For Trey Dremel, much of life is dictated by his commute. Every weekday morning, he leaves Morgan Hill before dawn, driving at 4 a.m. to try and skip the traffic flowing north so he can make it to work on the Peninsula on time. Most nights, he is in bed by 7:30 p.m. so he can wake up again for the early drive.
While the commute and the schedule is demanding, Dremel said it’s his best option to make ends meet, “beat traffic,” and “have some kind of life.”
Dremel — who helps prepare buildings for when companies move in to offices from Mountain View to Sunnyvale — is one of tens of thousands of commuters who head north into Silicon Valley for work. A Mercury News analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed what many commuting into Silicon Valley already know: While jobs are to the north, affordable housing is to the south. But the squeeze between housing and jobs has led to an imbalance that is hurting the bedroom communities on the southern edge of Silicon Valley — taxing their residents with long commutes, disrupting communities and stretching city services to their limits.
“Who wants to travel that far to work? If there was something closer with similar pay, I think everybody would jump on board,” said Dremel, a father of two. “I wasn’t paying the bills enough. That’s when I started commuting. … Everybody’s close to the same situation: more people living down here and going up there for the money.”
Northern Silicon Valley has more than 16 times the population of the bedroom communities to the south, and over 30 times as many jobs, according to a Mercury News analysis of 2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. This means that, in general, someone living in northern Silicon Valley — defined here as San Mateo County and northern Santa Clara County — is roughly twice as likely to find a job near where they live compared to someone living to the south.
And that job is likely to pay much better. The average annual earnings for someone working in 2023 in Gilroy were $49,928, according to the Census Bureau. In San Jose, that number was $61,675, and in Palo Alto it was $128,779.
Rent is, in general, less expensive farther south. Median monthly cost for rent and utilities in Palo Alto is $3,306 and in San Jose it is $2,574. In Gilroy and Hollister, those numbers are $2,270 and $1,846, respectively.
Because of this, the communities on the southern edges of Silicon Valley have long attracted those looking for cheaper housing and become exporters of workers, sending tens of thousands to workplaces away from where they live and, largely, to jobs hubs in the north.
Often, driving is the only viable option, since commuters to the south have only a fraction of the options for public transit.
This means that someone living south of San Jose is three times as likely to be driving an hour or more to work than someone living further north.
Gilroy native Deanna Jackson commutes two hours or more round trip every weekday to her job in San Jose. While she is glad to have affordable housing and a steady job, she said the drive can be taxing on her mental state and social life.
“I can’t be there for people when I spend so much time in my car,” said Jackson. “To not be able to be a part of my niece’s softball games, or nurse for people when they’re sick, or go to choir performances … it makes it so hard to feel connected to the people who are important to you.”
Her concerns were echoed during several interviews with commuters and their families, who said their time on the road takes away from their opportunity to engage with their communities and their families.
“You live in this rat race,” said Jackson. “Living in a commuter town, there’s not a big community feel.”
The impact goes beyond social costs, however. For more suburban cities, property tax is a far less effective source of income than sales tax or other revenue that comes from business. This means that when the population grows without business growth, the money to serve that population doesn’t keep pace. That leaves communities with a poor jobs balance in a precarious position when it comes to providing for their residents. A mix of housing growth and lack of funding has strained their infrastructure — and, when paired with planning missteps, has led to disastrous breaking points.
Hollister saw unchecked housing growth in the ’90s and early 2000s, which began to overburden its sewage system. This led to leaks from sewage ponds and reports of sewage backing up into people’s homes. In May 2002, the problem came to a head when a sewage treatment pond burst, spilling 15 million gallons of wastewater into the nearby San Benito River.
The disaster triggered $1.2 million in fines from the state and a moratorium on growth until the city built another treatment plant — an effort that took six years and quadrupled sewer rates.
Farther north, Gilroy has well-documented issues with funding and staffing its fire department. Along with flagging response times, an analysis of the department showed that, in case of a violent earthquake, certain fire stations would be liable to collapse on fire engines, leaving the department unable to respond in a time of dire emergency.
This contrasts with Palo Alto, which has more than five times as many jobs per population than Gilroy, and nearly twice as many firefighters per capita than Gilroy.
The blend of social and logistical woes has led many to call for their cities to hit the brakes on housing growth. Hollister saw every single incumbent on the City Council replaced by candidates who called for “slow growth,” and San Benito County — where Hollister is located — approved a restrictive measure that would require developers to get voter approval before building on farmland.
Even so, many familiar with state housing laws say there are limits to what an individual city can do to slow growth, since the state requires regions to build a certain number of housing units as part of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, or RHNA.
Others say the solution lies in building more housing closer to the job centers.
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“The Bay Area has not produced enough housing for its workforce or its residents,” said Michael Lane, state policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. “We need more housing where the jobs are and where the infrastructure is. … Just outsourcing the housing doesn’t work and it has all kinds of negative impacts.”
Several Bay Area housing experts and advocates echoed the sentiment that building more housing was the best tool to relieve the imbalance and its impacts. While all noted that the RHNA process was imperfect, they acknowledged that it was moving in the right direction by requiring job-heavy cities to pull their weight without leaving more suburban cities off the hook. For example, Palo Alto, which has the most jobs per capita in Silicon Valley, is asked to build three times as much housing as similarly sized Gilroy.
Still, many local leaders throughout the region argue over how much housing should grow and where, and even if the new housing requirements fairly address the imbalance, they will take years to be put into practice.
In the meantime, those farther to the south are attempting to address the jobs imbalance by focusing on bringing more jobs to their cities. In Gilroy, several candidates came into office riding a wave of pro-business sentiment, and others in Morgan Hill promised a city where residents could live and work. The candidates have proposed a series of measures ranging from improving tourism, revitalizing businesses and downtowns, and in Gilroy, trying to bring back the Garlic Festival.
All the while, the housing-heavy cities and the commuters who live in them carry on making the best of their situations.
That’s true at least for Miles Reese, who moved to Gilroy six years ago and now oversees security for Google’s campuses. Reese reflected what many commuters expressed: resigned acceptance of how things are.
“I use it as time for myself,” said Reese of his commute. “It’s tough, but everybody’s got to make a living. … It is what it is.”
