1 in 10 Cal State university students are homeless [0]. Anecdotally, I know of people with mega commutes (2.5 hrs from central valley), my phd student friends at Stanford live in garages. There is a housing crises in the entire state of California. The article seems to direct the blame for the insecure state of these drivers living situations at tech companies, that is a red herring. The tech companies might be able to help the situation by paying more, but the "blame" should assigned to the ~200 municipalities in the SFBA that have produce more office space than housing over the past 30 years.
This low slung, suburban sprawl is strangling growth in California, and eventually towns like Vista won't be able to afford the maintenance costs on their aging infrastructure, at which point Vista ends up like Detroit.
We should be building centrally located, high density developments that are transit oriented, instead of light rail and commuter rail stations being surrounded by 1 to 2 story office slums, they should be surrounded by 6+ story mixed use buildings, with retail, office space & residential appropriately intermingled.
Even with land prices in SoCal & the Bay Area, safe & comfortable housing can be affordably built without government subsidies, we only have to lower the barriers to allow this to happen. Additionally, it will put our towns on a solid financial footing with lower taxes to boot.
