Tallying new apartment construction in Silicon Valley: Hope amid the housing crunch?

We’ve got jobs, jobs, jobs in the valley, but no place to put the workers when they clock out at night. Maybe there’s a ray of hope. A new report from the RENTCafé apartment-search website says that intense renter demand is driving a wave of new construction in booming urban markets, including the San Jose metropolitan area. RENTCafé compiled a list of the top 20 U.S. metros with the most apartments to be completed in 2016 — and San Jose cracked the list, barely. It sits in the No. 20 spot, but let’s call it progress: 5,866 new units are scheduled for completion this year in the metropolitan area, which includes Santa Clara and San Benito counties. Compiling data from new large-scale projects (buildings with 50+ units), the report breaks down Silicon Valley construction like this: 4,077 units in San Jose; 445 in Santa Clara; 378 in Milpitas; 378 in Mountain View; 378 in Sunnyvale; 128 in Morgan Hill; and a measly 82 in Palo Alto. For many, Palo Alto still signifies “Silicon Valley,” but the city can’t seem to get off its duff when it comes to making decisions about housing. Among the top 20 metros, Texas leads the pack with a combined 69,000 units projected for completion in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio. Houston sits in the No. 1 position on the Top 20 list; it has 25,935 units slated to come online in 2016. The rest of the Top 5, in order, is Dallas (23,159), New York (21,177), Los Angeles (20,205) and Washington, D.C. (18,027). Here’s the full report. As you can see, San Francisco is No. 12 with 9,362 new units — more than doubling the 4,144 units completed in 2015. Whether all this construction will be enough to ease further Bay Area rent hikes remains to be seen. The region now has 746,100 technology jobs, according to an analysis by this newspaper published earlier this week. That tops the record set during the dot-com era by 21,000 jobs. Where will all these people live, and how will they do it affordably? Good question. A second-quarter report from Novato-based RealFacts showed rents continuing to climb across the region’s nine counties, though at a slower rate than the year before. The average Bay Area apartment rented for $2,526 in the second quarter, up 4.3 percent year over year. The average San Jose rent was $2,503, up 4.0 percent. In Oakland, the average was $2,959 up 5.4 percent, and even far-flung Concord saw a sharp increase of the average rent to $1,760, up 8.3 percent. Those numbers don’t capture the mom-and-pop landlord rentals that tend to be less costly. But they still are a good indicator of the region’s entrenched housing predicament — which drives thousands to commute long distances from more affordable communities to their jobs in the valley. And incidentally, if you’re thinking of finding some relief by moving to Sacramento, think again. Among the top 5 markets for projected rent growth this year, according to RENTCafé, “Sacramento will have the smallest number of new apartments added to its inventory in 2016, an unimpressive 730 units in large-scale developments. This actually represents a 30% decrease compared to 2015 when 1,000 units hit the market.”