Battle lines drawn in San Jose housing plan overhaul

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San Jose housing advocates and neighborhood groups are getting organized as the City Council prepares to take up a raft of proposals that could determine the course of housing development in the city for years to come.

The package of recommendations, part of the city’s once-every-four-year review of its general plan, makes changes to the city’s rules governing what gets built where. It includes reforms that would make it easier to build multifamily homes in primarily single-family home neighborhoods. Other recommendations would open up certain high-traffic areas to mid-rise housing developments.

During the June 24 Planning Commission meeting, commissioners voted to advance all the staff recommendations, except for a controversial plan to upzone portions of Winchester Boulevard, which deadlocked the body in a series of divided votes.

The city council is expected to review the proposals Aug. 18.

At this stage in the years-long general plan review process, the recommendations — hammered out over 10 months of special meetings — offer only a framework for guiding future policy deliberations.

It will still be more than a year before concrete policy changes are actually approved, but several flashpoints have already emerged as the city faces competing demands from residents and housing advocates.

Multifamily housing 

A central question driving this process has been where San Jose should change its zoning to make room for the 62,000 additional homes the city must plan for to satisfy its state-mandated housing targets.

Among the most controversial recommendations to increase housing capacity is a proposal to quadruple the density limits for much of the city’s residential neighborhoods. In practice, planners said this will open up these properties, historically zoned for single-family housing, to developments with up to 4 to 10 homes, depending on the lot size. Such “missing middle” housing, as it’s referred to by planners, could run the gamut from duplexes to townhomes to small apartment complexes.

The proposal has worried some residents, who warn many neighborhoods do not have the infrastructure capacity or transit options to absorb so many new homes.

“How many people want 14-units next door with no parking,” exclaimed one resident during an Almaden neighborhood community meeting held in May. “Nobody wants this.”

Housing advocates are pressuring the city from the other direction. In a letter addressed to the planning commission, a coalition of advocacy groups described the proposed upzoning as a move in the right direction. Nevertheless, they warned it would still fall short of what is needed to create projects large enough to actually make financial sense for developers facing spiraling construction costs.

“We go through these exercises, but we’re not always able to respond to what’s happening in the development world,” Alex Shoor, executive director of Catalyze SV, told San José Spotlight. “Ultimately, it’s about the big picture.”

The advocates complain that the proposed planning overhaul also fails to address a number of longstanding issues. In particular, they are urging the city to do more to reform its “Urban Village” strategy, which aims to add more housing by creating dense, walkable neighborhoods, but by many accounts has delivered mixed results since it was launched more than a decade ago.

“There’s no question we’re still losing (the fight to get housing built), and lots of questions as to whether these changes will turn the tide,” Shoor said.

New uses for public land 

Housing advocates are also pushing the city to make it easier to build homes on underused public property and institutional land. For example, they argue that plummeting enrollment in the city’s public schools could open up a prime opportunity to transform school land into affordable homes — if the city loosened its zoning rules to allow such projects.

The proposals seek to address the issue, asking staff to draw up a framework to change land use designations for properties on a case-by-case basis. But the advocates are demanding more sweeping reforms that would change the rules for all of these properties at once.

“The recommended approach means that some schools and congregations would have these opportunities while others would not,” Alison Cingolani, director of policy at nonprofit SV@Home, told San José Spotlight. “It could also make it harder for institutions with limited resources to pursue community-serving redevelopment, increasing the likelihood that properties are sold instead of being reinvested to benefit their communities.”

In laying out the policy recommendations during the June planning commission meeting, staff warned that if the city loosens land use controls too much, many neighborhoods could lose crucial community gathering spaces.

“In order to preserve a suitable inventory of public and private-serving community uses, we recommend a nuanced approach rather than a wholesale change,” Jerad Ferguson, a planner with San Jose’s Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement, said during the meeting.

Cory neighbors revolt 

The fiercest pushback has been directed at a plan to open up several properties along Winchester Boulevard to mid-rise residential construction. Under the proposal, maximum height limits for about a dozen parcels near Santana Row — mostly one- and two-story buildings that house small businesses — would increase to eight stories.

Cory neighborhood residents — already energized by their successful battle last year to scuttle a 17-story apartment tower at 826 Winchester Blvd. — have been showing up en masse to the general plan task force meetings to urge the city to consider more modest density increases.

“Our concern is that it would rim the neighborhood with eight-story buildings of housing, eliminating the small businesses that make our neighborhood vital,” Lindy Hayes with Concerned Cory Neighbors told San José Spotlight.

Planning staff said during the meeting that the neighborhood’s proximity to public transit and other amenities make it a prime location for housing growth.

But at least some planning commissioners appeared to be moved by the residents’ concerns. With the commission nearly evenly split on the matter, the proposal will advance to the city council without any recommendation.

Contact Keith Menconi at [email protected] or @KeithMenconi on X.