Despite touting some of the most progressive housing laws in the state, Sunnyvale has only met a fraction of its state mandated housing goals, a new city report shows.<\/p>\n
The wealthy Silicon Valley tech hub is far from unique.<\/p>\n
Many cities in the Bay Area are behind on their housing goals as they\u00a0balance increasingly aggressive state housing laws\u00a0with political and economic headwinds, according to the latest data available, painting a murky future of a region failing to offer sufficient housing for its residents.<\/p>\n
RELATED:\u00a0Will blocked views and denser housing rattle one of Oakland\u2019s priciest neighborhoods?<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe housing crisis is, in my opinion, the single greatest challenge facing the state of California,\u201d said Sunnyvale Vice Mayor Richard Mehlinger. \u201cSunnyvale has historically been a leader in housing production \u2026 However, we must continue to do more.\u201d<\/p>\n According to state law, every eight years, local governments in California are assigned a housing goal<\/a> that includes the number of units\u00a0required at different levels of affordability. Cities must then submit a plan to the state to meet that goal by the end of the cycle, with the current cycle running from 2023 to 2031.<\/p>\n In 2024, the state awarded Sunnyvale a \u201cpro-housing\u201d designation \u2014 a label which only a small minority of California cities can boast \u2014\u00a0and scored it as one of the most pro-housing cities in the state. The city has planned for thousands of units of high-density housing and has created a local funding source to help reduce the cost of developing affordable housing.<\/p>\n Even so, the current snapshot of the city shows it is only one-sixth of the way towards its housing goals.<\/p>\n Despite approaching the halfway point in the cycle, the city has issued permits for just under 2,000 homes in its nearly 12,000-unit goal, according to the staff report. Its progress is concentrated in housing made for those with \u201cabove moderate income,\u201d defined as those who make more than $195,200 for a family of four.<\/p>\n Many jurisdictions across the state and the Bay Area are in a similar predicament.<\/p>\n While state housing counts won\u2019t be finalized until June, a Mercury News analysis of most recently available state data<\/a> found that California and the Bay Area are falling behind on housing at nearly every level. California was only 14% of the way to it\u2019s goal of 2.5 million units this cycle, according to the most recent data. Data from last year showed that the Bay Area as a whole lagged behind, as did multiple Bay Area counties and the Bay Area\u2019s largest cities \u2013 Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco.<\/p>\n Similar to Sunnyvale, almost every jurisdiction analyzed saw housing for those above moderate income make up the largest portion of new housing stock \u2013 though a few cities, such as San Jose and Oakland, saw more low-income housing.<\/p>\n Housing experts and advocates say that this slow progress and bias towards housing for higher earners is nothing new.<\/p>\n An analysis of the last housing cycle found that some cities would take hundreds of years to meet affordable housing goals<\/a> given their pace of building.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s endemic to the state of California,\u201d said Matthew Lewis, communications director for the pro-housing group California YIMBY. \u201cCities need to take a hard look in the mirror to take a look at what they can achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n Lewis argues that cities have not planned for enough denser housing, leaving much of the city to single family homes which house far fewer people. He also notes that lower-income housing often needs subsidies from the state and federal government to pencil out for developers. When every city is competing for limited government money, that leaves little to support much needed low-income housing, so he argues that cities must raise their own money to support housing efforts.<\/p>\n At the same time, Sunnyvale and the rest of the state face a shrinking pool of funds and growing economic uncertainty.<\/p>\n Most recent proposals for California\u2019s budget would cut $1.4 billion in funding from housing and homelessness programs<\/a> \u2014 a reduction of more than half compared to last year. At the federal level, the Trump administration announced plans to divert funding earmarked for permanent housing<\/a>, meaning California could lose hundreds of millions of dollars that would have gone to permanent housing or rental aid.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, political and economic conditions are making it more difficult for developers to build housing. Alison Cingolani, director of policy at the housing advocacy group Silicon Valley at Home, points to the rising cost of borrowing money due to higher interest rates, growing costs of construction labor \u2013 particularly as immigration enforcement restricts the workforce<\/a>, and the rising cost of materials with tariffs<\/a>. Vice Mayor Mehlinger added the nascent war with Iran<\/a> as the most recent factor adding to instability.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of unpredictability right now,\u201d said Cignolani.<\/p>\n Despite the gloomy forecast, there are some glimmers of hope for housing advocates in Sunnyvale and elsewhere.<\/p>\n At the state level, legislators are floating a multibillion-dollar bond measure to help pay for affordable housing<\/a>. And at the regional level, Santa Clara County funded far more units than originally predicted<\/a> after passing its 2016 bond measure.<\/p>\n According to Sunnyvale staff, the city completed more housing in 2025 than any year since 2018. Additionally, the city has thousands more units that have filed for building approval in the city. If completed, the units could bring Sunnyvale more than halfway to meeting its housing goals.<\/p>\n While Sunnyvale Mayor Larry Klein said there was \u201csome good news\u201d given the proposed housing in the pipeline, he noted that the city was dealing with nationwide trends that made it uncertain whether those applications might soon turn into homes for locals. \u201cI\u2019m concerned \u2026 I would love for us to have certainty that we would meet our numbers,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom a city standpoint, there\u2019s only certain levers that we have and we\u2019re doing what we can.\u201d<\/p>\n City staff and housing advocates interviewed by this news organization agreed that it would take diverse approaches from policy makers at all levels of government to address the housing crisis and \u2014 importantly \u2014 time.<\/p>\n \u201cIt took us decades and decades of poor decision making to get us into the mess we\u2019re in and it\u2019s going to be a long haul to get out of it,\u201d said Cingolani. \u201cIt\u2019s really going to take a sustained commitment \u2026 there is no silver bullet solution.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite touting some of the most progressive housing laws in the state, Sunnyvale has only met a fraction…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[33628,1336,88,90,89,99460,203],"class_list":["post-216712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-california-housing","tag-housing-crisis","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-silicon-valley-housing","tag-sunnyvale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}