A Vision of Transit-Oriented Equity

Imagine living in an affordable home on the west side of Menlo Park, where you can send your kids to the best schools in the Bay Area, and you can live within walking distance to the best jobs in the country. Because you don’t spend much time commuting, you can spend more time with your children after school, working on homework together or watching their soccer games. You’d have time to make dinner, keep the house clean, and generally have a little work/life balance.

Unfortunately, for many people who work in Menlo Park, this is a pipe dream, and far from reality. We have a large and growing problem with the shortage of housing, particularly affordable housing. According to San Mateo County’s official count, the number of people living in RVs increased by 127% this year*.

What we also have is acres of underutilized land, paid for by the taxpayers, in several of the wealthy communities along the Caltrain line. We’ve calculated that Caltrain owns over 40 developable acres in San Mateo County alone**.

Although the problem of people needing shelter is large and growing, the solutions are not mysterious. Building affordable housing requires three things: land, money and political leadership. Everyone knows that land is scarce and valuable in the Bay Area. But not everyone knows that there are acres of publicly-owned land, many of them along the El Camino Real corridor, that could be used to build the housing we desperately need.

In the past several years, both Redwood City and Foster City built 185 new homes on public land.   

We’re asking the Caltrain Board to pass an affordable housing policy that would:

• Prioritize housing on the land they develop
• Require at least 20% of those homes to be affordable

As we write, there are thousands of people living without shelter, just trying to scrape by in one of the wealthiest regions. Let’s pass this policy without delay!

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*Source: https://cmo.smcgov.org/blog/2019-07-01/county-san-mateo-releases-one-day-homeless-count-data
**Acreage is based on assessor’s data. Caltrain staff dispute this number but have not provided any rationale for incorrect assessor’s data or alternative information.