Three years ago they bought a house, not a large one, but what seemed to me to be a very expensive one. It wasn't a bad house, but it also wasn't a very big house—as they've discovered. It wasn't a new house. It was, in fact, at least 75 years old (although it had recently been renovated) and it cost almost half a million dollars.

In the years since they bought their present house, their family has increased in size, but the house has not. In the years since they bought the house, the price of homes in Santa Clara County has risen nearly $100,000. They are now faced with the prospect of a market where what they would like to buy is going to cost them more than half a million dollars. How much over half a million it is going to cost depends, as usual, on the town in which they buy, but no place they are likely to buy is going to be cheap, nor is it likely to get cheaper.

What's even more discouraging is that the number of houses, new or used, on the market has declined. It has, in fact, almost disappeared in relation to the demand. Someone told me recently that there are roughly 1,000 houses on the market in the entire county.

I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like it. As soon as a house goes on the market it is sold, usually at a price higher than that for which it was listed. It doesn't seem to matter much what the house looks like—it's shelter, and that's what's important.

I also hear horror tales of Santa Clara County workers commuting from as far away as Tracy or Modesto because those are the only places where a reasonably priced house is likely to be found. I know this was true in the halcyon days of the dot-com boom, although I thought it had abated somewhat after the dot-com bubble burst.

Whatever the case, it is very expensive and very difficult to find a house to buy in Santa Clara County—or anywhere else on the San Francisco Peninsula, or probably anywhere in the Bay Area.

It's easy to sort out some of the reasons for this: population growth, the cost of labor and materials, the lack of available land on which to build, and mortgage rates that have not been lower for decades.

What's more difficult is to figure what to do about it. The prospects for change appear to be nothing but grim.

Certainly, it's unlikely that any more land is going become more available. The relatively cheap land has been built on.

The only really buildable land is likely to be hillsides or the Central Valley. The population, barring a major catastrophe, is not likely to decline. If anything, population pressure is going to increase in this century.

Building materials aren't likely to get cheaper. Mortgage rates have nowhere to go but up.

Thus, we're faced with the problems that have plagued parts of Europe since World War I: too many people, not enough land on which to build new houses and a continually increasing population demanding new places to live.

The solution in Europe has been to build up and to have more and more housing owned not by individuals but by the state. In the Netherlands and Germany, for instance, high-rise apartments are becoming more and more the way people live. Most are not privately owned, but are leased or rented for long periods of time.

The Netherlands in particular is part of some of the most densely populated land in the world, a kind of great arc of humanity that curves along the Atlantic and the North Sea. It is crowded, more crowded than the Bay Area, but perhaps no more crowded than the Bay Area is destined to become.

And the quaint little German village that once was the home to a couple of hundred burghers is no more. It's now become a kind of extended suburbia, and the farms that once lay between these little habitations are as they are in California agribusiness.

The dream of a vine-covered cottage has all but disappeared in Europe. And it seems to me it is disappearing in California.

Alas, my kids and a lot of others still live with that dream, that picture of the little (but not too little) home with a neat front lawn, a white picket fence around it, a two-car garage, shade trees and a back patio, a dream that may never really have existed and one that is probably a relic of the past.

And maybe it never really was real in the first place.

If it ever did exist, it was in the days when California was mostly land and not people, when houses were bungalows and cottages, not three- or four- or five-bedroom ranch-style habitations with family rooms, fireplaces, 2 ¹/2 bathrooms and Jacuzzi bathtubs.

It is perhaps a good thing that home is where the heart is. It seems not likely soon to be anything else.