Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

—    Lyrics from Malvina Reynold’s song “Little Boxes” written in 1962 that was inspired by tract-style housing in San Mateo County

Stoning Manteca Mayor Steve DeBrum from stating the obvious won’t do any good.
The mayor is right. The lack of executive-style homes — we’re not referring to super-sized production McMansions — doesn’t bode well for Manteca.
The city’s lack of a strong mixture of housing types makes it a huge struggle to lure new physicians and even companies that often provide better paying jobs than distribution centers. That’s because key people in such enterprises as well as professionals like doctors have a different lifestyle and they are looking for homes that match their desires. Large tract homes on 10,000-square-foot lots don’t cut it.
DeBrum has also voiced numerous times the need for affordable housing in Manteca meaning people with a Northern San Joaquin Valley or Manteca paycheck being able to afford to rent or live here.
Good luck with that one or even getting executive-style housing off the ground.
The 9,600 plus housing units the City of Manteca has in various stages of approval essentially are aimed at building traditional single family homes. When that is wedded with the scarcity of such new homes in the Bay Area it promises a seismic shift in buying patterns along the lifelines that freeways and the ACE train are for those accessing healthier Bay Area paychecks, it is clear that new free standing homes save Del Webb at Woodbridge are aimed exclusively at one buyer — those forced out of the Bay Area in search of affordable housing.
Keep in mind the median household income in Santa Clara Valley — essentially the Silicon Valley — is $93,854 a year compared to $62,032 for Manteca. Developers are building affordable housing in Manteca but it is becoming more about being affordable for families that are part of the Bay Area exodus that still retain Bay Area checks and not those working on this side of the Altamont Pass.
Yes, those 9,600 housing units include a smattering of apartments that are about as easy to secure financing to build as it is to go a day without someone hyperventilating over what is going on in Washington, D.C.
Save for a few bright spots such as the proposed Griffen Park where developer Bill Filios is making a bid to provide four distinctive neighborhoods aimed at four income level variations based on home sizes, it is more of the same.
Given that the city can’t un-ring the bell without adopting a new housing element that has targeted policies aimed at pushing the building market to wean off the traditional tract home addiction via aggressive density bonuses and other incentives, don’t get your hopes up that affordable housing for the rest of the world besides the Bay Area exodus will be built in Manteca in the coming decades.
City staff — not elected officials — have made it clear that are not going to tweak the housing element adopted just a  few years back as part of the general plan update to serve as the city’s blueprint for growth through 2040. Of course if there was any concerted effort to pursue goals in the current housing element by actually sitting down with developers and brain storming about how to break the mold, Manteca might not become a massive walled community segregating new subdivisions of duplicate tract homes from each other.
But then again such an effort wouldn’t probably work as bureaucrats would have to let go of development patterns and rules rooted in the 1960s and put everything on the table in an open minded fashion when talking with developers.
Florsheim Homes went through hell just trying to be able to build smaller, more affordable homes that were shrunken versions of McMansions a few years back. Believe it or not the city threw up the issue of not providing home lot designs that accommodated RV parking in the developer’s face. Someone you are targeting with affordable housing isn’t exactly in the market for an RV any time soon.
The “Little Boxes” song wasn’t simply a hit on the sameness of San Mateo County housing. The next three stanzas go on to describe how the people who live in them all end up having the same socio-economic lives.
What Manteca may be creating south of the 120 Bypass is a world devoid of the richness you get when everything from age-restricted housing to housing that serves the spectrum from distribution center workers to CEOs are tossed into the mix.
Instead of little boxes Manteca will have big boxes on the valley floor that for all practical purposes look the same. They will be in walled off neighborhoods where the people will be the same.
That is not a slam on anyone. It’s just that do we really want a community that caters to just one socio-economic group or do we want the richness of a city not dominated by sameness whether it is housing types or social economics?