South Bay lawmakers and advocates are reacting with mixed feelings after one Bay Area Senator’s attempt to tackle the housing crisis was evicted from the Senate floor this week. Sen. Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 50 is officially dead, as the debate between regulating city housing requirements, maintaining local control and ensuring tenant protections proved to...
Santa Clara leaders set slew of priorities for 2020
Santa Clara lawmakers spent nearly six hours Thursday identifying priorities they consider essential for Santa Clara’s growth in 2020 — touching on everything from Levi’s Stadium, public transparency and community-sourced development. In the first of a two-day session, Councilmember Teresa O’Neill summed up the goal of the meeting: “I think if we can … try...
Navarro: The Mercury News’ failure to mention me in editorial
I was very disappointed that the Mercury News failed to mention me as a San Jose City Council candidate for District 6 in its Jan. 21 endorsement editorial. By not mentioning the only District 6 candidate who grew up in the lower-income neighborhoods of District 6, in which income disparity, affordable housing, public safety and...
Santa Clara County works to finalize five-year plan to eradicate homelessness
Santa Clara County housing advocates and leaders are in the final stages of finalizing the newest five-year plan to eradicate homelessness — or at least try to get everyone in the county housed by 2025. This week, the group leading the effort to build the plan unveiled its high-level framework as housing advocates and local...
Ganesh: Measure E deserves support from San Jose voters
In a San José Spotlight op-ed published on Jan. 16, Pat Waite argued that Measure E — a property transfer tax on properties worth over $2 million which is slated for the March ballot — represented a money-grab by the city that would fail to deliver on its promises of increasing the city’s capability to...
San Jose’s new business tax amnesty program expected to generate $1M
San Jose adopted a business tax in the 1960s as a revenue stream for the city’s general fund, which pays for everything from police and fire service to roads, parks and libraries. And for the fifth time since the law was modernized in the 1980s, the city is offering an amnesty program for business owners...
Roberts: Put housing first, character second
This is the first of a three-part series on Housing First. They are people who are broke, and broken. They have insufficient resources to sustain housing, and tattered lives with barriers that sometimes seem insurmountable. Some are dependent on substances that misdirect, others are overcome by mental demons. All are unable to stand on their...
Leaders to weigh pros, cons of future train alignments at Diridon Station
As traffic and congestion plagues the Bay Area, regional transportation leaders are working on a redesign of the South Bay’s most critical transit hub: San Jose’s Diridon Station, abutting a potential new multi-million-square-foot Google campus. Some details of the new station have been ironed out. For instance, train tracks at Diridon Station will eventually sit...
Peralez: Breaking silos to solve homelessness
Last year, the city of San Jose’s point-in-time count, a federally mandated count of the area’s homeless population, showed that homelessness spiked 42% in the last two years. Today, for every one person we house, three more become homeless. On any given day, there are more than 5,000 residents living on our city’s streets, however,...
Santa Clara County supervisors approve new homeless task force
Last year, 161 homeless people died on Santa Clara County streets but some immediate solutions might be on the horizon. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved creating a new task force to help alleviate homelessness countywide by focusing on providing shelter and transitional housing options. In 2015, a similar task...