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Silicon Valley getting serious about severe housing shortage [SFChronicle.com]

 

In the 18 years since Google was born in a garage, Mountain View has ridden a wave of unprecedented job growth. But alongside the boom has come a slew of other issues familiar across the Bay Area: soaring rents, snarled traffic and people living in vehicles because they can’t afford apartments.

Google is starting to address the crisis head-on. Its parent company, Alphabet, which employs more than 20,000 people in a city of 80,000, has proposed building 330 units of housing not far from its headquarters.

It’s the first time Google has filed paperwork with the city to build housing — and a sign of just how acute the problem has become for technology companies, which are generating jobs much faster than their communities are building homes.

“It’s kind of a new thing in our area,” Mountain View Mayor Pat Showalter said of Google’s project, which includes office space as well as housing. The Bay Area, she added, has “under-built for decades.”

[For more of this story, written by Wendy Lee, go to http://www.sfchronicle.com/bus...-severe-10788159.php]

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