Shoor: San Jose’s general plan needs to achieve more vital outcomes

Ask almost any Silicon Valley elected official, city planner or resident in recent years what widespread issue our region needs to solve, and they’ll say the same thing: build more housing.

So why haven’t we? There are many reasons, yet here’s one needing more attention: our planning process is malfunctioning. Full of good intentions, it’s tripping on its own laces and tumbling.

A little background first. In 2011, San Jose approved a citywide vision called the general plan. Its objective: create neighborhood villages across San Jose where shops, homes, offices, transit and public space are within walking distance to make us more prosperous and healthy.

The 2024 update known as the housing element states San Jose needs to build 62,000 homes by 2031. The San Jose Planning Department applies policies to enable these plans. But it’s misinterpreting city plans, losing sight of the big picture by focusing on minor provisions instead of major results.

A tale of two proposed developments in San Jose explains how.

One planned urban village is in Midtown along West San Carlos Street, a major commercial and transit corridor. There, the city wants mid-rise buildings with housing above shops.

Shockingly, city staff are supporting a proposal on San Carlos and Race streets to tear down a building and displace two existing local small businesses for a big parking lot behind a single-story, traffic-inducing fast-food restaurant.

This notion is so off-base it led to a rarity: unifying the nearby neighborhood association, district-wide neighborhood leaders, 1,300 people in an online petition and members of my organization to oppose it. We want a mixed-use, multi-story housing building there instead.

So why would city staff prop up such a backward proposal?

The short answer: how they interpret the general plan.

Equally confounding, across town on Winchester Boulevard where a building has been empty, vandalized, broken into and burned for years, city planners oppose a proposal to revitalize the area. The redevelopment includes a high-rise building containing 135 homes — including 20 affordable homes — plus a park, playground space, restaurant and a public rooftop.

Now that’s what our city needs — but the city’s justification is, again, based on general plan interpretation.

Come to think of it, the city’s positions on these projects don’t sound like a government creating vibrant, walkable neighborhoods and a huge number of homes.

Rather, it’s a symptom of California’s “addiction to process over results” that state Sen. Scott Wiener recently identified. He recommends we deliver “results instead of process for the sake of process.” The saying, “You can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind.

Do you think immigrant families who recently moved here care what a general plan says? Or recent college graduates who grew up here and need affordable apartments? In 50 years, successful planning won’t result from processes found in dusty, fading documents, but from results we achieved for real people here.

Honestly, I’m highly uncomfortable critiquing government planning. I believe deeply in government as a force for good. Our local public servants possess good intentions. For generations, progressives like me have shaped government processes to protect people.

Yet we need more balance between processes creating protections and efficiency enabling results.

By no means does this mean we shouldn’t plan. Or have a vision. Or engage the community. We should.

Ultimately, if our most essential regional goal is building housing in vibrant villages that sustain neighborhoods, and we’re not doing so because of a busted process holding us back, then we must change course to achieve higher priority outcomes.

Alex Shoor is a community leader and the executive director of the grassroots, community-based organization Catalyze Silicon Valley.