It’s not sufficient to just build massive amounts of high-density housing in a never-ending race to keep up with more commercial office space. You have to think about where you’re going to put new schools, new parks, new retail, and new transportation, both road expansion and mass transit. Naturally, developers are in it only to maximize their short term profit so they make all sorts of promises that they don’t fulfill, and are able to get away with it because these smaller cities lack the legal expertise to craft bullet-proof agreements. In Palo Alto, Sand Hill Property is being fined a measly $1000 per day for failing to provide the legally mandated grocery store at Edgewood Plaza. Palo Alto’s response: writing the developer a letter—Peter Pau must be terribly scared—not.

In Cupertino, when there was a temporary dip in school-age children, the two school districts rushed out and sold or leased schools. They’ve been gradually taking back the leased-out properties, though there are still two elementary schools and one high school that need to be reclaimed. But the sold-off properties became housing, with a small park. When the housing stock finally began to turn over number of school-age children skyrocketed they were in serious trouble. Insufficient money to build new permanent classroom buildings, roads that were never intended to handle the amount of traffic, auditoriums, gymnasiums, cafeterias, playgrounds, and fields that were inadequate. The beneficiaries of this short-sightedness were developers and the manufacturers of portable classrooms.

Then high-density housing began to be constructed on former commercial property and school enrollment skyrocketed again, and more portables were added. No money for permanent buildings, though a few were finally built. Every summer you see trucks hauling more portables to the schools. "What did one portable say to the other portable? See you on the playground."

Developer fees are set artificially low by state law, laws which the developers lobbied for. Proposition 13 loopholes ensure that commercial property is not reassessed when sold. Parcel taxes are assessed per parcel, not per housing unit, so there is a big incentive to build rental housing, not for-sale housing, which screws over the schools and any other parcel tax beneficiary.

The root cause needs to be addressed. It’s money in politics where developers get laws passed that benefit themselves at the expense of residents. So there’s no money for mass transit, schools, parks, roads, etc.. Prop 13, the third rail of California politics desperately needs to be changed so it applies solely to owner-occupied residential housing, and not to commercial property or rental housing. In Cupertino you can see some older condo complexes that are more than 50% rental properties now. The owners pay miniscule property taxes, and rent the units out to families with two or three children. $2000 in yearly property taxes doesn’t pay for even ¼ of one child’s public school expenses, yet the owner is raking in $3500-4000 a month in rent.

If you look at major cities throughout the world, they build transit systems that allow residents to commute quickly from outlying areas. The LIRR and PATH in the NYC area. Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Munich, Frankfurt, Paris, etc.. BART did this, but they stopped too soon. It needs to go through Livermore and continue out to Tracy and Stockton, as well as going north to Santa Rosa. CalTrain needs to continue to Salinas. But in the U.S. we are unwilling to fund mass transit through higher vehicle fees and fuel taxes.