Job Sprawl: The untalked about sprawl

[skunkachunks]

Originally Posted by fflint

The Santa Clara Valley and the southern end of the San Francisco Peninsula--'Silicon Valley' more or less--is indeed a poster child for job sprawl (as well as residential sprawl). Office parks and single family homes carpet the valley from one end to another, and relative to overall regional employment downtown San Jose is anemic. NIMBYism makes significant densification a political non-starter in the vast majority of areas, and state tax rules incentivize cities to zone for commercial development while disincentivizing residential. People buy or rent their homes wherever they can afford, and commute to work by car--sometimes dozens and dozens of miles each way. Other than beefing up existing transit corridors and building high-density wherever politically possible, post-war suburban Silicon Valley is pretty hopeless.

That said, there are some pre-war bright spots and they're all along the Caltrain corridor. Caltrain, which now carries 60,000 daily passengers, is the successor operation of a commuter railroad that first began service in 1863. The cities that sprang up around the stations are not, as you put it, "purely suburban." They certainly do contain hopeless suburban areas, but they also contain historic urban, dense, walkable and transit-oriented areas that grew over the years around the stations. Some of those areas are quite extensive, as in San Jose, San Mateo, Palo Alto, Redwood City and Mountain View. Others are less extensive, but still function as urban areas, like Burlingame and Santa Clara. And while Sunnyvale tore down its historic downtown for a stupid mall that only lasted a couple decades, it has been retrofitted and dense mixed-use development is going in all around the station.

I think we're trying to say the same thing. Mine just might have been poorly worded. But yes, because of the CalTrain, we have nice urbanization in a swath of land (Silicon Valley) that is generally characterized by suburban development. What I was building on was that as more people moved into SV, the transit infrastructure improved around it and led to further urbanization.