The report slammed Palo Alto for not building enough affordable housing, comparing it to its neighbor Mountain View
After a recent grand jury
report slammed the city for its poor performance on building affordable housing
— comparing it unfavorably to its neighbor Mountain View — council members are
pushing back on the notion that they are not doing enough.
As Santa Clara County
struggles to meet state-mandated goals for housing construction, a civil grand
jury report released in December spotlighted the two next-door Peninsula cities
— one for taking the right approach and the other for slacking.
In its report, “Affordable
Housing: A Tale of Two Cities,” the Santa Clara County grand jury praises
Mountain View, saying the home of Google is on track to meet the housing
targets through planning, political will, and creative financing. But Palo
Alto, the home of Stanford, comes up well short, according to the grand jury.
While preparing its
official response to the grand jury due March 16, Palo Alto council members
Monday juggled with the jury’s recommendations, opting to take their advice on
fixing the arduous “Palo Alto Process” but pushing back on the idea that the
city should consider more mixed-use projects like those found in Mountain View
to increase affordable housing. They approved the response in a 5-2 vote, with
council members Alison Cormack and Greg Tanaka dissenting.
In its response to the
grand jury, the city stated that “whether cities consider both the demand and
supply impacts, or just the supply in isolation, makes an enormous difference
in how to evaluate a project’s housing availability and affordability impacts.”
When demand is considered,
“neither Palo Alto nor Mountain View effectively increased their affordable
housing,” the city continued, and instead, “both cities saw declines in it with
Mountain View experiencing more than five times the decline as Palo Alto.”
In his remarks to the
council, councilman Eric Filseth said building mixed-use projects that increase
the amount of office space in the city would be detrimental to the city’s goal
of building affordable housing and keeping people from being displaced.
“The grand jury has
several useful projects — about community education, council advocacy, and
outreach,” Filseth said. “But we have big reservations about the mixed-use
approach.”
Filseth explained for each
square foot of commercial space used to fund affordable housing, a mixed-use
development would produce “somewhere like three times as much demand.” If the
city were to go ahead with making precise plans for specific neighbors and
build mixed-use projects like those found in Mountain View then “for each
low-income person you house you’re going to displace two more.”
Mountain View has added
thousands of jobs and office space in the past decade, and when looking at
supply and demand, Filseth says “nobody is ahead.” If you look at affordable
housing units per new job, Palo Alto still has more affordable homes than
Mountain View and an average of the rest of the county, according to city-data.
Filseth’s comments and the
city’s official response doubles down on the predominant idea among
councilmembers that the jobs-housing imbalance should be flattened, not
exacerbated. That’s why the city put an
office cap on new developments in 2018.
“To the grand jury’s
immense credit, they do ask the question: if a project creates more demand for
affordable housing than it supplies, should that project be done?” Filseth
said. “We don’t agree with the grand jury on the use of commercial development
to fund affordable housing.”
But councilmember Alison
Cormack pushed back on her colleagues’ ideas about demand and how it would
impact the city if planners began working more like they do in Mountain View.
The flaw with the “jobs-housing imbalance narrative,” Cormack said, “is that we
assume people live in the city where they work.”
“That’s not true in Palo
Alto, where two-thirds of people work elsewhere,” Cormack said. “They don’t
come here to live and work necessarily. While it’s a helpful discussion, it
shouldn’t be the only metric and the focus of the rest of our discussions.”
Cormack also questioned
why her colleagues would be so quick to discount precise planning and
area-specific developments when they’ve worked in neighboring cities, and asked
economic development director Johnathan Lait about their use.
“We have this report here
which says we should use precise plans and I have two colleagues saying we
shouldn’t use them,” Cormack said.
Lait responded that
“professionally, we don’t need a precise plan to determine where we’re going to
place our affordable housing.”
“We need to have clear
zoning regulations and we need to communicate where geographically we want that
housing and provide incentives,” Lait said. “It’s a bit of a ‘pick ’em’ on
that. You don’t need precise plans to identify where you want to build
housing.”
Cormack ended up voting
against sending the city’s response after attempting to amend parts of the
response she felt were shifting blame.
But Vice Mayor Lydia Kou,
was satisfied with the city’s response to the grand jury, while noting that she
didn’t appreciate the comparison between Mountain View and Palo Alto, which she
felt was “simplistic,” “missed the mark” and attempted to pit “two cities
against each other.”
“We’re all trying to
resolve the affordability issue in our own ways, and each city comes up with
different ways to address problems,” Kou said. “How Mountain View chooses to do
it is their prerogative. It seems to pit the two cities and perhaps even blame,
and there’s no blame to go around. It’s a problem the whole state is facing.”
Bay Area News Group
By Aldo Toledo
March 1, 2022
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