I think you’re right about. A lot of the homeless people I’ve talked to in Palo Alto and around the area were people who had lived here for decades and they kept putting up with rent hike after rent hike until they had nothing left and then found themselves homeless. Some of that might just be a misplaced optimism — “it can’t possibly get worse.” Some of it may be lack of foresight. For some though, there are real reasons why leaving is an obstacle. Many people are now taking care of both elderly parents and raising children at the same time. For the “sandwich” generation it’s nearly impossible to uproot the kids and manage to take grandma and grandpa across the country with them. And then, too, people find it hard to move from a place where they’ve been living for decades where they have friends and family to a place where they don’t. That’s a really scary thing to do and especially so when you’re a senior citizen and you need to rely on others to help you with things like taking care of your lawn, moving your boxes, carrying your groceries. Then it’s not just a fear of loneliness; it’s a real fear about how to maintain your independence.

In any case, I think people uprooting themselves and moving away from good jobs and away from long-time friends and family is a terrible thing for people to have to go through and it makes for worse communities. The frustrating thing is that none of this needs to happen. The peninsula has tons of space for more housing. It’s almost all one or two story buildings. If every downtown along the Peninsula went up to just 6 stories we would be very close to closing the gap on our housing shortage.