The Sunnyvale condo market is, in a word, tight. Easy light rail and BART access allow for quick transportation in and around the city, especially into San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area, and Sunnyvale has become a real hub for tech workers. This has done a number on the condo market, limiting availability—and limiting space. Most of the condos in Sunnyvale are in the 1,100 sq ft range. In fact, despite some big 1,600-footers being built, the average actually dropped below 1,100 this year.

I recently spoke to a friend in Santa Clara about all the changes the town has been through lately. To me, it’s pretty much unrecognizable from before the tech boom, but when I brought it up, he shot me down with one of those crook-eyed “You think it’s different now?” looks. The thing is, he’s right. He told me about some of the enormous new mixed-use developments that have been approved in the area, namely Santa Clara’s City Place and San Jose’s Diridon Station—and when I say enormous, I mean enormous.

They’re both 230 acres, millions of square feet. They’ll have room for thousands of jobs. There’s a catch, though: they’ll make traffic considerably worse.