Opinion: Measure V will build housing for San Jose families

The story of San Jose has been one of hard-working families, making their way into the middle class and creating a better life for their children.

It is the story of my family and probably yours. My paternal grandparents arrived here in their youth, worked hard, opened a small grocery store and built a modest home on Fifth Street. My grandfather received only an eighth grade education, but he was determined that his children would graduate from college.

That generation created the middle-class dream. It remains for our generation to keep that dream alive.

This is San Jose’s story, more than any other city’s: the place where children can thrive and achieve their hard-working parents’ dreams. A 2014 Harvard study found that children growing up in San Jose had greater upward mobility than in any other U.S. city metro over the prior three decades.

Sadly, that narrative is changing. This year, San Jose became the least affordable metropolitan area in the nation. As we hear stories of our teachers, firefighters, nurses, mechanics, bus drivers, cooks, construction workers, and cops moving to less expensive regions, we know we’re losing much. We’re losing what makes San Jose work, and what makes our community special.

In this crisis, we must act boldly and act together. That requires, first, that we build more housing in San Jose, and throughout the Bay Area, to keep pace with the region’s job growth.

Second, it requires that we identify funding sources to build more housing affordable to our middle class, and to do much more to help our homeless residents get off our streets, out of our creeks, and into permanent housing.

In 2011, the California Legislature eliminated the primary source for local affordable housing construction — redevelopment agencies — which provided more than $40 million to San Jose annually that we used to build more affordable housing than any other California city. The loss of redevelopment has transformed the problem to a crisis.

We’ve launched several efforts to try to bridge the gap, with 928 affordable homes now under construction and another 1,682 rent-restricted apartments in the development pipeline. San Jose will fall far short of the 10,000 affordable homes we need to build in the next five years, however, without substantially more resources — $548 million, according to a recent Housing Department analysis.

Measure V will provide $450 million in bonds and will leverage several billion more dollars of private, federal and state investment to enable us to build thousands of affordable homes. As we build new housing for our middle class families, seniors, veterans and struggling neighbors, we’ll also inject billions of dollars of new residential investment that can revitalize struggling neighborhoods.

That’s why such a broad, bipartisan coalition has united around Measure V on the November ballot — including the League of Women Voters and nearly every major business, labor, environmental, affordable housing, good-government and non-profit organization in the Valley. Measure V has earned such broad support because everyone agrees that two hard-working people should be able to afford one decent place to live.

Under state law, we cannot use Measure V dollars to increase city salaries, pensions or any purpose other than building housing. The measure mandates the use of strict citizen oversight, annual audits and full public hearings to ensure that we use every dollar in a cost-effective manner.

Hard-working middle-class families built San Jose. Our city, our schools, our hospitals and our businesses can only run today if we can keep attracting and retaining ambitious people seeking to create a better future for their children.

Let’s make room for our hard-working San Jose families — and for our middle class — by voting “yes” on Measure V.

Sam Liccardo is mayor of San Jose.

Originally published at www.mercurynews.com on October 13, 2018.