Housing is the number one concern for many East Palo Alto Residents. Rents have doubled, even tripled, in the last decade and many residents are rent burdened. Rental units themselves have not changed - and in many instances are in worse shape than they were a decade ago - the price has just gone up.
The root cause of the increase in housing costs is very simple: we have not built enough housing in East Palo Alto. In particular, we have not built nearly enough market rate housing. As a result, the existing housing has been taking over by often affluent tech workers looking for places to live close to their jobs. East Palo Alto is no longer dangerous, and after several decades when fear of crime kept out most working professionals, EPA is now seen as a convenient location to live if you work at Stanford, Google, Meta, or any of the many technology companies located within a short drive of EPA.
Every city and county is required by state law to plan for how it will meet local housing needs across all income levels. These targets are set through the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) process, and progress toward those goals is measured by how many housing permits they’ve issued. Here are East Palo Alto's results from the last RHNA cycle, from 2015-2022:
In this cycle, EPA overproduced Very Low Income & Low Income Housing, but fell far short on Moderate and Above Moderate Housing. The results of this are easy to see in EPA - rents are up, housing prices are up, and EPA is increasingly rent burdened.
This analogy I saw on Twitter may help people understand why it is important to build market rate housing. Think of housing like a football stadium:
- Rich fans move in and want more VIP skyboxes
- NIMBYs block it: "skyboxes are not affordable"
- Rich fans instead get lower-bowl seats- this pushes middle-income fans to the bleachers
- Now low-income fans can't afford any seats
We are two years into our 8 year RHNA Cycle for 2023-2031 and are again falling short:
This time, we are falling short everywhere, from Very Low Income to Above Moderate Income.
Clearly, something needs to change. Our current strategy has not worked and will not work if we continue on the same path. We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Housing prices will continue to rise in East Palo Alto, and folks will leave a city that is increasingly unaffordable.
Partnership for the Bay's Future has an online database if you want to look up East Palo Alto and any other regional city - link is below:
