It's time for Palo Alto residents to decide if they really want more housing.
We say we do, but we certainly act as if we don't.
Affordable housing is one of the official top five City Council priorities. But the way city officials and some residential groups have been behaving, more housing - affordable or not - is the least desired goal.
This is a standard example of political "spin" - blatant misrepresentation of the issue and the debate. The issue under consideration was whether the proposed project warranted substantial exceptions to the zoning ordinance. The overwhelming decision was to reject it as a very bad project.
First there was the community wide referendum last year over whether 61 housing units, at 800 High should be built in the heart of our downtown. Some neighborhood groups opposed this housing, and forced the referendum, which narrowly passed, allowing the housing to be built. (Comment on this "spin")
Then there was Hyatt Rickeys proposal for approximately 300 housing units and a
renovated hotel. After years of delay plus a resident-requested
moratorium while traffic was being studied on the Charleston-Arastradero
roads corridor, Hyatt gave up and said forget the hotel,
we will just have 200 housing units.
So not only did we lose a hotel, we lost some housing.
This
is the "big lie" that Ms. Diamond and the Palo Alto Daily News have been
repeating ad naseam (Details).
And then there was the Planning Commission meeting Wednesday. By a 7-0 vote, commissioners flatly rejected a proposal to build 177 apartment rental units on Page Mill Road and the east side Park Boulevard, including 32 below-market rate units that would have rented for $890 per month for a one bedroom and $1,300 a month for a two-bedroom.
Sounds to me like the message is now that we are here,
let's close the gates and not
let anyone else move to our fair city.
Could Ms. Diamond be unaware that
several of the Commissioners have long histories of strong support for creating
more housing? Was she unaware that one
of these characterized it as "like public housing in St. Louis"?
Another Commissioner, an architect, said
that he "wanted to like it, but ..." and then called it "brutal" and "extreme".
Only
a handful of residents came to the Planning Commission meeting to oppose this
project, but those included some of the "regulars" who in the past
have opposed other housing projects in the city - Joy Ogawa, Lynn
Chapella, Annette Ashton, Bob Moss, Dorothy Bender and Doug Moran. Only one
resident, Sally Probst, spoke in favor of the apartment units.
One wouldn't know from this that many of the opponents in the
audience were first time attendees.
Details
as to the mischaracterization of the named people.
This "mixed use" four story project would have included 47,115 square feet for research and development space, a cafe on the ground floor, and 211,167 square feet for three floors of apartments. It also would have an underground parking garage and landscaping for an adjacent area on Page Mill.
Granted, it's a big project, with a density of 70 units
per acre. But if it were too big, planning commissioners made no effort to ask
the developer, Harold Holbach, to scale it back, nor did they refer it to the
Architectural Review Board for downsizing. Instead they simply rejected it.
Ms. Diamond is either being disingenuous or is incredibly
misinformed about the basics of this process.
The Commission did not have the option to send the developer away with
the suggestion to scale back the project - it was at the point of having to
approve or reject the broad outline of this project as defined by the
developer. Advice to scale back the
project could have been given during a preliminary review, but the
developer refused that opportunity.
Ms. Diamond should know that the Architectural Review Board addresses design issues
- it has no authority over a project's size or other land-use issues.
The PC (Planned Community) zone exists to handle situations not anticipated by the zoning rules. The current zoning specifies a maximum of 30 housing units per acre, with a pending rezoning upping that to 40. For this 2.5-acre site, this translates to 75-100 units. The developer proposes 177 units plus an additional floor for offices, creating a project over twice the size judged reasonable for this location. The developer needed the PC zone because he wanted exceptions to so many of the zoning rules: building height, setbacks from the street and neighbors, lot coverage and FAR (floor area ratio), minimum open space, ... And what warranted all these major exceptions? Nothing. The Commission judged it to be a very bad project - see their long enumeration of its faults in their decision.
Note: the correct spelling of the developer's name is "Hohbach".
Now Holbach has been before the city a couple of times with projects,
including the
Sheridan Plaza complex on Sheridan Avenue, and has had run-ins with city
officials. The developer also is asking for planned community (PC) zoning,
where the city relaxes height limits and other rules in return for concessions
from developers. PC zoning has been under attack because of a perception that
the city has let developers get away with too much.
The PC zoning is under attack because it has been so abused, and
this developer and this proposal is the poster child for that abuse
(details).
But the proposed apartment site on Park Boulevard, across from the corporate headquarters of Agilent Technologies, is certainly not a pristine residential area. It's right next to the railroad tracks, there's a car dealer just down the street and Fry's Electronics is just a couple of blocks away.
This rental housing project is also very near the
California Avenue train station, which is exactly what this city has said it
always wanted transit-oriented housing.
This is yet another disingenuous argument.
Ms. Diamond equates opposition to this
particular project to opposition to any housing project.
The Commissioners and other speakers said
that they would support housing at a lower density at this site, for example,
at the 40 units/acre instead of the proposed 70.
One of the residents opposing the project complained there was not enough
"neighborhood-serving retail" on the site, even though the
California Avenue shopping area is three blocks away.
The developer claimed this neighborhood-serving retail as
a "public benefit" because it would reduce trips by residents and
office workers.
The proposed 2000 square foot
space is enough for a medium sized café or coffee shop but is much too small
for current standalone drug stores (a Walgreen's or a Longs).
The developer provided no information on
projected trip-reduction.
Is it not
appropriate to ask if such a space would achieve the claimed objective?
Some residents on Emerson Street complained, if you can
imagine, that they would lose their view of the foothills. Please. Emerson is a
block from Alma Street, so there are two rows of houses in the way, plus the
railroad tracks, a four-story law office at Park and Page Mill, as well
as the Agilent building across Park Boulevard, all of which interfere with any
vistas of the hills. I find the "ruining a view" argument a bit
specious - where is it written that homeowners in this town are entitled
to a view of the foothills?
It is written, in Policy L-3 of the City's Comprehensive
Plan: "Guide development to respect views of the foothills and East Bay
hills from public streets in the developed portions of the City."
If Ms.
Diamond had bothered to attend the hearing, or even gotten around to listening
to the recording, she would have heard this mentioned multiple times.
She would have also heard residents from
this neighborhood complaining about how the Agilent building blocked their views
and that they had had no notification, and hence no opportunity for input, when
it was built.
And the proposed building
is taller and closer, hence having even greater impacts.
Ms. Diamond attitude is hardly surprising - she has a long history of disdain, even contempt, for the rights of individual residents when they get in the way of a developer's desires.
Commissioners objected to the size and density of the
plan, its proximity to the street and possible noise problems.
This grossly understates the
problems with the project.
The building
would extend all the way to the sidewalk, and the landscaping would be trees in
the sidewalk and bulb-outs in the street.
The "possible noise problem" is that the back of the building is akin to a freeway sound wall - the developer did not bother to provide any of the routine measures for absorbing and dispersing the sound. This wall could reasonably be expected to bounce noise from trains into residential neighborhoods. Remember that the tracks are used not only by Caltrain, but also by freight trains throughout the night.
But, as I mentioned, the size could have been scaled back.
And if you can't build some apartments in this town on property currently zoned
for general manufacturing use, adjacent to train tracks and right across from a
corporate headquarters, then where can we build housing? Nevertheless, the
housing opponents prevailed and the commission rejected this project, even
though the city council has said, time and again, that housing, particularly
rental housing, is needed in this town.
Again, the disingenuous argument.
There is absolutely nothing to keep the
developer from scaling back his project and resubmitting it.
Notice that there has been only a single brief mention that the first floor would be "research and development" (R&D) space. Based on averages for similar space, it would be expected to have 140 employees, and could have as many as 200. One of the reasons for building more housing is to decrease the jobs-housing imbalance, but you don't do this by building more office space. What this project would do is create more traffic in an area already having problems - you have commuters outbound from the apartments and inbound to the offices.
The 177-unit project is now on its way to City
Council, with an accompanying city report that says staff's recommendation is
that this project can either be approved or not approved. That's an obvious
statement, not a recommendation.
This misrepresents the staff report: It
told the Commissioners what their options were and detailed what an approval or
rejection would mean in terms of next steps.
The staff report did provide an assessment of the individual
components of the proposal, and conveyed skepticism of the proposed "public
benefits" needed to justify granting the PC zoning.
For complex proposals like this one, staff does not make
an overall recommendation because weighing the various tradeoffs is the role of
the Commissioners (and ultimately the City Council).
Interesting, notice that Ms. Diamond contradicts herself. In the paragraph beginning with "Granted", she attacked the Commission for not taking an (unavailable) alternative. Now, she ridicules Staff for reminding the Commission of what their alternatives are. Can she really have forgotten what she wrote just eight paragraphs earlier?
There
are hints that if council approves this project, it may be subject to another
citywide referendum. I think that would be fine, because we need to decide once
again whether residents want to have more housing in town, or whether we don't.
The other view is that a referendum may
be needed if the Council approves the donation of City land to a for-profit
developer because he wants to so over-build his property that he can't fit some
of the necessary components, such as parking and common space.
I suspect that the majority of us would favor more housing, but I am no longer
sure, since it's the housing opponents who appear at public meetings, not the
supporters. When commissioners and council members are faced time and again
with housing opponents, then they are not sure what the real community
sentiment is. And neither is the staff.
The decision was not a popularity contest or a "will of the
majority."
Instead it was a decision
based on explicit criteria.
The first
part of the decision was whether to grant the developer's request for a PC
zone, exempting him from the normal zoning requirements for the property.
The Commission determined that he utterly
failed to meet the specified criteria.
The second part of the decision was whether to recommend the donation of
City land to the developer for this project (Aside: if you read the staff
report, the euphemism/legal term for "donate" is "vacate").
Again, the Commission found that he failed
to provide adequate reason for taking such a step.
Are housing opponents the majority or the minority point of view? Rather than guess at it, a referendum, sponsored by either the developer or residents opposing such housing, would be the easiest way to find out. That's a lot more straightforward than the repetitive hypocrisy of claiming we want housing and then vetoing every project that comes along.
Diana Diamond's column appears every Thursday and on alternate Sundays in the Daily News. Her e-mail is Diana@dailynewsgroup.com.
Response by Douglas B. Moran