|
|
Posted at 12:12 a.m. PDT Tuesday, September 7, 1999 Dark side of the boom Finding solutions for growing pains BY LAURA KURTZMAN Mercury News Staff Writer Everyone knows Silicon Valley has terrible traffic and overpriced real estate. But what can anyone do about it? Talk about it, for one thing. Next week, the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group will sponsor a daylong seminar aimed at stimulating a community discussion about the dark side of the valley's prosperity, a future of gridlock and sky-high housing prices sketched out in a new report by the Association of Bay Area Governments. By educating people about the problems, the manufacturing group hopes local residents and politicians will be more likely to accept unpalatable solutions, such as building high-density housing and paying for transportation improvements. ``In Silicon Valley, company and community leaders must continue to partner if we're going to survive our own success,'' said Carl Guardino, president of the manufacturing group, which is holding the Sept. 14 conference at Stanford University's Kresge Auditorium. The ABAG report sketches a grim transportation future for Silicon Valley, as the robust local economy draws even more cars onto its congested freeways, while local cities continue to lag in building enough housing. The number of cars traveling into Silicon Valley will increase a stunning 50 percent by 2020, according to the report. Most of the growth will come from the East Bay, although more commuters will be streaming in from areas surrounding the valley, including Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey and San Mateo counties. A similar conference last year drew 450 participants to Santa Clara University for an interactive debate on how to shape the future. This year's conference will feature 100 laptop computers that participants can use to vote on how they think the valley should develop. Commuting woes to grow The report, called Projections '99, predicts demographic, transportation, housing and education trends for the 21 cities in Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Cruz counties that make up Silicon Valley. Most of the statistics have been rehashed from the report ABAG did for the manufacturing group's conference last year. But the commuting numbers are new. Trips into Silicon Valley from the East Bay will increase 43 percent, from 84,000 per day to nearly 120,000 by 2020. From the Peninsula, trips will grow 32 percent, from 59,000 to nearly 78,000 daily trips. From Santa Cruz, trips will double, from 21,000 to 42,000 a day. And from the southern counties, trips will grow 25 percent, from 8,000 to 10,000. In education, the report notes that in Silicon Valley, one of every two starting teachers will quit teaching here within four years. When interviewed, they tell school administrators the main reason they're leaving is because of the high cost of housing. Meanwhile, the number of students in Silicon Valley will grow 10 percent, about 50,000 children, by 2010. And the valley's population as a whole will grow by 175,000 to 2.6 million. Economy to grow, too The bright spot, of course, is the economy. While jobs are not expected to grow as fast as they have in the last several years, the report predicts continued growth, much of it in southern Alameda County and the San Jose-Milpitas area, but also in the core Silicon Valley cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara. ``Things aren't bad,'' said Michelle Fadelli, a spokeswoman for ABAG. ``They're actually pretty good.'' But the economic growth has a downside. Just like in past years, the valley will continue to produce more jobs than homes, resulting in a housing shortfall of 100,000 by the year 2010. IF YOU'RE INTERESTED To register for ``Surviving Our Success: Solutions for the Next 10 Years,'' visit the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group's Web site at www.projections.org. . The conference is from 8:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sept. 14 at Stanford University's Kresge Auditorium. Contact Laura Kurtzman at lkurtzman@sjmercury.com or (408) 343-4524. |