Good afternoon, welcome.

Sorry, good afternoon and welcome.

I think we should probably get started here.

Welcome to all of our planning commissioners.

Tony, would you please call the city council role?

I think we should probably get started here with all of our planning commissioners.

Please call the city council.

Here.

Cohen?

Here.

Ortiz?

Present.

Mulcahy?

Here.

Duan?

Here.

Kendallas.

Here.

Casey.

Fully?

Yeah, I think Mayhan.

Here.

You have a quorum.

Great.

Thank you.

And Cher Osara, do you do you all need to call roll?

Are you you're good?

Yes, please go ahead.

Okay.

Do we do we have someone here to call role for the Planning Commission?

Is this a item where they're going to do that?

I think I can do it if you need me to.

It won't be in like a normal order.

Young?

Here.

When Cal.

Here.

Bandle?

Here.

Oliverio?

Here.

Casey?

Here.

Kentrell?

Here.

Barosio?

Here.

Bickford?

Here.

Rosario.

Here.

You have a quorum.

All right, great.

Well, once again, uh, Chair Rosario, planning commissioners, thank you so much for taking the time to be here for this joint session.

Really looking forward to jumping into the study session.

As you all know well, but just for members of the public, we are initiating our third four-year general plan review, which is an opportunity to take stock of the planning context in which we are working to implement our uh envision 2040 general plan, uh, get an update on what's working and what isn't.

Hear from our community as we go through this review process and get important input from our most important stakeholders, the people we represent, and then uh come up with any policy changes or adjustments that we think are needed to better deliver on our shared goals.

We have made the Planning Commission the task force for this review process, and we have a lot to get through.

So I just want to thank everybody again for being here and for our commissioners, your service on the city's planning commission.

Thank you very much.

And uh Chris, I believe I'm handing it over to you to get underway.

Yes, thank you, Mayor.

Uh Chris Burton, Director of Planning Building Code Enforcement.

I'm joined here today by Deputy Director Meneer Sand here, Principal Planner Jared Ferguson, and Principal Planner Ruth Queto.

Um, we'd just like to thank everybody for joining us today.

Uh this is our first in-memory joint study session between the city council and the planning commission.

So it's great to see you all in one place, and we appreciate you taking the time.

As the mayor said, this is an important moment for us as we kind of leap into our next four-year review of the general plan.

And so we wanted to take some time just to help level set and to kind of help uh everybody contextualize the conversation that we're gonna have over the next uh 12 months with the planning commission standing of our task force.

So um, despite all our best efforts, um planning still takes a long time.

Um that's okay.

Um so part of what we want to do today is is give you that context of time and how uh decisions that you will make as city council members on policy, you know, may take a couple, may take several years to turn into planning entitlements that then may take a couple of years to turn into building permits that then may take a couple of years or more to turn into buildings.

So planning takes a long time.

The decisions we make now have impact, you know, far into the future.

Um and we want to give you that context.

Uh obviously, the the general plan is an aggregation of layers of decisions that have come before.

And so today our hope is to kind of give you that sense of how did we get here to this moment, all of the kind of decisions, not all of the decisions that preceded.

We're certainly not gonna go back the 150 years, 175 years to the first incorporated city in California, or the 250 years to the initial Spanish settlement, or even further back to all of the indigenous populations that lived here.

What we're really gonna focus on is the last 30 years of planning policy, and there's a reason why.

So when you think about the city and how it grew, uh certainly post-World War II, we saw a lot of single family, suburban, what would it be categorized as sprawl as the city sort of spread outwards?

There's really this sort of breakwater moment as we get through the 1980s and into the 1990s where we start to think differently about planning.

Um so through our current general plan and the previous one, a lot of those decisions have been made that kind of led us to this point.

So our goal is to kind of take you back in time a little bit, walk through the decisions that got us from that previous general plan to the writing of the current one, and then kind of everything that's happened since.

A lot has changed, um, certainly within the city's context, but also from the state of California and the way we do land because in the way we approach this.

Once we've given you that context, we want to talk a little bit about some of the challenges, some of which stem from some of those decisions and the way we've approached it, some of those of the sort of world that exists around us.

And then we kind of want to leave you with the questions we're really going to start asking through the four-year review process and talk about sort of what are the sorts of things that we're going to look to hope to solve.

What are the kind of questions that are ultimately going to find?

So just to kind of quickly touch on the agenda.

Before we get to all of the history, we want to give you a quick sort of refresher on general plan 101 on what it is, how we use it, what goes into our general plan.

Then as I said, we'll give you that pathway to our current general plan and current condition.

We're going to lay out a lot of the key land use issues and emerging issues that are facing us now, then talk about where we're headed before we open it up.

It's a lot of content.

We've tried to make it as engaging as possible.

So we look forward to sharing all of this with you.

And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Meneira.

Thank you, Chris.

So I'll be covering some of the basics around the general plan.

What is the general plan and how we use it?

So the general plan is a city's vision and blueprint for how we grow.

Every city and county in the state of California is required to have a general plan.

And a typical horizon of a general plan is 20 to 30 years.

So as Chris mentioned, this is a long-term policy document that really embodies a community's values.

It is developed with a lot of public outreach and community engagement.

And as you can see, it has a lot of different elements to it that it can inform private development, but also a city's decision on capital infrastructure projects and the services it provides.

So in the second bullet there, you can see that state law requires eight elements in a general plan.

Land use is one, which we're going to deeply focus on today, but it is it also includes elements focused on circulation, so how people get around a city, whether we are focused on transit or transportation networks, multi-mobility, et cetera, housing, open space and conservation, safety, noise, as well as the most recent addition of environmental justice, which is focused on disadvantaged communities in the state.

The housing element deserves its own separate, you know, bullet because it is the only element in the general plan that is certified by the State Department of Community and Housing Development.

It is also different because it is on an eight year cycle.

So as I mentioned, the general plan is long-term, 20 to 30 years.

The housing element is on an eight-year cycle.

And it includes a number of policies and programs that are focused on housing production as well as preservation.

And it includes a regional housing needs allocation.

RENA, and this is a term that you may have heard often, where we talk about how the city wants to produce housing or develop housing.

And the city of San Jose's housing element goal for this cycle that runs from 2023 to 2031 is actually 62,000 units.

So just wanted to end with that number.

All right, so how do we use the general plan?

So typically a general plan is accompanied by the zoning ordinance.

And while the general plan sets the long-term vision and it includes goals and policies and implementation actions on how to effect effectuate that vision, the zoning ordinance is the implementation tool that looks at creating codes and standards and procedures that can equitably treat any application that comes to the city.

And so while you can think of the general plan as the roadmap, the zoning ordinance provides like fills out the nuts and bolts of how a city develops.

And so it includes setback requirements, building height requirements, things that really can allow for development to occur.

All right.

So given that this the general plan is a long-term document, you know, it's not a static document.

So while when a general plan is adopted, a city council and the community may have a certain vision in mind, there may be opportunities or instances where it needs tweaking and uh amendments to really align with the with the realities of the time.

Um so there is opportunity to update or amend the general plan.

It is limited since you don't want to fiddle too much with a long-range planning document because again, it it's not intended to be reactive to every instance of change.

Um but a general plan amendment can be city initiated, so either council giving direction or staff recognizing that there's some policies that need to be amended or mapping changes that need to occur, or it could be privately initiated, where a property owner or a developer can come to the city to request a general plan of amendment that allows a certain use or a certain uh standard for their development.

Um again, we are limited to four hearings per year for these kinds of general plan amendments, um, out of which one are reserved for privately initiated general plan amendments and one for affordable housing projects.

In San Jose, we do provide a unique opportunity for early consideration of general plan amendments.

So when we receive private development applications for projects that may be fundamentally inconsistent with some of the general plan policies, the applicants can request early consideration before the planning commission and city council to get an early understanding of whether that project is right for the city or should be continued processing, or is clearly fundamentally incompatible with its surrounding uses or incompatible with the policies and should be denied at that upfront, you know, beginning stages of a project.

So you don't have to spend all that time and money going through environmental review and other steps.

So that is unique to San Jose.

Next slide.

Again, since it's a long-term document, it is good to reflect on it and check on it and see how we're doing.

So state law does require that a general plan is reviewed annually.

We send out reports to OPR, or now I think the term is changed, the Office of Planning and Research at the stage state, sometime around March.

We bring those reports to the planning commission every year between December and February, March.

And this sort of just gives an example of what are the things that are covered in the annual report.

So we report out on the jobs to employed resident ratio, on how much transportation improvements have occurred, on goals related to our climate smart strategies or greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

And I do want to take a minute to touch on the jobs to employ at resident ratio here, because I think that is an important term that you will hear throughout our presentation.

So the jobs to employed resident ratio is really a good indicator of the city's economic base and indicates how many people are actually living and working in the city versus living and traveling outside of the city.

I was trying to pull up the note that I had.

San Jose is actually the only big city in the country that is primarily a bedroom community.

So as you can see, our current jobs to employed resident ratio is about 0.79 to 0.80, which is fairly low compared to our goal of 1.1, and actually our original goal in a general plan of 1.3.

So we we do have to face some of those challenges.

Some of the other areas that are included in our annual report, we look at commercial square footage of development, industrial square footage of development.

This is just a chart pulled from our last year annual report that shows how the construction markets can be really cyclical, right?

Like you have these downward trends where the markets may not allow for certain types of developments, or you have these certain boom times when construction may be really ticking up, and we'll we'll go over that as we cover the history of our general plan.

Similarly, we also report on our housing numbers.

So as you can see in this chart, again, there is sort of you know variation across time on how much housing we are producing.

In our last year, we had about 2,674 housing units permitted.

I believe that has gone down, and we will touch on that in a few minutes.

Um, but historically, on average, we've produced about 2,666 units every year.

And if anybody's good at mental math, I would invite you to think about the 62,000 unit RENA number and compare that with our average sort of data, and guess how many years it would take for us to get to those 62,000 units.

And I actually had the benefit of looking it up in our calculator, so it's 23 years.

So switching a little bit and diving deeper into you know what really excites us as planners and looking at the general plan from a planning lens, um, is uh thinking about all of the land uses that make up a city, right?

So this is a typical map.

All cities have a land use designation map that'll outline the various uses that are designated for various parts of the city.

And of course, there's a lot of you know fine-grained detail into it, but broadly you can think about the green areas as being sort of our open space and our parks networks.

Um the housing is covered in the yellow and you know, starting to get into the orange and red zones, um, and then the jobs are in our blue and purple parts of the city.

Um, so as you can see on this map, like you know, we we do have a lot of green areas, the the bayfront in the north along El Viso, but then also in the south and along the foothills, uh, Coyote Valley is one area that's notable here.

But then a lot of the map is that light yellow color, which is a lot of our single family neighborhoods.

Um if you think about our job centers, those are primarily located up to the north in North San Jose, so the blue and purple areas, um, but then you have some around downtown and then also along Edenvale.

Um then if you step back a little bit, and I don't have a map to show that, but if you picture up picture the the Bay Area on the whole in your minds, you can also think about the regional employment centers, right?

So their regional employment or employment centers to our northeast and our northwest, and um, and you have all of these people, almost a million population in San Jose that are traveling up to these job centers, whether it's here right here in San Jose and North San Jose or up to other job centers up in San Francisco or up along the peninsula.

Um, so that just shows you like how land uses sort of, you know, and how mobility uh is impacted depending on the land use distribution within a city.

Um another representation of what I just covered uh out of the 180 square miles that is the city, we have about 50 percent of that land actually in public open space.

Um then if you look at the rest of the area, that's about you know the rest of the 50 percent.

Uh 37% is considered residential lands, and again, this is everything.

Uh as you saw, we had a lot of light yellow on there, so almost 80% of that is actually in our single family neighborhoods.

Um, and then only 14% is in our uh employment areas, which is distributed across commercial lands and light and heavy industrial and other industrial lands.

Um how did we come to this moment in time?

And you know, before I pass it on to Ruth to cover the last 30 years of this history, just going back in time a little bit to when we were called the Valley of Hearts Delight.

Uh, like it's interesting after the post-war boom, between the 1950s and the 1970s, San Jose really expanded and grew outward and grew south.

And one of the interesting numbers that I'll end with here is that we actually had almost 1,400 annexations over the course of those two decades between 1950 and 1970.

So that's how you know we have these land uses that we that currently exist in our in our framework.

So, with that, I will turn it over to Ruth to take us through the rest of our history.

Thank you.

So we are going to start with um the General Plan 2020 uh focus on the future, which was adopted in 1994.

It's 94.

Mayor Susan Hammer is entering her second term, and the popular population of San Jose is approximately 800,000 people.

Like our current general plan, San Jose 2020 general plan sought to tackle challenges related to growth, the economy downtown, and address the jobs housing imbalance.

Um, some of these approaches are not what we're used to now.

Uh one of the approaches was to make it easier for cars to move versus you know multimodal experience.

Um it also uh the densities were a lot lower than what we see today and what we try to strive for today.

And there were um several alternative use policies that allowed for exceptions to rules.

So while the plan did include some bicycle and transit-friendly transportation policies, management really relied heavily on making it easier for vehicles to move throughout city highways and streets.

For example, during this time is when we saw um heavy investment in the expansion of highway 87 and highway 85.

In terms of residential densities outside of downtown, the general plan prescribed maximum densities like transit corridor residential, which was at 12 dwelling units to the acre or more, or high density residential at 25 to 50 dwelling units to the acre.

These two examples of densities are typical of what was built at that time, just shy of 30 dwelling units to the acre.

For reference, that is on the low end of the densities that we currently have for our general plan.

The 2020 general plan was a plan of exceptions.

While the plan identified environmental, fiscal and economic goals as important considerations, it also provided significant growth opportunity through a number of discretionary alternate use policies.

One of these policies was a two-acre rule that allowed for conversion of commercial, industrial or public quasi-public lands without the need for a general plan amendment, so long as the project was compatible with the surrounding area.

At its height between 2004 and 2007, industrial conversions in San Jose occurred at a rate of 120 acres per year and prompted the city council to adopt a different approach to address that issue.

So we're gonna jump to 2005 and 2000 to 2010.

This is a short window with significant changes.

The San Jose population increases to about 910,000 in 2005 when Ron Gonzalez served as mayor, and then climbs to about 945,000 in 2010 when Chuck Reed serves as mayor.

We think of the previous general plan and these years leading up to 2011 as setting the groundwork for Nvision 2040.

As the implementation of the 2020 plan continued, the city began experiencing challenges like the erosion of employment lands, continued push for sprawl, the need to revitalize downtown and focus on North San Jose, and during this time we also experienced the advent of green tech and the Great Recession.

We continued with aspirations for smart growth.

In 2005, council adopted the downtown strategy plan, which supported additional job and housing growth in the downtown area.

The same year, the North San Jose policy update was adopted, which plans for millions of square feet in office and retail and 32,000 housing units to be built in phases of 8,000 units per phase.

The phasing ensured that transportation improvements funded under the city's first traffic impact fee would be linked to the planned jobs and housing growth.

And yet sprawl pressures did continue, especially in the city's periphery.

The Coyote Valley specific plan process was launched in 2002 with the intent to plan the future development of North and Mid-Coyote Valley and preserve the South Coyote Valley area in perpetual and a perpetual non-urban state.

There was intense debate during the specific plan process about the costs and benefits of developing that area, and it concluded in 2008 when the city council accepted the work of the task force and referred further future work to the Nvision San Jose 2040 general plan update, which was currently underway.

In 2003, the Evergreen East Hills Vision Strategy was initiated also to plan for new development and transportation in the Evergreen area.

A key part of this of that strategy was to consider changing industrial properties into residential land.

The project wrapped up in 2008 when the council allowed only a small amount of new homes and businesses to proceed.

Facing little job growth but high demand for housing between 2000 and 2010, the city encountered a problem.

Developers began to convert low-value industrial areas, spaces typically reserved for factories and warehouses, into new housing developments.

Industrial lands tend to cost less than residential lands, and that low cost provides for a higher rate of return to developers after considering all other costs.

This was a concern for the city because it was losing land needed for middle-income blue-collar jobs, as well as undermining the city's economic development goals and the ability to provide adequate services for residents.

It was short-sighted thinking with long-term consequences.

The employment lands preservation framework.

The goal was to keep land available for businesses that provide jobs for the community.

In 2007, the city revised the framework to strengthen its ability to preserve the overall employment capacity, and eventually the policies in this framework were included in the 2040 general plan.

Also during this time, we encounter a growing climate crisis and the emergence of statewide initiatives and legislation tackling climate change and greenhouse gas emissions and green and clean tech.

These two major pieces of legislation, AB 32 and SB 375, had a significant impact on how cities would address climate change, particularly with the intersection of land use actions.

Aligned with these efforts in 2007, the City Council adopted the Green Vision, a 15-year plan for economic growth and environmental sustainability, with a focus on emerging clean tech jobs, energy use reduction, and other sustainable activities.

The impact of the Great Recession was very substantial.

We saw a record number of unemployment, significant drop in home values, downturns across all major industries, and extreme budget shortfalls.

San Jose and many other cities had to deal with impact on their ability to provide services.

In San Jose, we experienced a marked reduction in city services.

Library operations were limited to four days a week.

We had historically low staffing in the police department.

Our deferred maintenance backlog increased significantly, and we also witnessed the closing of many neighborhood community centers.

This final slide is a quote in the 2009-2010 budget message, budget adopted budget, excuse me, highlighting the years of challenging budget situations and the tremendous loss in staff over the course of eight years.

So we're going to move on to 2011 and describe a little bit about the adopted 2040 general plan.

And at this time, Chuck Reed is in his term, second term as mayor, and the population population continues to grow.

So the 2040 process was initiated in 2007, 13 years after the completion of the San Jose, excuse me, the San Jose 2020 general plan.

While influenced by the economic downturn of this and the city's subsequent fiscal struggles, the general plan reinforced consistent and ongoing economic development, fiscal sustainability, focused growth, and environmental leadership.

The general plan's 12 major strategies shown here informed the land use and transportation diagram, as well as the goals, policies, and actions to deliver on the vision.

I'm going to highlight a few of them in these next slides.

The envisioned plan embodies the support among the city's residents for building urban walkable communities with jobs and housing.

It's a strategy that can help us achieve sustainability and is supportive of public transit.

The general plan also says we're going to achieve those walkable communities by focusing 100% of the growth in 16% of the land area, otherwise known as growth areas, and by staying away from all of the area that you see here in yellow, which is residential neighborhood in the general plan, and mostly single family homes.

We will achieve that by focusing the growth in these areas in red and blue and pink.

This was to be a major win for everyone, where we would preserve the integrity of established single family neighborhoods and focus jobs and housing in these other areas highlighted here.

An important strategy of the general plan was to improve the city's budget through land use and uphold a long-term vision, opposite of the plan of exceptions.

It requires us to consider the impacts of land use decisions on the financial health in the budget and the ability to provide services to residents.

We consider where the city's revenue comes from when we evaluate changes to land use.

One example here for more than more than 50% of general fund revenues come from property tax and sales tax.

So an example that uh an example of that is looking at the cost of sprawl versus the value of jobs.

The image to your right portrays the net fiscal impact using a color spectrum from red to green of five types of land uses.

Single family townhomes, dense multifamily, commercial, hotel, and industrial.

In general, sprawling low density homes are fiscally negative as they require more services like fire, police, and libraries, and bring in less revenue compared to the commercial, hotel, and industrial uses, which require fewer services but offset the cost for those services with more revenue generated.

Lastly, we have climate smart and sustainability as a prominent theme in the general plan.

The plan includes numerous goals encouraging green building, water conservation, and other climate-friendly actions.

As discussed earlier in 2007, City Council adopted the green vision, and that was eventually incorporated into the general plan and replaced, ultimately replaced by the city's climate spark plan in 2018.

Okay, now we're in 2011-2018, so post-adoption.

This next section during this time frame, Mayor Reed transitions out of office, Mayor Sam Licardo brings begins his first term in 2015, and San Jose reaches a population of 1 million, becoming the 10th largest city in the country.

One of those is that we experienced the longest economic expansion since World War II, where between November 2011 and the end of fiscal year 1819, San Jose issued building permits for 23,000 housing units, 14 million square feet of commercial, and 9 million square feet of industrial.

Much of this was due to back a backlog of pre-recession entitlements.

At this moment, we also had a policy environment that coupled with market forces resulted in this residential growth, primarily in North San Jose through the second half of the expansion.

As you may recall, North San Jose plan called for four phases, 8,000 units each, and that's when this first portion of units were completed, with very few of those deed restricted affordable.

And due to the phasing nature of the plan, the door essentially closed on any more housing in North San Jose until we built millions of square feet in industrial.

At the same time, we're seeing an increase in that we're seeing this increase in housing production.

We're also facing a challenge in building affordable housing.

It was a perfect storm.

From 2010 to 2015, the city's inclusionary housing ordinance was litigated.

And at that same time, we also see the end of redevelopment in California, losing millions of funds of funds in affordable housing.

20% of redevelopment dollars were allocated to affordable housing.

This support from redevelopment was how San Jose became one of the highest producing cities in terms of affordable housing.

While the inclusionary housing ordinance was being litigated, the city switched gears and implemented the affordable housing impact fee in 2014.

However, this ordinance came into effect just as the increase in housing production was slowing down.

And in November 2015, we kicked off our first general plan four-year review and accomplished the following.

Adopted policies to increase affordable housing production, reduced our jobs goal, and modified the jobs to employed resident ratio from 1.3 to 1.1.

And we also implemented policy adjustments for our urban villages.

Following that work, we received direction from council to take a comprehensive approach to the growing housing crisis.

That's where we enter the housing crisis work plan, a plan to get to 25,000 new units in five years.

The housing catalyst team would take that uh would lead that effort and focus on delivering housing production by amending policies and programs to facilitate new units.

And with this, I will hand it over to Jared.

Thanks, Ruth.

Um in 2018 and more so moving into 2019, in addition to the city's emphasis on the housing crisis, the state also began taking an even more direct interventionist role in the housing crisis, which fundamentally and permanently realigned how we think about land use and local control.

In this new housing focused era, the second general plan four-year review started in 2019.

The scope of work made housing the focal point even more so than in the first four-year review.

We look for other opportunities for housing within our neighborhood business districts, which were not designated as urban villages and many were primarily commercial and did not allow for housing.

We eliminated our growth horizons completely as a part of this review.

Originally, growth was metered out in the general plan across three phases or horizons.

And these were also intended to specify which urban villages would be planned first.

Numerous policy changes and other actions had already greatly limited how the horizons were used, but through the this four-year review, they were fully eliminated.

And then the major topic was around missing middle housing, or what at the time we called opportunity housing.

And this was considering allowing up to four units on single family properties in various areas of the city with walkability to transit.

Right, a staff was preparing to go to city council with recommendations to move forward with this proposal based on feedback from the task force.

SB9 was signed into law.

SB9 allows duplexes and lot splits in single family zoning statewide.

The decision was made to monitor SB9 implementation rather than pursue the city's own approach.

And then the last major item was removing commercial requirements on affordable housing projects where it was required.

As we moved into 2018, the start the state really started to rewrite the playbook for cities, including charter cities like San Jose.

Zoning had always been a uniquely local issue, having stemmed from the city's policing power, as we mentioned in the General Plan 101 section.

The state changes have heavily impacted San Jose as we have historically used our general plan as a place to include more policy or land use elements that are typically part of a zoning ordinance.

SB 35 allows for the streamlined ministerial approval for affordable housing and mixed mixed income housing projects.

This means that there that no hearing is required and projects are exempt from CEQA.

AB 2162 was approved near the same time and allowed a similar approval process for supportive housing.

SB 1333 required charter cities like San Jose to have a site zoning match its general plan designation, which was a major shift for San Jose and impacted many of our general plan policies and how land use had worked for us in the city for decades.

And then SB 330 modified the housing accountability act and greatly limits the city's discretion in housing approvals.

Limits our ability to down zone properties and also ensures that all of our development standards related to housing must be objective.

Additionally, the state density bonus law allows for projects including that include affordable housing units to request waivers and concessions that sidestep our local guidelines.

Then, of course, through the sixth cycle housing element, as we know, the state added a host of new requirements and expectations that hadn't existed in the previous five cycles.

Many state law changes, especially SB 35, have had a positive impact, but also represent an extreme and fast change to how zoning and local control work.

While in some cases, this has made it easier for us to meet our housing goals of our general plan, it's also made it harder for us to meet some of our other goals around economic development and providing additional amenities within new development that were promised in the initial general plan.

These changes have also greatly added to our policy workload as a department as we respond to the ever evolving and complicated landscape that they that they create.

On top of our traditional role of maintaining the zoning ordinance and general plan.

And this is just a small snapshot.

By no means does it include all of the state laws we've had to deal with, but just gives you a sense of the volume, you know, that's just been immense that we've had to respond to within this you know kind of time frame since 2018.

So moving into the next section brings us into the present and is an opportunity for us to discuss some of the challenges and emerging issues we're facing today.

As Chris mentioned in kind of discussing the objectives for today, um, this really moves us to to try to answer that second question of what challenges we face.

Really at the forefront of this conversation is the economics.

The economics of the development of multifamily housing has continued to be the biggest barrier to housing in the city.

The city does not build housing, we provide just one element of the environment that produces new housing units.

We rely on private investment and development to deliver housing, and to do that, it must deliver an appropriate and positive return for that investment.

As a part of our first housing crisis work plan that was initiated as a part of the last housing element, the city began conducting annual assessments of the financial feasibility of multifamily development throughout the city in what we call our report on the cost of residential development.

As a part of this, the city completed reports in 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023.

A new report is anticipated later this year.

As a part of that first report in 2018, rents were continuing to rise substantially in San Jose.

And while feasibility was challenging, in many submarkets within the city, there were areas such as West San Jose where multifamily development was feasible.

However, as we moved into 2019, the trend started to continue where costs of the cost of construction increased, among other factors that led to all development types in that study to be infeasible.

Year over year costs have continued to rise and were exacerbated by the impacts of the global pandemic, where in 2022 and 2023, feasibility continued to grow even more challenging.

Other factors have also weighed on feasibility, such as interest rates and insurance costs.

Simultaneously, rent growth, which has which is the other side of the equation, has you know continued to grow in the positive direction but has been slow to grow.

These conditions have made it extremely challenging for private development and investment to deliver on our market rate housing goals in our housing element, or to really see the continued development in our urban villages in ways that were possible when the general plan was created in 2011.

And just as an example of that, taking a look at a local index of the San Francisco Bay Area that tracks construction costs between the first quarter of 2018 until the first quarter of 2025 shows an increase in construction costs of 54%.

And you can really see the impacts of the economy through this chart on housing production.

So this goes back by fiscal year to 2011, so when the general plan was adopted.

You can see the major jump in 2013-14 that Ruth talked about, you know, coming out of the Great Recession, and also you know, we had a major backlog of development from earlier, and then also the impacts of that North San Jose policy.

And then you see another uptick in 2017-2018, but then you can start to see when economic conditions again become less favorable in 2018-2019 as the trend starts downward, even before the pandemic.

And the earlier trends here helped us achieve our above our market rate housing goals within the last housing element cycle.

You can see there was an upward trend in the last fiscal year, really driven by affordable housing, not by market rate housing.

And then this last fiscal year, you can kind of see where even that production has dropped off in the affordable housing category and continued market rate category as well.

So getting into some of the more sorry, so getting into the direct city, sorry.

So also included in our report on the cost of development, we take a look at the city's fees and taxes, which are really our area of direct control.

And so in the last report in 2023, the city's impact fees and taxes are just below 8% per unit total.

Our city's permitting costs are less than 1% of the unit costs.

And so we we continue to monitor this and look for opportunities for changes in ways that could help move housing forward, as with our multifamily housing incentive program and our continued downtown high-rise program.

So getting into more of the direct city challenges rather than those external challenges with the economy.

Each requires requires a comprehensive plan.

Until the plans are completed, the commercial properties, with some exceptions, do not allow for residential or mixed use.

The prospect of completing individual plans for each village has been a monumental task.

Almost all of our plans have been reliant on external grant funding.

Additionally, as we shared previously, the urban villages were set out in phases that were via our growth horizons.

So that meant certain villages were meant to be planned across three phases.

So all this was accelerated when those horizons were eliminated.

On a more positive note, you know, although we spend a lot of time lamenting the only 15 of the 62 have been planned, from an overall city perspective, we've planned nearly 50% of the total land area across all 62 villages.

Additionally, state requirements through various laws, especially in the last five years or so, as I mentioned earlier, have greatly weighed down our resources to allow us to do this community-based planning work.

Typically, on average, these plans take about three and a half years.

Okay, so to give you a better sense of where we are in planning our villages, we put together this new map that gives you what villages we've completed and what's underway.

It also outlines some of the initial strategies we've talked about in terms of how we can group and streamline our work around urban villages to expedite the process.

So everything you see in dark red and light red is completed.

Yellow are the two areas or villages that were currently underway right now planning.

So you have the Saratoga Avenue and the El Paseo effort going right now, and then the Alum Rock East Urban Village is underway.

So the ones in light green and dark green, these are two light rail station corridors.

So in the north is the Capitol Avenue Light Rail Corridor, and then in the south in light green is the 87 light rail corridor.

We'd like to plan these villages together as one effort to try to streamline that work and also see also see how much work within the MTC TOC policy aligns with what needs to be done to complete those villages as well.

So in orange, these are all of our what we call our neighborhood villages.

Nearly all of these are fairly small, and our strategy that we'd like to pursue moving forward is to make some specific land use changes to allow mixed-use development at certain locations within these villages without completing a comprehensive individual plan for each of the villages.

Given the size and number of these villages, we think that that might be a more appropriate process for them.

And then lastly in dark blue, there are still more of what we're calling our traditional villages.

These are larger, and we feel that they still should be planned through that more traditional village planning process.

And our team is working on ways that we can streamline the traditional process further.

And this is a topic we'll discuss more in the four four-year review and in our next section of the presentation.

So getting back to some of the challenges to the urban village strategy as well.

The strategy in 2011 when the general plan was adopted was not just about allowing mixed-use development on 100% commercial sites throughout the city.

The initial strategy included significant upzoning of existing multifamily residential properties.

In the previous general plan, high density residential, as Ruth had mentioned, was the highest residential designation we had was 25 to 50 dwelling units per acre.

However, under General Plan 2040, we have our urban residential designation, which is not our highest designation, but is one of our typical ones in urban villages, and that goes from 30 to 95 dwelling units per acre.

And this is really demonstrated through the assigned capacity and makeup of the Southwest Expressway urban village.

This is a corridor on Southwest Expressway where there are two light rail stations.

And here is a map of that area with all the current uses.

Everything in light purple is currently residential.

And so about 65% of that village area total area is existing residential properties.

And the initial general plan assigned a capacity of 3,000 new units to that village.

In 2015, the thinking around the policy of upzoning and the replacement of apartments shifted, especially around those units under the city's rent control ordinance.

This was really driven by the proposal to redevelop the reserve apartments in West San Jose on Winchester Boulevard.

This was an apartment complex of 216 units, subject to the city's rent control ordinance on a 7.6 acre site.

It was within the Winchester Urban Village, which did not have an adopted plan at that time.

And however, the site was designated as urban residential that allowed redevelopment to proceed.

The redevelopment was ultimately approved by city council and resulted in the 636 unit Linhaven apartments at the site today, which meant it went from roughly 28 dwelling units per acre to 86 dwelling units per acre.

And this redevelopment really evoked a long and deep discussion in the city about the appropriateness and approach to the redevelopment of existing housing.

Numerous policy changes followed with a goal of protecting residents in existing apartments and to provide that new units, those new units also fall under the city's rent control ordinance.

So in that light, the city passed its Ellis Act ordinance and tenant protection ordinance in 2017.

These changes require that tenants be provided advanced notice of any redevelopment, be provided relocation benefits, and new any new units created, 50% of those new units must fall under the city's rent control ordinance.

And so while these policies don't prevent redevelopment, they make it both financially and politically very unlikely that we'd see redevelopment of these properties in the future.

And that's really resulted in a reduction of where the plan capacity in our general plan can go.

So if we look at the composition of our city, our urban village composition rather, roughly 20% of urban villages is existing residential, looking at current uses.

And so this has really resulted in even more pressure to convert commercial or completely eliminate commercial in urban villages.

And commercial elimination can provide its own challenges to the city, not just to the long-term fiscal health of the city, as Ruth mentioned, but also it can impact the small business and community serving businesses in those urban villages.

And just as an example of this, we have an affordable development in the Alum Rock urban village.

So this is at 2358 Alum Rock.

And this was actually the city's first SB 35 project.

On the site previously was a small strip mall with multiple small businesses, a western ware store, a cell phone shop, a nail salon, and an insurance company.

And it was replaced by 87 affordable units.

It did include 3,000 square feet of commercial space, but ultimately no new neighborhood serving retail is at that location.

So even in situations where we do see mixed use, the new space is often unable to support small business.

The new retail space or new commercial space is built as cold shell and requires massive investment to become suitable for those businesses.

And in a mixed-use setting, may or may not be designed adequately to accommodate those uses as well.

The landscape is also changed through state law and also our city policy changes.

For affordable housing, as I mentioned, we eliminated all commercial requirements or commercial replacement requirements.

And state law has really limited our ability to require commercial or mixed use on housing properties through some of the laws that I've mentioned in other ones as well.

We hear a lot about the future of work and the office market, and it's true that it's very challenging due to that shift to remote work.

Citywide, our office vacancy is at about 20%.

And the length and permanence of that shift to remote work is uncertain at this point.

But it's also important to understand that our retail vacancy is less than 5% citywide.

And so as we look at the composition of our urban villages, as we as I mentioned, that 80-20 split without the residential, you know, kind of being off the table as well.

If you look at the 80% commercial, only 5% is office.

So the opportunity there in terms of that vacancy is not really there.

And now I'll pass it to Chris.

So as you look at this map, the thing to really pay attention to, and we've already touched on this a little bit, is we're trying to do a lot in not very much space.

So the number that we've already stated, 100% of the growth in this general plan occurs in about 16% of the land area citywide.

And when you combine some of these challenges we're facing around the economics, where the market is, and then our aspirations for focused but smart growth, it leads to a challenge in what we're seeing in the development market.

Am I pressing the wrong button?

Technologically challenged today.

And that's that's the gap in the middle.

So what we're looking at here is a distribution of existing residential lands throughout the city.

And so what you have is roughly 30% of the units across sorry, uh yeah, roughly 30% of the units across the city are taking up about 78% of the land area dedicated to residential as it currently stands today.

66% of the units we have throughout San Jose exists on that same sort of 17% of land area.

And all the additional growth we're looking for in our general plan, whether it's the 62,000 units in our current housing element or additional growth, the vast majority of that is planned to occur in that same land area.

Given the challenge with the economics, that's not where the market wants to be.

It's struggling to meet that demand.

Also, now with the changes in state law, Jared already mentioned SB 330.

It's not something that we can go back and down zone these areas to meet the market where it's at.

We sort of have to keep a lot of that capacity in place.

So one of the biggest challenges we're finding right now is understanding how we meet the market with the type of development it wants to do.

And that's what we're commonly referring to as missing middle.

How that's playing out is in areas where there is sort of a little bit of flexibility in the land use policy, or in the instance where there was a brief window, we were out of compliance with our housing element, which under the housing accountability act meant that we were under the builder's remedy condition, which allowed developers to propose land use projects that were inconsistent with the general plan.

We've seen this increase in the desire to build townhomes and sort of lower density product throughout the city.

So we know that there's demand for this product.

We know that it's something that we need to meet in continuing to grow housing through a difficult and challenging economic market.

But we really don't have the land area or the land use designations.

When we did the 2011 general plan, we really didn't consider the production of missing middle housing, given the balance of needs that we were trying to address, especially in consideration of the fiscalization fiscalization of land use and the consideration to make land use net fiscally positive.

Like we pushed for high density in a small area of the city.

And this is one of the most significant challenges we face.

And it's not like we can just turn around and just meet that demand where it wants to be, because there is a limit to the available land area.

As you saw in the earlier chart, about 50% of the city is dedicated to open space based on our land use designations.

The vast majority of the remainder is already residential lands.

Of those spaces where we can develop, you know, if we were just to go to town homes, it still wouldn't meet the need that we have.

We took a couple of projects here just as examples.

The one on the left, 5670 Camden is one of those builders' remedy projects.

It's being proposed with 108 town homes on 10 acres.

It comes in at a gross density of roughly 10 acres, sorry, 10 units to the acre.

Which means that if we were to build at that rate to meet our annual housing goal, so each year under this housing element, we would need 770 acres of land.

When you do a similar comparison with the Pleasant Hills Golf Course proposal we're currently working on, that's roughly 2,000 units on 114 acres.

It's higher density, it's closer to 18 units to the acre.

But we would still need almost four Pleasant Hills golf courses a year to meet that demand for our housing element goals based on just a town home market.

And as you can see just from the site of our urban villages, you know, our largest urban village at Oak Ridge is 380 acres.

Doesn't get us close.

So there's a definitely a challenge there on how we how we think about this, how we balance the needs of the market and where that wants to be, how we balance the needs of our state requirements to produce housing, and then how we sort of continue to meet the need of our residents.

And that's the sort of last piece we want to touch on in the context of challenges, which is the ongoing housing crisis.

And it's a thing that we see in really two lenses.

The housing crisis exists as an availability crisis, but also an affordability crisis.

So as we've seen this massive economic expansion throughout the entire Bay Area over the last, well, over the previous expansion, sort of post-great recession right up to the pandemic, which really kind of changed the game a little bit.

We've not kept pace as a region with housing production.

We've seen massive expansion in employment.

We as a city have done everything we can to try and meet that demand and produce housing.

Other cities around us have not.

And it puts us in a backlog.

So there's an availability crisis which continues to put pressure on the economics from a rent perspective.

Now, in San Jose, that exists under affordability crisis.

We've seen increased pressure around existing housing stock, which for us is a lot of single family homes on a very large land area.

And it's pushed some amount of that multifamily development, but not everything we want to see.

Now, just again, meeting the market where it wants to be right now with town homes, helps address some amount of that market.

It hits a certain segment, certainly those areas that are pushing into the outliers of the Bay Area that are increasing the commute challenges that we face.

However, it's not meeting the needs of all of our residents.

So, based on just Redfin, looking at July of last year, new town homes being built in the city are running somewhere north of a million dollars a unit.

That means you've got to have at least 200,000 in money to put down, and you've got to be earning somewhere between 280 and 360,000 a year as a household just to be able to afford that.

That puts it somewhere between 140 and 180% area median income.

So clearly, while it we're sort of hitting on the availability piece, it doesn't really address the affordability crisis that we still face and still unique to San Jose.

So that's outlined many of our challenges.

I'm just going to keep pointing at Ruth.

It's much easier.

So I want to touch a little bit on kind of where we're headed next.

So, as we've mentioned, we're headed right now into our four-year review.

Just to sort of touch on that, the reason that we have the four-year review in the general plan, it is somewhat unique to general plans.

You don't see this in every city.

The idea was that we didn't want to keep rewriting the general plan.

We wanted the opportunity to adapt to all of those conditions that we've just described.

And the way that we do that beyond our annual work on policy is to say every four years, we're going to do a check-in, we'll take on these major issues, we can adjust our general plan.

And as such, it actually gives us sort of a more of a runway.

General plans have a horizon of 20, 30 years.

Most cities rewrite them every sort of 10 to 15.

So we're now going on into year 14.

We're going to do a four-year review.

That will give us sort of more run on this.

So council's given us the scope for this four-year review.

There are some significant timeline crunches that we're considering as we think about this work.

And so as a result, we've really focused the scope on that four-year review.

So what's the timeline crunch?

What's really that housing element?

So the last housing element, and I mentioned the builders' remedy situation that we found ourselves in for a period of time, creates a challenge for us because if we don't have that certified housing element, it will open up a lot of these land areas for land uses that are outside of our control.

So we're really focused on delivering a complete and certified housing element by 2031, January 2031, which seems a really, really long time away.

But as you'll recall, I started this presentation by saying planning takes a long time, and this is why.

So we know that we're going to get additional unit requirements above the 62,000 that we already have planned.

That 62,000 pretty much puts us at capacity in the current general plan.

So we know that we need to expand the capacity overall.

To do that, working back, it took us about two and a half years to write the last housing element.

So we know that we need to get started in 2027 to give ourselves some buffer so that once we go through the review cycle with the state that we avoid some of those challenges.

Before we get to that, we've got to change the general plan.

We've also got to do a new environmental impact report, which is a significant undertaking.

We know that we need to start that in 2026, which means we need to get a four-year review done so we know what we're going to study and what general plan changes we need to make.

Hence, we need to do a four-year review now, and we need to get it done in the space of 12 months.

And that's why we find ourselves using the planning commission at this time to really focus that review and look at four key areas within the general plan.

So the four topics that we're going to look at within that focused scope that was given by council is increasing that residential capacity so we can meet the demand.

Obviously, we don't have all the answers on this right now.

We're trying to balance sort of what we assume we're going to get through HCD through the state and ultimately comes through MTC and A bag to give us the number that we're shooting for.

So we're planning for that now.

We want to look at that gap between where the market is and where our growth aspirations are and think about how we address the missing middle challenge that we face.

We need to think about the jobs to employed resident metric that we have set for ourselves.

We know that we need balanced growth.

And you think about the employment in the city.

We've long supported the Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area by housing its workers.

About 60% of those workers leave San Jose every day to go work in surrounding communities.

So we need to keep a focus on balanced growth.

We need to produce jobs as well as housing.

But we can't necessarily hold ourselves to that same aspiration because as soon as you add more housing units, that number's going to be completely different.

So we need to address how we're thinking about that.

And then lastly, we touched on some of those challenges with urban villages, which represent you know one of our best opportunities for growth.

But we know that there's more work to be done there as far as how we streamline that process and make them more effective.

So just I want to frame some of the questions that we'll be asking through this process.

I certainly don't expect you to answer them today.

Again, it's to just put them in mind so you have a sense of what's coming.

So as we think about residential capacity, it's really how do we accommodate the growth?

We're really already pushing the limits in the 16% of the land area we have planned.

So where else can we think about this?

How do we think differently?

How do we continue to preserve our employment lands to meet that balance?

Um, but then also how do we kind of plan for all of the different types of housing, the different densities that the market can ultimately support now, and then hopefully support in the future.

Also, how do we kind of rethink what those opportunity areas are?

How do we approach it to maybe unlock areas that currently haven't been planned or designated for future growth?

Um, so we can think about that slightly differently.

Um we're also gonna, as I said, look at missing middle housing.

Um we know that it's something we've got to accommodate.

We know that it's something that the state will continue to push us on.

As we said, we had this in the previous four-year review.

As we were coming through that analysis, the state adopted SB9, which essentially allowed four units on single family lots.

Um, you know, there's a local sort of uh variant of that that sort of, you know, um really what we're looking at in San Jose mostly is two units and two ADUs.

Um, but we know there's gonna be more work in this area, and this is an opportunity for us to get ahead of that, to really think creatively and strategically about where that missing middle housing should go within the city, um, how we think about the increase of gentle densities or mid-densities as a transition between high density areas and preserve that character in our existing single family neighborhoods.

Um, as I said, how do we rebalance the job to employ uh resident ratio?

I think the thing to remember as we think about that post-war growth in the single family neighborhoods.

Again, we were really housing the rest of the valley's workforce.

So, in trying to sort of address that balance and kind of pull that back, there's a challenge there.

So we need to think about how we we provide the balance going forward, but meter that with our expectations on how many sort of jobs we can actually increase throughout the city and how we adjust that target and monitor that over time.

And then lastly, Jared talked a little bit about how we're thinking about urban villages, but ultimately we know we need to streamline that three and a half year process and think differently about that approach and where it's going, and then also the impact.

Like we talk about the commercial challenge that we face and what we've seen now, and as we continue to sort of see development occur in urban villages, the type of retail and commercial space that gets provided through that process does not meet the needs of small businesses.

Typically it's it's brand new space, it's unbuilt, it's cold shell as it's referred to.

So the tenant improvements alone for an existing small business that's serving the local neighborhood.

It's just too inaccessible for anybody to move into that space.

So we need to kind of think creatively around that while still preserving the opportunity for future density throughout our urban villages.

So hopefully that's a lot.

I know we've covered a lot of ground.

I'm sure there are questions and further things.

We could probably spend an hour on each of those slides.

But we've tried to condense it down a little bit, but we're hoping that what you take away from this is really that balancing act that we're constantly playing with our land use policy.

That often we're getting pulled in multiple directions by our own sort of interests, our own desires for the future of this community, as well as those that are imposed on us by other entities, uh, including the state of California.

There are a number of challenges that we face.

Um we continue to adapt and try and move towards those challenges so that we can address them on an ongoing basis.

Um there's a lot of work that goes into that.

Um, this is our opportunity to rethink that for that next set of decisions.

The decisions that we make through this process will have impact beyond 2031, well up to 2015, I'm sure.

So with that, I will hand it over to you, Ma.

Um just want to say a quick thank you to the staff who put tremendous amount of work in putting together this presentation.

Absolutely and open this for questions and comments.

Thank you, Chris.

Thank you to staff.

That was a great primer.

Really appreciate it.

So Manura, Ruth, and Jared, thank you so much for joining Chris and what I think was a very enlightening primer on the general plan and uh sorry, and the uh the very real challenges we face.

It is like a complicated jigsaw puzzle, and it's not entirely clear to me how we achieve all the goals we have at once, which I think is gonna be an important thing for us to reflect on.

Um, I will just say is a couple of just opening reflections on the presentation, and then we'll open it up to folks' questions and comments.

On the ratio itself of jobs to employed residents, I personally am less hung up on the exact ratio than I am on the importance that I think you reinforced of protecting and maximizing the use and value of the economic lands we have.

Because a ratio can be changed on either side.

Having more housing, especially if it's relatively dense, should not be seen as a negative thing, even if it makes that ratio worse.

What would be a negative way to change that ratio would be to just continue to eliminate employment land, which we did far too much of historically, as I think we've all learned in retrospect.

So I I do think there's room for some nuance around how we understand that ratio.

I also appreciate the highlighting of this notion of gentle densification.

The idea that we were going to get 100% of our growth and 16% of the land, uh, I think was um optimistic and has proven not to be our reality.

Um, state law, whether we like it or not, has has changed the game here.

And so our task in part is to better manage that gentle densification and look for the areas where we want to encourage it and can do it in a responsible way.

One of the few bright spots we've seen in housing in the last decade has been our work around ADUs.

And not only has the city led and making it easier to build ADUs, but we were the first to have a conduized ADU in the state of California.

And that's an area where I think uh both we have state law supporting it, we have community buy-in, and we're starting to create a little bit of missing middle housing without just inventing more land, which is not in the cards.

Um, I would encourage us to look at PQP land.

And and I think whether we like it or not, this is coming.

And we have declining student enrollment, we have a lot of underutilized or soon to be underutilized school and in some cases religious lands that we need to look at, and we need a strategy.

And while I think it would be grossly irresponsible of us to make it easy to just convert all vacant school land into low density housing, on the other hand, having it sit there vacant and unutilized for 10 or 20 years is also a bad outcome.

So the one of the questions before us will be what is the right balance?

Where does it make sense to allow redevelopment of that land and and under what conditions and where do we need to hold the line and ensure that we don't in 10 or 20 years look back as we've looked at the decline in our employment land and say, boy, it was a mistake to let all those school sites become townhomes.

And so it's a it's a I'm not saying there's an easy answer here.

I don't know what the answer is, but it's something we have to study and understand because again, the extremes would be a mistake.

I don't really wish to convert all of it uh to low density housing.

I also think having a bunch of vacant, blighted school properties that are a drag on everybody's finances and neighborhoods don't make a whole lot of sense either.

So I just want to point to that.

Let's not forget religious land.

Uh, we've had some attempts, not a lot of success yet, but that's a lot of land that we need to look at.

Uh what else did I want to reflect on?

I also just really appreciate the emphasis on streamlining urban village planning and how do we get out of our own way.

Unfortunately, and I'm glad we belatedly got rid of the horizons, but we already did a bit of damage by saying, Oh, uh, you know, we grew too fast on housing, now let's wait for the commercial to catch up, and then in retrospect, we didn't end up building the housing that could have penciled at the time.

And in some cases, I believe in urban villages, getting especially denser housing built and getting more residents and more foot traffic actually becomes a draw for retail and commercial use.

I mean, look at there is a lesson in what we've seen at Santana Road.

Um, it's it's not out.

I mean, it's not everybody's gonna be Santana Road, it's it's kind of unique, and yet you look at the formula, and now we're seeing employers in droves want to be there because it's a really walkable mixed use, it's got amenities, it's got retail, it's got residential, and it wasn't the office user who came first.

It was the housing and the retail, and it's a little unique, but there's some lesson there for us.

Um, so anyway, those are a few reflections just off the cuff based on the great staff presentation.

So, with that, we've got a bit of time now to open it up.

Um, questions for staff, or if folks have some reactions and observations like I just did.

Let's go around.

I will since uh Councilmember Tradis, you are the uh newest member of the council and a former planning commissioner.

I'm gonna let you kick off and just flag me with your hand and I'll I'll get people in.

Go ahead.

Thank you, Mayor.

And thank you also staff for the incredible presentation.

I had two quick questions that I wanted to get things started with.

Uh, the first, I'm curious about how some of the ongoing program commitments that we have from our last housing element kind of factor into the ongoing work happening with the general uh plan four year review.

Uh, in particular, uh, we spoke a little bit about the missing middle question here.

I know we have a missing middle policy program included in the housing element.

Um we also have our small multifamily housing program that's looking to add 20,000 units of new capacity.

Uh so curious if you could just speak a little bit to the sequencing of implementation of that particular program with the four-year review.

Sure.

Yeah, so Chris talked about the necessity of the four-year review to set us up for the seven cycle.

It's also really to help us complete on those plans in the sixth cycle.

So to get to that missing middle small multifamily program to fully evaluate our urban village process and amend it, we have to do it through a major update of the general plan.

So we're trying to accomplish both tasks of both making sure that we do deliver on those policy goals in the sixth cycle, but also set ourselves up to be prepared for the seventh cycle.

So it's we're trying to do both at once.

Sounds good.

So I understand one of the questions with that program in particular is where do we put that new uh that new density, that new upzoning to allow the small multifamily program.

So it sounds like basically the four-year review will be part of how we determine the sites for that program.

Correct.

Perfect, thank you.

Uh, and then we talked a lot about state law here and recent changes in the landscape.

I think one of the biggest uh recent movements here is currently sitting on the governor's governor's desk, uh, SB 79.

Uh, curious if you could speak a little bit to the potential of that bill, or I guess the perils of trying to implement that bill in San Jose, but also the potential for adding significant capacity, uh, both as part of the four-year review and uh preparing for the seventh cycle housing element.

Sure, yeah.

I mean, obviously we're we're monitoring it very closely.

Um, so SP 79, I think we I try to give a quick recap of it.

Um, but basically a lot around um transit stations, and this will impact San Jose, especially around our all of our light rail stations and then rapid bus stations.

Um, it it sets a minimum and and maximum height and allows for residential and all properties around those stations.

Um so it it if it if it does get signed, it's on the governor's desk as you indicated.

Uh, it will have a uh a major impact on on the city of San Jose.

Um, as we talked about uh to council the other the other day, um, there is some there are some provisions in there for San Jose around um our ability to protect North San Jose Edenvale.

Um but I I think as it relates to this general plan and how we would look at it, I think you know we would need to analyze it more as it's so new, but I think we would we would need to look at it in the context of this general plan and think about that added capacity and how we could incorporate that into new capacity that we might use in the next housing element.

So probably already areas that are you know are already urban villages, but how maybe um you know we would add additional sites or additional capacity where it's added through SB 79.

So thank you.

And I guess to that point, you mentioned that we have two urban villages that'll be coming up that are along uh light rail corridors.

Is it safe to say that there may be changes to the boundaries of urban villages to incorporate some of the zoning changes from SB 79 if it's ultimately signed?

Probably, yeah.

I mean, I think again, we'll have to get into that, but yeah, I think we would it would be something we would consider, but we need to do more analysis on it.

Yeah, sounds good.

Thank you.

Thanks, council member.

Great questions.

Let me turn now to Councilmember Ortiz.

Thank you, Mayor, and I appreciate your comments, especially as it relates to um the closure of schools.

We know that in Alam Rock.

There's several schools that are closing, and who knows what lies in the future, and so we need to be very careful with those decisions.

Um, because once there is a townhome or an apartment on there, which I'll support, and I'm sure we'll do some of those in the district.

Um, but once that's been developed, we can't go back.

So we need to be mindful of those uh decisions.

Um so I just want to thank uh you, Chris, and the whole uh planning team for this presentation.

I'm I was not on the planning commission before, uh, being a council member, so I didn't have uh well, other than reading it myself, I didn't have this great uh overview, so I I really appreciate it, and it's good to have that historical context about uh the many issues around zoning, planning, you know, jobs to employed ratios and just the many issues that the cities face, and then some of the innovative uh approaches that we um have tried to essentially solve them or attempt uh to solve them.

Um I did, you know, I I do just recall in the beginning of the presentation, just uh the stressing of the lack of jobs that are being uh developed here in the city of San Jose and the need to address that.

Um, but I wanted to see, and I didn't hear anything, and I know we talked about you know supporting business, but and I've all we also saw slides about streamlining for housing development, but I didn't see anything in regards to streamlining or support for small businesses, which I know are the the number one employer uh here in the city of San Jose.

So, how are we balancing?

Because obviously I'm pro-housing, but how are we balancing um the need for housing, which I think Alan Rock has definitely stepped up to do um with also the impact to small businesses because we we saw in the presentation there's a reason why you mentioned Alan Rock because they are being impacted.

Yeah, thanks, council member.

Uh certainly something we we're very conscious of going into the four-year review as we think about urban villages.

I think a lot of our work to support small business on the near term is much more tactical, so it occurs around zoning and permitting questions and facilitation on the process, um, and less so on the kind of bigger picture policy.

But I think there are some questions that we need to ask on the balance of land uses through the four-year review that sort of speaks to this issue of uh small business displacement in our urban villages because redevelopment is the primary driver that's getting us to the housing that we need.

So it's definitely there as a part of that consideration.

Many of the things that we're doing near term to support small business exist just in other parts of our work.

Okay, good.

I really appreciate uh uh those those comments because sometimes I think the plight of our small businesses are kind of an afterthought uh here uh at the city in pursuit to you know those uh arena goals that we unfortunately never seem to reach.

Um and you know, and I I just I do want to mention, you know, I think the city has, you know, for good reasons have done things that have impacted small businesses, for example, that commercial uh uh elimination, the elimination of commercial spaces, and you know, for every commercial space that we do eliminate, that is an American dream that's being shuttered for, especially on Alan Rock and immigrant family.

Majority of the businesses founded there are by immigrant women.

Um, and so I just want to make sure that um you know we are weighing that uh as well in the decisions that we propose here at City Hall.

Thank you.

Thanks, Councilmember.

Appreciate uh those points you just made.

I think you're right on.

Uh let's go to Commissioner Cantral next.

Okay, um actually I'll move this over here on the left-sided I actually want to say first, I am I am just so elated to see missing metal in our language today.

Um, because I I think that's just of such importance when so much of our city is zoned single family.

Um, but I also think it's important for us to reflect on exactly why we have so much single family zoning.

I'm gonna use the dreaded E-word here, equity is key.

And we can't create equity in our communities with so much of all the wealth concentrated in the way that it is.

Um, so looking at the single family zoning, I think is key to our future.

I'm gonna use the second dreaded word, diversity, which I think is key to our survival, period.

Um we get more diversity when we create equity in our communities, and that diversity is exhibited in so many beautiful ways from faith to food to celebration, and that's something we should be looking at.

But I think it's really important to reflect on how we got here in the first place, and it is not a welcoming story.

Secondly, I think we've been driving a car for generations here, uh, with either a gas pedal or a brake pedal.

We've been chasing this market, and the market leaves us behind every time.

Um luckily we had a steering wheel, so we could drive into a curve to stop the car.

So we could drive into a curve to stop the car.

But the reality is I don't think we have enough tools to actually adjust to the market.

The market's going to happen the way it's going to happen, like it or not.

We've been ill prepared to deal with it.

We've been stuck with rules and policies that were based on many generations before the market changes.

So we need more flexibility.

Specifically, as we look at missing metal.

They cannot wait for years for entitlements.

It will not work.

I think also we should consider that the missing middle brings development that we don't have here in large part, which also brings jobs.

It also brings work to our communities.

And if we use our economic development office along with our planning staff, we could actually create some very rich programs to help smaller, as we talked about small businesses.

Developers develop in our community and help us bring jobs to our community and help us bring that much needed housing to our communities along with equity and diversity.

Thank you, Commissioner Kentral.

I'll appreciate those reflections.

We'll go next to Commissioner Casey, not to be confused with council member case.

Thank you, Mayor.

Also, I wanted to thank the planning department.

I mean, I think it was a great, as you heard from others, a great education for all of us here.

But I think even more so, I think for the community at large.

Many times they come to the planning commission and they think we're making decisions in a vacuum or having this full understanding of all the pieces that go into play there.

Um I think is hugely educational.

I don't know how we kind of publicize this presentation a bit more for folks, but I think that would be good.

Um the question though relates more to the housing element and the target that comes from the state.

I assume it's probably a book this thick that has all the criteria.

Is there some high level that you can help us to understand when they give us that target number, at least the high level elements that go into it?

I ask because as we mentioned, we already have a high number of residents to jobs, so we feel we're doing our share in terms of the community.

Um we wanted a plan that's aggressive, right?

We want stretch goals, we want to be able to measure that, but we also want it to be achievable.

If if we need four golf courses every year to meet our goal, and we're trying to shove it all into you know 18% of our available or 16% of our available land, it this doesn't seem like a very achievable goal.

We're just kind of fooling ourselves each year.

Um so I don't know if the state, when they look at those numbers, they want us to re-look at our open space policies, if they want us to redevelop our sing existing single-family neighborhoods and like start over.

Um so maybe if you can just give us a little bit more on that housing element from the state.

Yeah, I'll I'll try to do my best to keep it as short as possible.

You could spend a lot of time talking about how it's calculated.

I don't want to get into the minutiae, but so um every cycle um there's an assignment that comes from the state to our regional government entity, so in our case to ABAG.

Um, they go through a kind of a comprehensive process and um determine an allocation methodology for how those units they get are assigned to the jurisdictions within them.

Um, and typically that methodology, um, there's a lengthy process for developing that methodology, it's based on population growth over overcrowding existing demand, and so there's a lot of elements that go into that and kind of coming out of that process is how the jurisdiction gets assigned.

This this last cycle was particularly high.

Lots of jurisdictions, San Jose included, received a very large allocation compared to other cycles.

Um that's that's kind of how it goes through.

That's the the quick version.

Um, I mean, do they take into account existing density, like land, like the amount of land in a city or they do, they they look at you know undeveloped land, vacant lands, they take all of that in into account.

Um, and so you know, for San Jose, while we got 62,000, a lot of other jurisdictions got even higher and proportionally higher allocations that than we did, even and so it looks at all of the a lot of the factors that you're talking about.

Okay, and so sorry, and so I assume in our in our four-year update that we're doing now, we'll need to think more creatively about not assuming we're gonna shove it all in the 16% of the existing land, we're really gonna have to think are there some you know third rail topics that we need to reopen potentially in terms of where we put the additional housing.

You know, and we're trying to do our best too because of how the process is set up.

We don't know what that allocation is going to be, but since we need to plan for that that growth capacity, we kind of have to take our best guess as we go into this four-year review to try to anticipate what it's going to be.

So it's not the ideal setup for us either.

To be ideally, we'd have more time to plan to know what that number is so that we could you know spend a lot of time working and figure out where it fits best.

But they've kind of made it made it hard for us with how the sequencing is of the timeline.

Thank you, Commissioner.

We are on now to Commissioner Bickford.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, two observations.

The first one is I wanted to say thank you for calling out that we don't want to get so locked into the JER because I'm a resident of San Jose.

I don't work in San Jose because my employer doesn't have a location in San Jose.

They were supposed to, but they don't.

So I don't work in San Jose.

Um and so JER to me is partially a function of what businesses we're attracting, where the the employers that that can hire people in San Jose are.

Um, and also as another council member said the small businesses that we are supporting here where we live.

And are we actually supporting them and enabling them through city services?

The the other thing that I've observed is we actually have a lot more open space than I think we observe as available for residential housing.

We have a lot of blighted parks in San Jose.

I love open space.

I want to keep open space, but I I can name four or five large parks in the city that might be better served with housing than with a derelict park.

So that's a thing that I would like us to put on the docket and think about.

And then I think the the other piece or the last piece is this ability to potentially convert places that have very old buildings that are vacant.

We have a lot of whether they're commercial or residential properties that aren't being utilized, and we're not really looking at those as opportunities to do something better for our residents.

Thank you.

Thanks for those reflections.

Appreciate it.

Let's go to Councilmember Campos.

Uh okay, there we go.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, and thank you to our staff for that presentation and for uh bringing us all together here to have this very important conversation.

Um I I think a lot of us can agree that the general plan is one of the most critical documents that we have in guiding our city towards our goals and and priorities and land use challenges are one of the ways that we work to address our housing crisis.

I am optimistic that through this process we will look at those opportunities and those solutions to advance um housing production and meet the needs of our residents, and also um better understand how our our staff is approaching the jobs to employed resident ratio.

I know that my office in particularly has been looking at um different partnerships working with charities housing, the county office of ed, Silicon Valley Community Foundation to co-locate child care in what's been a long time vacant commercial space on the ground floor of affordable senior housing projects.

So it's um really important that we think about how we're bringing community together to meet those needs of our community members, which are jobs, they are housing, but it's also community amenities like child care health clinics, um, arts and culture spaces, um, parks and and green open spaces as well.

So I have a couple of questions that I'd like to ask about what opportunities through local ministerial approval uh ordinances we might have to create meaningful incentives that promote mixed use development in our communities.

I'll I'll start and then maybe Chris can add if um yeah, I mean it's uh it's a key strategy that that we're pursuing.

Um, you know, we we did implement our ministerial approval ordinance in December.

So for urban villages with adopted plans to submit sites within those villages that that allow residential can go through our city's ministerial process.

And the benefit of that is that they are exempt from from CEQA and there no hearing is required.

Um so you know, on our work plan was to continue to look at sites that we would add to that pool, you know, as we adopt urban village plans.

Now, kind of the the change to that equation has been um the state reforms through AB 130.

And so there's there's gonna be a you know, this new pathway or new exemption process for projects could be an important tool.

And so I think we just need to evaluate do we keep pursuing our own ministerial or do we you know start to rely more on that exemption?

You know, I think I think there's pros and cons.

I think we want to weigh that, um, but I think it's something we're gonna continue to look at.

Our next piece is to kind of sort of look at the downtown um and where we might pursue ministerial approval in in downtown.

Um a lot of the work that goes into that is actually the environmental work to approve those policies to have it done.

Um so I think the the challenge with mixed use as I kind of alluded to in the presentation is that our our ability to condition and require commercial or mixed use is is a lot more limited under uh the current environment and state law.

Um I think a lot of our opportunities for commercial are probably more at a horizontal mixed use, you know, where we designate and keep sites in urban villages as 100% commercial and then look for opportunities where we want residential.

Um so obviously we'll continue to have policies that will allow for mixed use, but I think what we've seen is it's been very challenging to really deliver deliver on those goals.

Um Thank you for that.

And because urban villages was one of the key um points that that we heard in the presentation.

I was curious about what staff has learned about urban villages that have hindered our ability to develop housing.

I think the biggest challenge that I uh you know tried to allude to is that we didn't we didn't we didn't complete the plans fast enough.

I mean, if we really had you know completed more of the plan to have more of the area available, you know, there might have been more opportunities to kind of capture the market, I think as the the you know mayor had mentioned.

Um so I think that's an opportunity where you know I think we agree with the approach of what we have, you know, what we were pushed to do in terms of evaluating and trying to figure out ways to streamline those processes.

I think where the challenge is gonna lie is that in streamlining those processes for urban villages, the most significant component is the community engagement and outreach piece.

So we have to kind of carefully balance how we're streamlining with how we're doing that outreach to the community because you know, as I said, that's kind of what takes the most time is that education, communication, and meetings with residents so they understand what's happening, they have a chance to provide input, and then we adopt a policy.

So that's usually typically what drives that three and a half years for the most part.

So I think that's where we kind of have to try to balance.

But um, doing that work unlocks those sites for housing and clears a pathway where they can get approved.

Okay.

I think yeah, if I may add something to that, I think the urban village strategies was really focused on a lot of growth in urban villages, not just housing, but also for jobs.

And typically what we have seen is with the displacement issues, like that's not really materialized.

So that's something else that we have to consider as we embark on this four-year review process.

Like, how do we think about our urban villages?

Like, where are those appropriate areas where we could put certain types of jobs?

I think the retail market has held steady, but the commercial market, the office market has really gone down, and we are certainly not seeing that kind of development in these urban villages.

Thank you for those responses.

Thanks, Councilmember Campos.

Let's go now to Council Member Condelas.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um, uh thank you for the presentation and and uh the the time the the time for for uh engaging us, I think a couple a couple high-level thoughts.

Uh you know, one is I I think the presentation showed me is is one could argue that our focus growth and our our grand bargain that was struck you know a decade plus ago have come at a tangible cost, and that's uh inadvertently creating a a a housing and intensify intensified housing crisis because of our lack of of housing production.

Um and thus we as a city and thus as as leaders, you know, are responding to what we're seeing on the streets.

We we have we know it's uh how rents are really expensive.

We know housing affordability is tough.

There's a lot of folks who are unhoused.

Um we are investing millions of dollars that we haven't ever in emergency interim housing in actions to house you know those who are down on their luck.

And so, you know, retrospectively, you know, Monday night quarterbacking, we're all 100%.

And so I think it's important for us to uh to to look at a couple things.

You know, one uh there was a slide in the presentation, I I you know it was a little disheartening.

Uh page 53, slide 53 is city costs and things that we can do are not significant enough to move the needle.

That was one of the presentations.

That was one of the notes.

And you know, we uh invested in a high-rise incentive to try to try to spur some some housing units production in downtown in places that make sense, which I was fully supportive of.

Um, you know, and and you know, we we got some units online, we approved a couple applications that came before us, but uh you know, we need more.

Um, and so you know that that's that's a a tough, a tough challenge.

Um you know, the neighborhood villages and unplanned villages.

I do have a question on on slide 55, you know, there's a couple properties that were highlighted as neighborhood villages or unplanned traditional urban villages.

Um can staff provide a little bit more clarity as you know, what is what does that mean for properties?

And I'm selfishly looking at my district.

I said, you know, there's two orange properties uh or plots of land that that were later labeled, I want to say unplanned traditional urban villages and neighborhood villages.

Yeah, so uh neighborhood villages are the orange ones, and there's about um 18 throughout the city.

I think we've we've only planned one of them.

So all the orange ones are unplanned.

Typically, most of them are fairly small.

There are some larger ones.

Um, but our we're trying to rethink maybe the strategy around how we plan those.

Um, you know, as I said, each each village who've typically done its own individual comprehensive plan.

Um our thinking is that to try to speed up to get all of these 18 done, we would do them kind of as one effort potentially and go in and make you know kind of strategic land use changes within those cities to allow for housing on certain sites, but not have uh, you know, um a specific separate written plan.

You know, we would do some you know community engagement, um, but it wouldn't be to the level of having you know, just like we do uh uh urban village traditional.

Now the blue, what we're kind of calling our traditional, that we would continue to have maybe more of the you know, we want to streamline it, but we'd still have the more traditional process where there would be the document.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that, uh, Jared.

And look, I I think um it's you know, we're we're trying to we're trying to be ambitious with our bills, but we're also trying to you know be uh be predictors of the market, which is tough to do.

Um and and so I I appreciate the mayor's comments and the creativity around PQP land.

Um I mean, granted, those are lands uh by our partner educational institutions, and so as part of this review, I I you know, I I I'll challenge to see where we can hold the line and where can we help our partners visualize and envision these these assets to help meet mutually beneficial goals?

And that that's very difficult.

Uh we all I think every single one of us has well mayor have mayor, except the mayor, mayor has everybody, but every single one of my council colleagues has schools in their district that for one reason or or another are closing.

Um and so uh I I think that's that's especially helpful.

And uh again, the missing middle conversation and the the thought around being purposeful about what kind of housing we can generate outside of single family homes is important.

Um as you you clearly laid out in your presentation, some traditional townhomes aren't too affordable or aren't considered affordable affordable based on uh what are our historical knowledge of affordable means uh but it's it's important that you know for me as we start thinking about you know density requirements and in fill development uh densities that we we we we think about how we can find a gray area and and that gentle density was important uh because you know densifying certain areas just for the sake of of saying, hey, this is the the minimum number of units that we need, 30 units per acre, et cetera, et cetera, uh in will tend to create a lot of conflict from our neighbors.

And I know firsthand.

Um so I think if we are to set our ambitious targets, I think we also have to be realistic and what's actually gonna be buildable.

Um and so I I'll I'll I'll leave that thought and then I'll I'll I have I have one more question regarding you know the envisioning of of industrial lands.

And I uh I'll uh I have uh substantial amount of industrial property in my in my district, and and I I want to challenge staff to see you know what what are what our game plan is as a city.

Do we really think we can attract these uh industrial um entities, companies, organizations, to the to these lands where you know they're they're outside of the urban core, they're in the periphery.

I I I want to I want staff to think about um how we can actually find best use of that land.

I'm not saying housing, I'm not saying uh maybe it's attracting attracting um companies, and maybe that's a question how we work with OED, our Office of Economic Development, to spur that.

But I I'm curious to to hear from staff of how they how they think about approaching these these large swaths of lands that are in the periphery, my district, councilmember Casey's district, etc.

Yeah, thanks, Councilmember.

That's uh a good question, and I will make the distinction between industrial lands and industrially designated lands, maybe.

So and we could probably do a whole separate study session on this particular part of the city and how it ended up blue on the map, uh considering that there's really not the transportation infrastructure roadway network or even sort of desire for the market to be there.

I mean, again, when we talk about the layers of decisions that have been made by prior councils, you know, this is one of them.

This this intent in sort of as we look at this, and this is true for the way that Coyote Valley's been looked at, um, certainly parts of Evergreen, other parts of the city.

Um, you know, past uh interest in the employment lands has been sort of more distributed.

But what we've seen over the last sort of 25 years is really this concentration, right?

And what what the employers tend to want to be close to now is accessibility of their employees.

And we've seen this certainly since post-COVID, right?

When everybody's like, great, let's work at home because they don't want to do a three-hour commute.

Um they don't want to sort of uh you know think about how they move the people around.

That's why we saw interest in Dirodon, you know, because people can get there easily.

That's why we've seen interest in North San Jose, because it's proximate to a lot of that housing development.

So I think we do have to think differently now.

Again, we could do a whole study session on Evergreen just on its own, and in particular, some of the uh legal challenges around that property in particular.

Um but I do think we have to think differently.

Um and I think not just in the context of of those bigger swaths of employment lands that really are going to be difficult to get any kind of development on, but sort of how that sits in a broader development pattern in these different parts of the city, right?

We've sort of focused our growth within these limited areas.

We didn't take comprehensive view to sort of how do we expand growth more holistically across the whole land area.

Um so that really fits into that conversation as we as we kind of move forward.

Perfect.

No, thank you, Chris.

And I'll just I'll just close with the the fact that you know, as we go through this four-year review, I know our planning commission is gonna be doing a lot of the heavy lift, but I would hope that we are doing what we need to do with regards to getting as much feedback from residents on this process, educating residents, informing residents, getting their direct feedback on what we're proposing uh and what we're thinking about.

So no one's blindsided by what by what's proposed or what's discussed, and so we have a genuine um uh feedback loop uh from folks and and and I and I I hope that's the case and I I'll I'll harp it.

I've harped it before, and I'm gonna harp it again and and and hope that um you know our our neighbors and the folks that we're we're talking about who's gonna who's impacted by our decisions and conversations are have a have an ability to be able to be here, you know.

The this chamber, I wish it were packed, but unfortunately it's not.

And so it's incumbent upon staff to make sure that we're we're getting the word out.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thanks, council member.

I think that's a great point to conclude your remarks on.

And I wonder if staff, just before I go to the next hand, we've got a few a few more here.

Um could you share just a little more about your expectations for committee engagement and how you see that playing out over the course of the 12-month process?

Yeah, absolutely.

Let me start and I'm gonna hand it to Ruth.

Um, so absolutely, sort of community engagement is at the core of what we do.

It's something that you know we we are very committed to.

I think as we think about the balance of this process, it's about not just sort of ensuring that um we're doing the traditional methods, but also how do we expand that to non-traditional methods to make sure that people are understanding kind of what's going on.

And we really wanted to take this opportunity with this study session to help set the tone for that.

Um this is obviously being recorded.

Um, we'll be using this as well as other sort of communications techniques to really push a digital presence around this effort.

Um, we know that this is a very compressed timeline.

Like effective community engagement takes time.

Um and so you know, we're trying to balance that need.

Um what I will say is obviously we have the task force process, which is a plan to take a year, uh, but then there's ultimately steps that come after that as well.

But then there's ultimately steps that come after that as well.

So we you know, we uh we'll be looking to sort of use that engagement path now to engage early, but then on a continued basis as we move throughout this entire process.

So let Ruth kind of touch on some of the specifics.

Thank you.

Um so we do have four community meetings that we are planning for between now and June 2026, and that will be either topic-based or we will we will touch on all four areas that we're gonna be discussing at the planning commission.

The planning commission meetings will be recorded.

Um, as Chris alluded to, we hope to use this study session to educate the public, you know, the general plan 101 section, this discussion on sort of why we're doing the general plan four-year review right now.

Um so we'll have our web-based online presence.

Uh, we have listservs that we're you know creating.

We've shared this um specific study session with the previous task force members from um the last two general plan four-year reviews.

So we're we're doing sort of that work to get the word out.

We're we'll have a media outreach campaign as well.

Um, and you know, once we get to 2026 um and the planning commission concludes with their work, as Chris said, we're still gonna have those touch points with the public and with the community until we come back again to planning commission and city council at the end of 2027.

So there'll be different time time points when we can do that.

And although we committed to four meetings right now, I mean, you know, beyond 2026 in the summer, I mean, we we would have a little bit more capacity and we can think about what is that outreach gonna look like, um, you know, neighborhood groups, uh, district council groups.

And I do wanna just remind the planning commission and um the city council, we are partnering with the Office of Racial and Social Equity, so they're helping us with you know how do we um set up our meetings to make sure that they're inclusive, are there groups that we should be targeting?

And we have that list that we got from council as well.

Thanks, Ruth.

And I assume, and I'll I saw Councilman Condels want to finish this uh thought, but uh as I try to do with the budget town halls, I assume at the appropriate time and place within reason.

If a council member or council member commissioner pear want to suggest and host a community meeting that they could approach the team here to try to schedule some time to incorporate that into a community meeting, I think between now and June that would be difficult for staff, just given our our resources, but maybe post-June that may be more appropriate.

Okay.

I understand you have limited bandwidth.

Um I think it can be helpful for us at our larger community meetings to be able to bring staff in to answer questions, provide updates just because you all have a level of technical expertise and context that we don't always have.

So there may be a flexible way to do this.

As I mentioned, budget, the budget process where I go around the city and often bring Jim Shannon along, could be a model for how to do that with council members and commissioners.

But we can we can talk more about what that looks like in practice.

I don't want to overburden you with 50 meetings either.

Yeah, let me just touch on that for say so uh I think you know, when we think about those four meetings, those uh planning department led, you know, publicly noticed they're a much bigger endeavor.

Uh certainly when we've done this in the past, if there are existing meetings going on that we can come and use as a sort of a platform to come speak to specific topics or just highlight the issues, then absolutely we'll that's more what I was thinking.

Great, thank you.

Council Condos, did you want to finish your time?

Yeah, I did.

Thank you, thank you, Mayor, for the for that point, actually.

And and you know, I uh that that point about um accessibility and you know just being available is is a big one.

I do a pancake breakfast every year on January or February at the latest on purpose in preparation for the budget.

Uh so I mean, if I do a pancake breakfast on planning, I would hope staff would be willing, not just to for the free pancakes, but for for the opportunity to engage and and quite frankly, loop more people into the process.

And so um I am mindful of bandwidth as former staff.

I understand we can only do so much with with the amount of time we have, but but given given how important this this topic is, I think the more people involved is uh it behooves uh the success of our of what we're trying to achieve.

All right.

Agreed.

If you're not careful, Chris is gonna remind you that his department is mostly fee funded.

So watch out.

You're about to get a budget ask.

All right, we're gonna go.

I've got about four more hands up.

Everybody's welcome to participate.

We can try to keep things moving along here.

I've got you uh Kosher uh let's go to Commissioner Bandalf next.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um thank you, planning staff for the beautiful presentation.

Um I was engaged the whole time, even though it's super long, but it's long because it's an important subject matter.

So thank you for that.

And second, I'd like to thank the mayor and our our council members for voting us in and having your confidence and your trust in us.

And we appreciate that.

You know, I'm I'm I would still consider myself fairly new.

I'm like a sponge, I'm soaking it all in.

So being a part of this four-year review process is a it's a great opportunity for for all of us to learn and thank you for that.

Um I did have one question for uh staff.

Um I was gonna ask about the cost of development study for homes because so many times that we see a project comes and it gets passed and approved, and we're all excited for all the units that are gonna come in, but it never kicks off.

So maybe you could touch base on that.

Okay.

Yeah, thanks for that question.

Yeah, I mean, uh so there can be multiple factors, you know.

That that's why we started that analysis, so that we we as a city have an independent view on like what's really feasible and what's not.

You know, oftentimes we you know there can be developers who are a bit more speculative in terms of what they might be looking to do in anticipation of market changes.

It's also important to kind of realize, you know, as Chris talked about the length of planning, the length of projects themselves, too, right?

From site identification to entitlement to building permit to completion of building can take you know three to five years.

So, you know, even as you sit at Planning Commission approving a project or seeing a project come through, it could still be 12, 24 months before that that really breaks ground, you know, as they're working through that building permit process.

So it's kind of a combination of things of why things might not happen, you know, and uh we don't always know the unique circumstances of that development, but having that view independent analysis of kind of those models gives us an understanding of where the markets really are.

Um so uh yeah, no, I understand it's it's basically you know it's uh it's more so based on the economics of how the interest rates are going and different several different factors.

But do we have anything available like for the cost of uh development, like a study for that?

As far as the we have the previous studies available, the next one will be coming out.

I think um by the end of this calendar year on the sort of current market conditions.

Um as we said, the the sort of the analysis really takes into account sort of models of development.

So we sort of take areas of the city and the the likely type of development we would see, and then does a pro former analysis to try and sort of guess that this every development is unique and different, and so the economic shift between is just kind of trying to give us a sense of where that goes.

So we'll have that most recent study uh hopefully by the end of the year, um, and certainly we can make the previous studies available as well.

Great.

Thanks, Commissioner.

Uh I had Council Rommel Cay next.

Uh thank you, Mayor, and um thanks uh to the four of you for the presentation.

Um, as I asked you before we get in a master class, um I I think it might be interesting to take that chronology that you just put together, and because you're having this other outreach moving forward, to you know, you just probably have this all on audio and transcribe that walkthrough the last you know third 25 years or whatever it covered might be helpful to have available.

Um, but thank you for that.

It sort of reminded me that in 2005 when I chaired the downtown development strategy task force.

We still remember that, which is great.

Um so now that we have parks and open space on the table for consideration.

I heard that come from that side of the room.

You know, there's other land barons we're forgetting about.

We've got other uh government agencies who have property inside the city of San Jose boundaries.

We've got unincorporated, which you know, we've certainly got in District Six that feels like you gotta move heaven and earth to make those happen, and it takes a long time.

You know, what are some of the things that we can do with our other, you know, sort of partner agencies out there?

Water district, utility, uh Union Pacific Railroad, who has unused spurs all throughout.

You know, are there other resources uh that we can pull and partner from those other uh agencies that you know that we have in San Jose?

And I don't know that we've done that before.

I don't know if we've just purposefully avoided that before, and it may not be necessarily planning's job to do that.

There may be more politics involved in some of that.

But any comments on yeah, I I think it it's a great point, and uh no stone will be left unturned, I think is the the first comment as we continue to look for opportunities to uh cite new housing throughout the city.

I think we've seen it in the past, it's typically been on a case-by-case basis as those sites have typically been offered to the market, right?

So there's been a couple of UP spurs that have gone up for sale that have either integrated into projects or considered in other ways.

I know certainly there's a lot of work we've done with VTA on some of their properties throughout the city and looking for opportunities for transit oriented development.

So I think we're definitely open to it.

I don't think we have necessarily a proactive strategy around going after it.

It's certainly something I think we'll continue to consider and look to the city council as as you participate on other boards and you know, other with other organizations to look for that input.

Um, and then also just continue to coordinate internally with uh our other partners inside the organization who have better linkages into some of those organizations as well.

Uh so this is probably a more of an editorial comment, and it probably goes uh as much to Councilmember Duan's district as any.

Um, but look, we've worked really hard to protect our industrial base.

You know, it's been the last 25 years of my life working in in and around that area, and you know, we've heavily invested in North San Jose, heavily invested in Indianville.

Granted, we had redevelopment funds, but one of the areas that provides the most jobs for small business people in the industrial sector is between Albedan Expressway, Coyote Creek, uh, just south of downtown, all the way down through the fairgrounds.

And we have completely underinvested as a city in that area.

So if we're talking about small jobs, we're or small business owners, we're talking about jobs that pay really well for you know box benders and metal painting and and the like, that's an area that I know that's not your job as planning.

It's a you know, all hands on deck with OED and everywhere else, but the reality is we do have opportunity there, and if we're gonna hold on to it and prevent other development from coming in that may be different than the uses is today, we we need to show support for that investment that people are making right now there.

So I just, you know, I know that kind of stretches down maybe even to into two, um, but um just want to put that out there.

And you already covered the next piece, which was how are we moving forward, what happens next.

The one thing I would say is because I think this process will go beyond June for this body as the planning commission, but with expirations and things like that happening, we won't want to think about if we get this group started, what happens after June and maybe even beyond, as some of these commissioners retire, it's hard.

Look, I'm an alternate on VTA.

I step into these meetings, sometimes I really don't know what's happening, honestly.

So we should think about that as this process goes through.

Yeah, thanks, Councilmember.

Um, I am gonna touch on your editorial just because industrial lands are something that are near and dear to my heart.

Um, and we take that work incredibly seriously, and we do believe it's an important part of our job in planning and building as well as code enforcement.

Um and you know, absolutely, that's why since 2005, you know, we've had the industrial preservation policy that 2.7% of land area that's dedicated to light and heavy industrial is absolutely critical to the city to function as a city.

These are these are uses that you know we need to have space for and preserve space for.

Um, it is a challenge to really direct investment into those areas because similarly to some of the issues we face with small business and locally serving retail, the economics don't always work, and we are thinking about ways to creatively address that so we can sort of think about opportunities for development in the right areas that at least at minimum maintain and preserve the opportunity for the industrial uses and potentially expand and look for new opportunity for investment.

So we have some experiments going on in other parts of the city, it's something we'll continue to work on on a regular basis.

And then as far as the sort of term, I think absolutely that's something that is is top of mind for us.

That's why we're really focused on uh on that June time frame.

And so the intent is to complete the task force process by the end of June, which is when we start to see the expiration of terms of some of our planning commissioners.

So we will have a complete recommendation from the task force, you know, as the planning commission at that point.

The work then continues beyond it because ultimately those recommendations and the actions need to be taken by city council and the CEQA needs to be done as a football.

But we'll we'll get that sort of holistic view as one body and the recommendations that then forward on.

That is the intent.

And just lastly, um you're flying a plane while you're sort of under construction, right?

So do you expect, and I think somewhere in my life's work, you know, oh, we're reviewing we're doing that as part of the general plan.

We're sort of pausing decisions on that for now.

Are there gonna be any anything that might be contemplated by planning you know during this time that you might put a pause on waiting for this task force work to be completed?

Sorry, yeah.

So we already have one example.

So as we move through the budget process, we did an extensive prioritization process uh working with Councilmember Kamei, um, the Saratoga urban village is is one of those things, right?

We know that um there's an opportunity to do more in that urban village, but because of the way we structured the general plan when we initially wrote it and the environmental document that accompanied it.

We're now into 102, by the way, right?

As we get into these details, um we essentially did uh work to assign uh capacity for both jobs and housing units by growth area and village.

And so as soon as we'd adopted the general plan, we got into a horse trade of saying, wait, we need more units over here, wait, we need more units over there.

And so in certain villages, there's just not the capacity we know that's that Saratoga is one of those.

I think there's a thousand units allocated to that village, and that I think there's opportunity for more growth in that area.

So, what we've said is let's let's get through the sort of the work with the community on kind of developing the concepts around the urban village plan, but ultimately pause here until we get through this conversation to say actually there's more capacity in units here, so we can continue to expand.

So we will be looking for other opportunities like that.

Um, you know, like there's a couple of early consideration conversations coming up to city council that might also be right for that too.

But but just for everyday mortal developers, you're not suggesting that there's any pauses on there's no pause on development right now.

Anybody that's got a development proposal that's coming through, absolutely committed to meeting those through as quickly as possible.

All right, all right.

I'm gonna interject with just a time check.

Thank you for the great questions and comments.

Uh for the record, if you get a unit of housing built on Union Pacific land, we're gonna build you a statue.

Uh but your broader point is well is well taken.

Um just as a time check.

So we still have a number of hands.

This is a great discussion.

I really appreciate all the thoughtful engagement.

It's 336.

We're only agendized till four.

How many comment cards do we have, Tony?

Just one.

Okay, members of the public, if you absolutely want to speak, uh, you're very welcome to during public comment.

Please fill out a comment card so we have an accurate assessment of how many people would like to speak.

I need to save time at the end of the meeting for that, and then many of us have a hard stop at four.

Uh, I'm gonna ask folks to try to limit to three or four minutes each so we can hear from everybody.

I have Councilmember Kamei next.

Well, I'll be brief because um I've been sort of in it for a long time with land use and all the things that are land use and general plan.

Uh I want to say, you know, uh, I want to thank you for uh bringing this forward in terms of having it in a very uh quick concise way.

Um I will say that you know, when I would when I went to planning school, uh things were much more simpler.

So what we have is a lot of existing conditions that we inherited, and it's become more and more complex.

And as we look at the volume of laws that are, you know, it's like boulders coming down, and you're trying not to get flattened.

Uh, but I think that it's it continues to get more and more complex.

So I just want to thank the staff.

Uh you're the one that you know have to kind of like dodge the boulders, uh, and and really set the general plan as a reflection of not just you know our uh future land use uh planning and development, but also incorporating the values of the community, and the community does not understand all of these laws that are upon us, right?

So it becomes much more complex to get out there.

So I'm glad that you are gonna go out to um uh not just the four meetings, but you know, Chris has a volunteered himself for the 50, just like uh Jim Shannon.

And so and so uh I want to say thank you.

I really do, because it's it's very complex and to translate it to the community so that they understand uh what we can and what we cannot do is uh very difficult.

So thank you so much.

Thanks, Councilmember.

Appreciate that.

Uh Councilman Campos, if I have time, I'll come back to you.

I saw your your hand.

Let me go next uh to uh Commissioner Borrosio.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um I'll also keep it brief.

Um thank you uh for keeping it um high level, but at the same time uh just giving us context, right, on how we got here.

And uh my question, I don't know if it's if it's too late to bring up slide 36.

I really appreciated slide 36.

I re I think the four key areas um, if I understood them correctly, the first two are around housing and the next two around jobs and commercial.

So on the commission, we get um projects on a Wednesday, and they have their own merits, they have their own reasons, and they have their own ass.

And you can you repeat the slide?

36, sorry.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Ruth.

Um meeting we get at Costco.

And then we get housing, housing, housing, housing, and then we get a tech company and then housing, housing, housing.

So, like just to kind of is there a ratio that is a healthy balance, right?

Like something that will bring in the money through commercial use, but at the same time, bring in the services and not have one overpower the other, right?

So is there I don't know if it's a dwelling unit to commercial space or let's say, for example, for every 10,000 square feet of commercial space, we should strive for 200, but no more than that dwelling units.

Is there something like that that exists sort of as a guideline or a protective barrier so we don't keep going in a direction that we shouldn't go into?

But currently in San Jose, we do not have that, right?

But that is something to consider as part of the four-year review.

Um I have that done in other jurisdictions where you tie the commercial development with housing development.

The challenge is that the state laws may now make it harder and harder to do that.

So I think we'd have to think about that as we go through this process and identify what that correct mechanism could be.

Okay, thank you.

Because I think every meeting we all walk away with, yes, I think we nailed that one.

We did a good job, and you know, sometimes not so much, right?

But I think if we take a step back every quarter, every six months, every year, it would be nice to see um, or it would be nice to keep these four key areas in mind, but in a way that keeps us accountable towards those four goals, right?

Those four key areas.

So um I don't know perhaps at the commission level at the retreats.

If you can keep reminding us on how we're doing in those these four key areas, I think it would be greatly appreciated.

But thank you.

Thank you for your work.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Appreciate the question.

Let's go to Chair Rosaru.

Sure.

Uh I appreciate all the comments that were made.

Uh Councilmember Candelas, I think you said something about you know getting a wide variety of folks to present to us so we can learn more uh particularly community and whatnot.

I think one of the things that if possible, I would like to some folks that I would like to hear from are the folks that are in the trenches working on developments, financing these things and hearing what their pie in the sky ideas would be if they could have the city pool X lever or Y lever, what would that be?

So that way we sort of have common understanding of what they would like to see, because that may help us think deeper about what's realistic.

I believe the most of us do not have a uh you know real estate or business finance in the background, right?

So if we could get some type of group of folks to come in and talk to talk to us about what are what are we looking for, even though that wouldn't be independent and it would be biased.

I think some of us could benefit from hearing that does that sound good to staff?

Yeah, that the something that we you know try to do and typically do is to bring in other voices.

Um we've done previously through a number of different venues with absolutely bring that into this uh into this process.

Great.

Thank you, Chair.

I think hearing from market participants is one really important input.

Just don't let them convince you to convert all of our employment land to low density residential, but otherwise listen to what they say.

And the the cost of development study has been referenced.

I assume there if there hasn't already been, there will be an opportunity, uh, not just for council, but for the planning commission to get uh a deep dive on that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, because that's incredibly insightful as well as I think we've all said.

Okay, let's keep going.

Thanks for keeping it quick.

We're on to Commissioner Oliverio.

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you to all involved, some comments questions, uh, etc.

So, Mayor, you mentioned PQP on school district land.

I remember at the planning commission, we had union school district, I think, and they came in and were you know very serious about how difficult it is for their teachers to live here, but then they did a land swap for their property that was excess, and they built three million dollar homes.

So I think it's worth the question.

Um secondarily staff, I think we should look at San Francisco's family zoning ordinance that's going forward.

That's where they're increasing height and density on major streets like Van S and Lombard.

So maybe that's something to not reinvent the wheel because they're working within state law.

Uh for SB 79, if it's imminent, then I think you know, draw the half mile and understand how many units that could that would provide, and that's part of your criteria, whether you like it or not, it's just the state law.

Um and then correct me, is BRT the only BRT line we have is Alum Rock, Santa Clara Alameda, or do we have another BRT line in San Jose?

Those are the only stations I think that it would apply to.

I want to when it if it passes, and we want to do some more analysis to verify that, but our initial analysis was the only ones that fair enough.

Fair enough.

And then again, that that would be included in whatever that number is.

And uh, mayor, you brought up Santana Roe and its desirability for business.

Uh, and then I remember on the council we had a well-connected uh lobbyist who took a piece of nice industrial land.

We were supposed to have another hotel generating occupancy tax for the city, and instead what we got is low density town homes.

So unfortunately, that's sort of the story there.

We I do feel right now San Jose is lacking in the corporations that are adding the massive head count.

Those seem to be headquartered in San Francisco right now.

Are some of our pristine companies, Adobe, Zoom, uh Cisco, they're all plateaued with shrinking workforce in the area, which I think is problematic.

I don't think San Jose can solve all the problems in the world when it comes to housing in the state and the region.

Uh another thing to note is um child-occupied homes in San Jose is 18.9%.

It continues to drop.

Less people are having, they're choosing not to have children.

San Francisco is even more, 13.4.

So I think you know, forcing these three bedroom apartments when they don't want to, maybe it's better to have the one bedroom apartments and studios in the right places.

I think that's important.

And when we looked at uh uh Councilmember Candelas, when you're talking about the Carl Berg property and uh in Herbert District, I think potentially marketing those areas as data centers.

I mean, if you look at OpenAI's deal with Oracle infrastructure, Oracle's gonna have to spend 40 billion dollars on building data centers.

And I'd much rather have a data center that produces utility revenue for the city than a vacant space for another 40 years.

And then I think we do need to have some serious these since I did this for five years.

The only people that attend the meetings or watch the meetings are the insiders.

The general public does not attend.

So whatever method it is to get the word out, whether it's a postcard or something that goes with their utility mailing, especially when you're talking about the missing middle, that's gonna catch a lot of people of high level of interest, so might as well get in front of it.

Thank you very much.

Great comments.

Appreciate how succinct and substantiable this price model.

Well done.

Good job.

It's gonna council recomb.

Yeah, green is it's on already, it's on the whole time.

Everybody's got a hot mile.

Good thing I wasn't uh whispering too much to my neighbor.

Um, thank thank you for the for the uh presentation today.

I'm I'm um the this overview is important, but I also always are cautioning that our job as a city is to is to zone but not to build.

You know, we I keep reminding people we have a lot of capacity, and we're just we're we are relying on the economics of of building, and unfortunately, we're being squeezed on both ends.

The economics of building dense housing doesn't work right now for a lot of developers, although in some cases it is, um, and I'm hopeful that that's changing a bit.

The economics of of uh on the commercial side is almost worse.

And so right now we're being squeezed, and the only types of housing that people can afford to build are the townhouses or single family homes, and so we have to sort of balance that.

But I I it's also important for us to remind our partners at the state and everywhere else.

You can keep being upset that not enough is getting built and change the laws, and it doesn't force, it doesn't create the environment for anybody to be able to afford to build.

So that's that's number one.

I also want to caution us about conditioning one type of construction on another just for that very reason.

Um we have a lot of these mixed-use developments that don't have properties filled.

Um it doesn't necessarily help us and the the cautionary tale, you know.

I represent North San Jose, there's 24,000 housing units in our housing element for North San Jose that are supposed to can get built.

And we're we work really hard.

I spent a lot of time talking to developers.

I know OED does, I know your your office does, trying to convince them to use all these sites that we've identified.

Um the reason we stopped we didn't have a single housing unit get built after 2014 was the conditioning of we now need some uh enough commercial to catch up before we can build more housing.

So we shouldn't be over-constraining ourselves, and we should be figuring out how to incentivize both types without tying them to each other.

So I just want to make sure that that point is made.

Obviously, I have a lot of thoughts about the PQP conversion for schools as a long-time school board member who thinks it's important for us to be uh responsive to school districts who want to utilize space for revenue.

Also remembering that in 20 years, we don't know that the state that that some of these school sites are not going to be needed again, and we have to be really careful.

I know that some districts are concerned about that.

I'm I'm making sure the districts around me are um you know are thoughtful about that.

There's a real problem, and it's partly due to what Commissioner Overio said with people choosing not to have children, but it's the cost of living, it's the fact that we're not getting a turnover of home, so everyone who's got their kids have gone on are still living where they were, and no new families are able to move in.

There's a lot of reasons for it.

I suspect there will be a point at which that starts to shift, and we'll start to see more students again.

So we have to be careful.

Fortunately, there's some responsible school districts trying to find other uses for their properties and not necessarily just tearing them down and and converting them without being really thoughtful.

So those are my thoughts.

Thanks.

Great, great points.

Uh council member.

Okay, we'll go to councilmember Tordillos.

We're down to about 10 minutes, Tony.

Sorry, just how many comment cards do we have?

Three.

Three.

Okay.

Go ahead.

Sounds good.

I'll try to keep it brief.

Uh one thing I wanted to touch on.

We mentioned that uh previously we'd identified growth areas with densities that turned out to not really be feasible in the market, but you mentioned the challenges of uh you know no net loss provisions at the state level.

As we look to add capacity with this general plan update in the next housing element cycle, do we think there's any opportunities to in tandem decrease densities in any existing growth areas to nudge development closer to feasibility in those places?

That's a good question, and I I think we're gonna have to consider that.

But again, I think there's that balancing act.

We can't down zone unless we're upzoning.

But I will say um I think all of our unplanned urban villages, the majority are commercial anyway.

So they're they're right now they don't necessarily allow for housing by right.

Sounds good, thank you.

Uh then my final question here was just touching on that uh slide 53, the city permitting cost, less than one percent of total unit costs.

Curious what goes into that if it's only permitting costs, if it includes impact fees, environmental impact reports, what soft costs are included there.

Yeah, so that that's just the permitting cost.

So that's the cost recovery program for staff across PVC via public works, um uh which is the core development services.

When we look at the slide in front of me, when we look at the total cost of the city, I think it's with old impact fees, um, and assuming that the uh affordable housing is taken care of with with feeing out, it's about eight percent.

Sounds good, thank you.

Uh, and I think to the extent that C core reform at the state level helps to streamline some of this process, that can hopefully save on soft costs.

But then I think the other big opportunity here is just time.

Obviously, the longer the entitlement process drags out, the longer the building uh permit process drags out, you know, the more staff cost there is, the more holding costs, the more lending costs on the land that they've already acquired.

Uh so as we move forward, just eager about any opportunities for additional streamlining.

Thank you.

Agree.

Well said.

Uh councilman Duan, you've got two minutes.

Well, thank you very much.

I'll make it quick.

Um thank you for the uh the presentation.

I agree with council Kamei on the general plan to reflect upon the community vision and long-term goal and the value.

On the other hand, I also support Constable Kay to preserve that industrial land that create a lot of jobs that we needed.

The imbalance is already continued since 1950.

And my I'm afraid is this that we continue to be the anomaly of a bedroom community.

When we don't have jobs, people can't afford it doesn't matter even if it's affordable housing.

If they don't have jobs, they can't pay for their housing.

And then eventually, if we don't have enough businesses to support the taxes and the services that we have, the city eventually go into bankruptcy.

And that would not do any good for anyone.

And so therefore, we need to bring in more businesses, continue to support our small businesses to create jobs, and I'm not saying don't create housing, but we have to balance that.

And that's a responsible thing to do.

Thank you.

Thanks, Councilmember.

Appreciate it.

Councilmember Compost, did you have a final question or comment you want to quickly offer?

Thank you, Mayor.

Just a quick question because I keep hearing about the PQP land.

So could Stock please clarify.

Does PQP land already have residential capacity?

And what would the assumed density be?

PQP land public quasi public does not have a residential capacity.

It does allow for emergency shelters and also permanent supportive housing, but does not allow for housing typically.

Thank you for clarifying.

Thanks.

And while I mentioned PQP and focused on schools and faith-based land, I I thought Councilman Wolkey's point that at the end of the day you've got 13% point six for employment, 37% for um for housing.

That leaves the other 50% that we need to look at and actually understand.

Now a lot of it will never be built because it's repairing corridor, it's it's charter parks, it's but we should understand it and think creatively about where we might get some housing or employment uses.

Okay, this was a great discussion, sparked by a great staff presentation.

We have just enough we have uh thank you all very much.

We have just enough time for public comment, Tony.

Um I have Jeff followed by Jim and Triana.

Come on now.

Can we get that mic turned up?

Thank you, Ruth.

Yeah, sorry.

Um BC Bellman Grad.

I have Signoria, Michael and Matt.

My my first time in in the deep end was here in uh 2006 uh for the Sunshine Reform uh meetings.

I was an observer.

Um this uh this one is called Truth to Power.

Um I would ask that the uh board think this over.

I think that development in the college park uh might well be paused.

Uh CR 76474 violated the Brown Act, I think.

And I'm a witness.

And this is relevant to me because as a renter since 1989 in College Park on land, also good for redevelopment.

Uh that's well, that's my stake.

Also, that CR involved a key property for strategic planning for the city of San Jose.

My interest in that is in the Guadalupe Park.

Briefly, it's about access to the park to bring out its potential for recreation use and to mitigate light.

Thanks so much.

Thank you, next speaker.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

It's good to see a lot of you again.

Um to bring some things to uh illumination here.

So I'm glad the jobs housing balance is still being discussed.

However, in the 25 years that I've been involved with planning in the city, it hasn't moved.

So something to think about.

The other is the preserving, the ensuring that we are preserving uh community serving services and businesses.

So I'm glad to hear all the comments about small businesses.

We're building high densities with no parking and really poor transportation, and um people have to be able to go to the grocery store.

They have to be able to get their dry cleaning done, right?

So let's not forget about ensuring that there is community serving uh commercial available to any new um development.

There's one in our district uh councilmember Condales with the uh the golf course, and there really isn't anything close, right?

So that's important.

Uh one thing you may want to look at spending a lot of time in Northern Virginia.

You might want to look at Reston Virginia as of their planning.

Resident Virginia has found a way to put both the uh business, industrial, and uh community serving businesses along with very mixed density housing.

And finally, um PQP lands uh being on school board for 15 years.

I don't know if you have any influence on the state legislature in changing the laws that we have to sell the land at what we paid for it.

So I realize that's land swaps and other possibilities, but um that's something that would help us immensely.

And finally, has a drop in population we lost 25,000 residents.

Has that eased up on any of the the pressures that you have in in in development?

Appreciate that.

Thank you, next speaker.

Hello, really quickly.

My name is China Crane.

I'm a planner of VTA in the land use and development of your team.

Thank you again for a great presentation.

Just really quickly.

So if SB 79 does pass, a VTA has a lot of our own homework to do about the role we're gonna play in SB 79.

But with that, I do believe there is potential for a lot of really interesting and positive partnership between us and the city.

So with that, we look forward to hearing about um how the city feels SB 79 may affect your vision.

That was um detailed here.

Thank you.

Great back to council.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We'll look forward to working with VTA.

The population is bouncing back, by the way.

We're about to cross the million person threshold again any day now.

And thank you again for a really great conversation.

Thank you to the planning commission for taking this on as our task force here.

We'll see you all soon.

We're adjourned.