Here’s an idea to address the Bay Area’s transportation and housing crisis: Stop making it worse.

Since the Great Recession, the Bay Area has added 722,000 jobs but constructed only 106,000 housing units.

Little wonder rents and home prices have soared – and even people with jobs live in cars or on the streets. Little wonder freeways are gridlocked and commuter trains are packed.

It’s time to stop digging this housing deficit hole deeper. We need more housing. But we need it in the right places.

Bay Area cities with housing shortfalls – San Francisco, Cupertino, Menlo Park and Palo Alto, for example – should stop adding more buildings for jobs unless they provide commensurate new housing.

Conversely, areas with serious job deficits – East Contra Costa is the poster child – should be barred from adding new housing without new places for residents to work.

Here’s the fundamental problem: San Francisco and most of Silicon Valley generally have more jobs than workers living there. The East Bay has more workers than jobs.

Consequently, our freeways and public transit systems overflow in the morning with commuters headed toward San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In the evening, the crush runs in the opposite direction.

And the intra-county imbalance between jobs and housing exacerbates the gridlock. For example, in Santa Clara County, while Palo Alto imports workers every morning, San Jose exports them.

We keep raising taxes to increase commute capacity, but long-term that’s an exorbitantly costly fool’s errand – especially when we ignore underutilized capacity in the counter-commute direction. We are only making the situation worse.

The key is to put jobs next to housing and housing next to jobs.

That won’t happen on its own. Our convoluted property and sales tax systems discourage housing construction. So, this will require action by the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

What’s needed are rules that prohibit cities with housing deficits from approving commercial and office buildings unless they also approve new housing for employees who would work in those buildings.

And in cities with severe job deficits, the rules should be reversed. Residential development approvals should require construction of commensurate facilities for jobs.

Before business leaders, especially from tech companies, and local politicians howl about killing economic growth and impinging on local control, they should admit that they’re a big part of the problem.

They should recognize that current unaffordable housing prices and ridiculous commutes already threaten to undermine the long-term success of the region.

And they should acknowledge the obvious, that companies keep expanding – and local governments keep letting them – without meaningful regard for providing adequate housing.

For example, Cupertino, even before the opening of the massive new Apple campus, had 1.5 jobs for every member of the labor force who lives in the city, according to 2016 U.S. Census data compiled by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Palo Alto had 2.8 jobs per worker; Santa Clara and Mountain View had about 1.7 jobs per worker; and San Francisco had 1.3.

Conversely, in the South Bay, San Jose, with a 0.8 ratio of jobs to workers, needs more employers. In the East Bay, the same goes for Oakland, at just below 0.9 – that’s nine jobs for every 10 residents in the workforce.

And, in East Contra Costa County, the cities of Pittsburg, Antioch, Oakley and Brentwood should be prohibited from approving more housing. They have a combined ratio of 0.4 – just four jobs for every 10 residents in the workforce.

It’s absurd. For more than four decades, leaders of those four cities, backed by politically powerful developers, have tried to convince voters that if they keep building residential homes the jobs would follow. It’s not going to happen.

As for cities with job surpluses, state mandates requiring commensurate housing would force employers wanting new space to partner with housing developers to ensure homes are built. Or, better yet, those employers might opt to locate where workers already live.

Either way it would ease future stress on our transportation systems – and environment. As a taxpayer, I’m tired of paying for more road and transit expansions to meet the needs of multi-billion-dollar companies that refuse to do the responsible thing.

Some caveats to the housing mandate: The affordability of the required housing should be matched to likely jobs that would fill the new offices and commercial centers. And, to encourage public transit use, the mandates might include leeway for homes or business construction near commuter rail stations or existing major bus corridors.

Local and state leaders understand the Bay Area faces a housing crisis. Unfortunately, solutions under discussion are incremental steps that don’t address the fundamental problem: Not only have we failed to build enough housing, we’ve also failed to put it near jobs.

It’s time to fix that.