Photo: Virginia Mayo / Associated Press

Google, one of the world’s most valuable companies, is growing in a big way. It’s planning a mixed-used development in San Jose that could include more than 6 million square feet of office and research-and-development space.

The plans, which are still in development and contingent on Google buying all of the parcels in a roughly 240-acre area near Diridon Station, would create a tech campus even larger than the 3.1-million-square-foot Googleplex in Mountain View. It would bring as many as 20,000 new jobs to San Jose.

In a normal time, these plans would be an example of excellent urban planning.

San Jose has long struggled with one of the region’s few jobs-housing imbalance in favor of housing. A Google campus could help stabilize the city’s finances and bring some much-needed revitalization to its long-suffering downtown.

Diridon Station is already a transit hub for Caltrain, and it’s also the future home of a BART station and possibly a high-speed rail connection. Placing a jobs center near a transit hub is good for workers and good for the environment. Google, with a workforce increasingly centered in the South Bay, has chosen the best possible location for a campus of this enormous size.

But these are not normal times.

The entire Bay Area is suffering from a catastrophic housing crisis. The adverse effects — increased homelessness, traffic gridlock, accelerated displacement of low- and moderate-income residents — are the region’s top challenge.

To put it more simply: It’s great that Google wants to bring 20,000 jobs to San Jose. But where are the workers supposed to live?

If Google — or any other major company — wants to build a campus of this size anywhere in the Bay Area, it needs to figure out ways to account for its housing impact. This may take many different forms, but for the good of the entire region, such discussions can no longer be optional.

Some may say that figuring out ways to account for the housing impact of a major tech complex isn’t Google’s problem.

But if Google wants to retain its employees, the company will understand that the Bay Area’s housing crisis is very much its problem. Local Bay Area governments, meanwhile, need to feel heat from their neighbors to ensure that they’re providing solutions for housing — not just jobs.