Well before the mountains and valleys had turned into silicon, Santa Clara County was the playground of large subdividers. I remember doing many studies of San Jose and the surrounding cities. I didn’t care for the place or the area, because there was hardly any man-made beauty, only what Mother Nature had placed there, after fashioning San Francisco Bay from the Pacific. But Silicon Valley became the synonym of a new genre of entrepreneur and product. Thus was born the creativity and the accelerated speed of change — the greatest boom since gold was discovered yonder.

Silicon brought more than gold to this valley. It turned ingenuity into products and growth into a bad word. In 1977, the great visionary David Packard, summoned his fellow businessmen to become the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group. This became a proactive collaborative effort that would partner with the public sector in learning, educating and solving the problems that growth brings.

Among them were issues dealing with transportation, housing, environment and unhappiness. The irony is that solutions can bring cooperative effort, but the law of economics always is the same: the ratio between supply and demand (of land) determines pricing. The median cost of a resale home in Silicon Valley has reached $618,000 and a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment rents for $1,600 per month.

Born out of this group Packard founded was the Housing Trust of Santa Clara County, which will swing into action when it has raised its goal of $20 million. The organization expects to leverage its funds 10 or more times, using the pot of money to assist in supplying affordable housing. The money will be distributed in the form of loans rather than grants. They must be paid back so that the effort grows along with supply.

Expanding from the original 30, now 150 large companies, representing 275,000 jobs, participate in funding the effort. They have done very well, the organization’s executive director, Carl Guardino, told the San Diego Association of Government’s Regional Housing Task Force and Regional Growth Management Technical Committee.

As the group has reached out to the 21 communities making up the county, its discovery of what it calls 95/5 became key to success in Silicon Valley, and potentially that would work well here also. The manufacturing group has found that the various participants agree on 95 percent of the issues and solutions, with only 5 percent disagreeing. So it decided to focus always on areas of agreement. This learned wisdom produces shared discussion and that magic condition — trust. To comprehend problems and solutions requires mutuality of goals and effort, created through trusting the best practices of those who become part of the organization.

The trust promotes home ownership, working directly with developers and builders of homes, becoming what we call the last money in, so that enough financing is available to build. In the United States, 150 such housing trusts are operating, with 10 in our state. (The San Diego Housing Trust Fund began as a $20 million venture and produced some 1,700 housing units in its first 30 months.)

The lessons are myriad:

• work together for common interests;
• advocate, locate and legislate through building coalitions for uncommon efforts so that rental and for-sale supply may be added locally;
• create whistle-stop tours in which planners and officials experience demonstrations of products and solutions. People need to see and touch solutions, not just debate them;
• establish a speakers’ bureau consisting of common folk with passion and knowledge to share what has been learned from transit-oriented neighborhood implementation. In the Silicon Valley, its Housing Leadership Council of 60 CEO-level private and public sectors is a powerful educational force that knows housing solutions promote economic and social health, rather than the scourge of deprivation created by NIMBY-ism and ignorance.

One of the council’s unique accomplishments is the creation of land-use inventories in 21 cities. This identifies land that could be available for residential construction. To learn more about this superb demonstration of cooperative effort, visit the Web site: www.svmg.org, or e-mail the group at httscc@intel.com. It’s time to learn and then to collaborate.

Our own San Diego Regional Economic Development Council is hot on the trail to help create this collaborative, along with Sandag, the city and county, ULI and the Professional Design Council. Get involved. Land is a terrible thing to waste.

Sanford R. Goodkin is CEO of Sanford R. Goodkin & Associates, international real estate analysts. He can be reached by e-mail at sgoodkin@mil.net. His Web site is sgoodkin.com.