EDITORIAL: Housing will be a challenge EDITORIAL: Housing will be a challenge (August 17, 2005)

As Peninsula homeowners sit back and smile as their real estate values increase at double digit rates, they may not be aware of the major downside in this market: the increasing inability of many local workers to afford homes near where they work and even in the Bay Area.

Escalating housing prices have been worrying education and local government officials for years, as they see more and more teachers, police officers and firefighters move to the Central Valley and even Sacramento to find an affordable place to live. This eastward migration produces one of the area's major headaches -- the daily congestion that chokes freeways as commuters drive into and out of the job-rich, housing-poor Bay Area.

The huge housing-to-jobs imbalance recently spurred the San Mateo County supervisors to advance a proposal designed to bring some of those commuters back into the fold, by providing assistance to local developers and communities that want to build housing, particularly along mass transit corridors. The supervisors recently hired former East Palo Alto mayor Duane Bay, a veteran on affordable housing issues, to lead the effort, which will be backed by the county's Housing Endowment and Regional Trust, HEART, a voluntary joint powers authority of citizens and elected officials from 12 of the 20 cities and towns in the county.

The county's hands are tied since most of the available land is under the control of cities and towns, but the idea of HEART is to convince towns with high land values to contribute money to the fund, while communities willing to contribute land can provide sites to build condominiums and apartments. The HEART fund could streamline permit processing to save developers time (and therefore money) and could provide seed money in the form of loans or contributions to get a project off the ground.

In this part of the Peninsula, where home values are high and neighbors tend to oppose dense housing projects, it may be difficult for the county-supported housing to get going. Contributions from local governments here could help, but Menlo Park, for example, is being pummeled by huge losses of sales tax dollars in this still-recovering local economy.

Even so, County leaders are on the right track. The lack of affordable housing remains the major unsolved problem, and it will only get worse as more older homes are bulldozed and replaced by multi-million-dollar homes. But there are plenty of old commercial sites on the Peninsula near the transit corridor that could easily be converted to new housing, if local governments are willing to adjust zoning laws. Given the current high vacancy rate of commercial property, it seems an opportune time to convert such land to a mix of retail and residential, provided it can be done at a price that can produce affordable housing.

We have seen many efforts to tackle this problem over the years, and the county's plan is a sound one, even if it makes only a small dent in the problem. At least, we are moving in the right direction.

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