to prod cities in the Bay Area to ensure that jobs, increasingly, are located near housing.
“It’s fair to say that we are all losers if we are always stuck in traffic,” Liccardo said.
From 2010 through 2016, the number of payroll jobs in Silicon Valley increased 29 percent — but the total number of housing units in the region rose a feeble 4 percent. Silicon Valley’s population rose just 8 percent over that period, according to a report formally presented Friday by the Leadership Group.
The lack of housing has worsened traffic in Silicon Valley at a much faster pace than other tech hubs, as people commute to work in the Valley from outlying areas.
From 2010 through 2016, average commute times soared 18.9 percent in Silicon Valley. Over the same period, commute times rose 14 percent in Seattle, 8.2 percent in Southern California, 7.7 percent in Boston, 7.1 percent in Austin and 6.3 percent in New York City.
But the leaders who gathered pointed out that one major solution has arrived in the form of Senate Bill 1, authored by state Sen. Jim Beall, a Santa Clara County Democrat. The measure created a $5.24 billion yearly funding package for transportation and transit.
Attendees applauded tech companies such as Adobe Systems and Google for taking steps to place jobs near mass transit and housing, and to seek out expansions in urban settings such as downtown San Jose.
San Jose-based Adobe Systems occupies a downtown campus of three office towers and in January bought a site for a fourth tower to expand its headquarters.
Mountain View-based Google and a development ally are buying properties on the western edges of downtown San Jose near the Diridon train station for a potential transit-oriented village where 15,000 to 20,000 employees of the search giant could work.
Without solutions, the region’s problems could become insurmountable, warned Carl Guardino, president of the Leadership Group.
“We can either rename Highway 101 as the 101 parking lot, or we can address the challenges we face here,” Guardino said.
