Excellent advice; I hope all board members and candidates follow it. I especially liked, "When you must make a controversial decision ... be the activist by going out to all the communities affected". This and other points supporting the idea that the board is a public body and needs to make its deliberations public to the greatest extent possible, and needs to listen carefully and thoughtfully to what the public has to say, is good advice for any public body.
Make Silicon Valley a single city
This is a thoughtful piece laying out a possible way to improve government administration of the San Francisco Bay Area. But I'm not sure I agree it is the best way. I would certainly want the East Bay, from Fremont (itself a combination of smaller towns) and Milpitas to Oakland and Berkeley, to be included.
I hope the Association of Bay Area Governments (http://www.abag.ca.gov) can be strengthened and that might be enough. However, housing is an important aspect of their work and it has not been very successful, mainly because they lack real authority--exactly what James Kempf's proposed city would have. The fundamental problem with housing is that there is no longer enough land for everyone to own their own affordable single family detached home on its own plot of land, in reasonable proximity to their jobs. Indeed, considering the number of jobs in the area, the only housing choice I can see is a great many high-rise apartment and condominium buildings.
I don't know what the actual jobs/housing ratio is, but there are not nearly enough housing units. I was very sorry when the City Council rejected Google's plan to build housing units for its employees. Company towns of the 19th century West got a well-deserved bad rap because they turned the employees into indentured servants--a form of economic slavery. The City Council could easily have prevented that outcome while still allowing new housing North of Bayshore, and should have done it.
Housing is not the only Area-wide problem. Kempf noted other problems and, no doubt, there are still others. Would the kind of city envisioned by Kempf be able to find a solution to these problems without introducing problems of its own?
