Pleasanton leaders mull solutions for workforce housing shortage

Solving the jobs-housing imbalance in Pleasanton will require building more housing for those currently commuting to work in the city boundaries, but also encouraging local employers to hire more locally, officials told the Pleasanton City Council on Tuesday.

While reviewing the city’s sixth cycle Housing Element draft preliminary report at this week’s regular council meeting, community development manager Ellen Clark said, “It’s going to take more than this Housing Element to solve the jobs-housing imbalance in Pleasanton.”

Part of fulfilling the city’s mandated Regional Housing Needs Allocation, the forthcoming Housing Element update covers an eight-year period from 2023 to 2031, and requires local municipalities to identify sites within their boundaries that are suitable for housing development. Building on those sites in that same timeframe is not required, however.

With most of Pleasanton’s workforce living outside its borders, only 8% of jobs in the city are also taken by employees currently living in Pleasanton. Clark said it “will probably require a couple of different angles of policy attack to address this more.”

The city “is a net importer of workers for jobs at all wage levels,” though the report said “this data point is slightly different than the percentage of employed residents who also hold jobs in Pleasanton, which has ranged from 22.9% in 2002 to 15.2% in 2018.”

Staff added, “Although the 2018 data point reflects a substantial decline since 2002, the 2018 number is an improvement from the lowest percentage seen (in 2010), when the proportion of Pleasanton’s workforce employed locally was 13.7%.”

BART access is one reason Pleasanton is a jobs center, Mayor Karla Brown said during discussion that evening: “If your spouse works in Silicon Valley and you live in Milpitas, coming to Pleasanton is easy because there’s very little traffic that direction.”

“It’s one of the reasons so many companies seek Pleasanton, is because we’re that reverse commute option. It would make sense to me that we’re a jobs center and will continue to be a jobs center,” Brown said.

During the public hearing, resident Jocelyn Combs said, “What happens in Silicon Valley ripples out to us and I think what we’re seeing is the housing need is rippling.”

“Pleasanton thrives as a community because of its residents but Pleasanton thrives financially because of our businesses,” Combs said. “If Pleasanton can’t attract employees because it is not housing friendly, it threatens our city and our quality of life.”

Combs added, “This new Housing Element extends through 2031, that’s 10 years away. Who knows what the next 10 years will bring, but I can say with some certainty that if we don’t do something different with our housing, nothing will change and the problems will only get worse.”

Former councilmember Becky Dennis said that officials must “understand where our workers are coming from, their income level, and their housing needs” when building new homes in Pleasanton.

High housing costs are mentioned several times in the report, which states that Pleasanton’s population has a median income of $156,400 — about 57% higher than the $99,406 median income throughout Alameda County — but almost one in five local households are low-income and earn less than 80% of the area median income (AMI), while about 7.6% of Pleasanton households are extremely low-income.

According to the report, Pleasanton has fewer cost-burdened households compared to the county. But despite reporting higher incomes, almost 24% of local homeowners are “cost-burdened” and spend 30% or more of their gross income on housing costs, while nearly 44% of renters said the same.

More renters in Pleasanton live in cost-burdened households, which must earn about $226,080 — at least 180% of AMI — to afford market rent. Another 21% of renters also spend half or more of their income on housing, compared to 10% of homeowners.

“You really need that information to get the most out of the affordable housing that you build,” Dennis said. “Both because your objective in the era of planning to mitigate climate change is to bring that work for us as close to the city as possible, and you don’t really know the housing that they need until you understand their income.”

Dennis added, “You can’t really calculate the savings as carbon sequestration unless you know how far they come from so that’s why I think that that is a very important metric.”

Vice Mayor Julie Testa asked if the city has “looked at the possibility of incentivizing our local employers to hire local.”

“An expectation that everyone who lives in a community will also work there is a pretty unrealistic expectation, but perhaps we could do some incentivizing that would improve that a little bit,” Testa said, such as employers asking job applicants if they live or work in a 30-mile radius.

Testa also mentioned “coordinating with employers to train and prepare local residents and graduation students for local jobs,” which she said “that kind of coordination and preparation” would help address the issue.

The council also gave feedback including “refinements or clarification” to each section, with additional sections to be brought forward at future meetings and include a draft Housing Sites Inventory and an Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) assessment. Once data from the 2020 Census is finalized and available, staff will review and incorporate key points as needed into the final preliminary report.

A “more detailed review and discussion” are both expected to take place during one or more meetings in early 2022. The Housing and Planning commissions will also review and solicit feedback on the site inventory list during meetings in October and November.