A Palo Alto Planning Commissioner Leaves Town—and Starts a Furor

Last week, Kate Vershov Downing, a lawyer who served on the planning and transportation commission for the city of Palo Alto, California, resigned from her volunteer position. She also posted her resignation letter on Medium, announcing that she and her husband, an engineer, were leaving the pricey Silicon Valley burg for Santa Cruz, some 40 miles away. She was tired, she wrote, of paying $6,200 a month to share a rented four-bedroom house with another couple:

Downing, who’s active in a local advocacy group called Palo Alto Forward, also expressed some pointed frustration with the city’s unwillingness to create more affordable housing. She appears to have struck a nerve in the Bay Area, where skyrocketing real estate prices are a local obsession, and especially in Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University, several technology firms, and a housing stock that has become increasingly unattainable (the median price of homes currently for sale, says Palo Alto Forward, is more than $2 million). She recently spoke to CityLab about the Silicon Valley housing crisis and why her cri-de-coeur made her the target of both local and national attention.