Mixed use would be so awesome. We could use more commercial in the burbs, "Store houses" would be a great benefit. With more people working remotely it might be a good blend of retail/office and residential too with small residential towers having commercial lower floors.
There's demand for offices, and tons of demand for residential too. The latter receives the most resistance and hence tends not to happen, however. As for where all those office workers will live - well, that's someone else's problem.
San Jose does need more offices, especially closer to the downtown core. Despite being a 1+ million resident city, it's largely a sleeper suburb. Many of the people that live in San Jose work elsewhere in the Bay Area.
So San Jose does need more offices. It's all the nearby cities like Cupertino, Sunnyvale or Mountain View that need to be building more housing.
Real estate is so tight I daresay people would live there anyway, particularly if by mixed use you mean the bottom two or three floors is restaurants and other services and perhaps even a grocery to round things out with residential on top.
It's also surrounded by about 4 Superfund sites (2 AMD, TRW, and Phillips electronics) and 2 toxic groundwater plumes. Somehow this doesn't seem to matter for offices - Google's Quad campus sits over an active Superfund site, and you can periodically smell TCE in the air - but it may not be the best place to raise a family.
The Bay Area has more superfund sites than anywhere else in the country, so you can't really optimize for that when choosing where to put housing, sadly.
My house actually backs up to a 10 lane freeway. :) But there is a huge difference between being on the ground floor behind the wall where the freeway just sounds like a river, and being on a higher floor where you can see, hear, and smell the cars.
I lived next to a railway line, like it ran behind my back fence and it was a corner, so extremely screechy. I would constantly wake up to feeling like it had derailed right into my bedroom. Would not do again.
Screeching corner rails are solved by an automated rail greasing system. All train systems have these. If the rails are screeching, open a ticket with the local city system and have them fix the rail greasing system. Muni here was shut down for a long time and they forgot to turn back on the rail greasers and it sounded awful for a day before they were turned on/refilled.
The grease is applied to the wheel flange on the outer rail of the curve, to minimise wear from the flange contacting the inside of the rail, which addresses some but not all screeching.
Screeching can still occur because train wheels’ axles do not have a differential and one wheel travels a longer path than the other. The conical shape of the wheel profile deals with this, but some metal/metal creep between the wheels and the (ungreased top of the) rail still occurs
It was a commuter and transport line so the majority of the screeching came from the long transport trains in the middle of the night. I suspect those are run differently here in Australia. It happened for the entire three years I lived there so I imagine if it was just a mishap it would have been solved already.
