Heart & Home is a column by Josh Ishimatsu
Synopsis: Josh phones it in this month.
A little bit short on bandwidth this month and I don’t have the time to write a full column/blog post for Heart and Home. So, instead, I want to highlight a couple of recent articles that are amongst those listed below in the What We’re Reading section of the newsletter:
- Housing, Tech and Taxes: 50 Years of Unaffordability in the Bay Area
- Silicon Valley is booming. So why does the system feel like it’s breaking?
These are both pretty deep and demanding pieces, with a lot of information, stories, and data (most of the data is courtesy of Joint Venture’s excellent Silicon Valley Index). They’re asking us to confront the present and future of Silicon Valley, our home. One of my big takeaways from these articles is that without massive amounts of new housing, especially but not limited to affordable housing, we are losing what makes this place special. This is something that I say a lot – it’s something we say a lot at SV@Home. This is not the only takeaway from these articles but it is a core one. And it ties to what’s becoming a common refrain for us, we can’t have good things without affordable housing.
Linking here to a few of my older columns on this theme: