One reason that Bay Area cities resort to approving large amounts of [tech] office space is in part because single-family homeowners do not pay property tax levels that keep pace with the cost of providing services. So local govts have to look toward alternate strategies.
Take a look at San Jose's sale of land to Google exactly one month ago: mercurynews.com/2018/12/04/san…
Why did they do this? Well, actually, San Jose has a housing surplus (!) compared to neighboring Santa Clara County cities. Shouldn't that be exciting? sanjose.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&… 
Well, actually it's complicated. Because it means that San Jose doesn't have enough tax revenue to cover the costs of operating the city. sanjose.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&…
It was actually losing net $110M/year on servicing residential areas, which are mostly single-family home areas, compared to office & employment areas, where it was generating net $124M/year. spur.org/sites/default/…
Tim, who wrote the piece at the top, has a predictable response of just taxing tech/the rich more, which, in light of last year's tax bill, makes a lot of sense. But it also actually makes our system more structurally dependent on attracting tech & HNW people in the long-run.
Which is basically the California model. Capped, assessed property tax rates that are inheritable that get priced into ever higher land values. Then the cities & the state need to tie themselves to a small number of extremely HNW people to float services.
I am not really sure how to fix this. That said, the plan that Tim is criticizing also expands emergency rent caps, emergency rental assistance, just cause for eviction across the Bay Area, promotes $1.5B in new taxes to fund affordable housing, so 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️. mercurynews.com/2018/12/12/emp…
