This week, Mayor Sam Liccardo and several of his City Council colleagues — Vice Mayor Magdalena Carrasco, Sylvia Arenas, and Dev Davis — said they plan to push for new affordable housing requirements and a commercial impact fee to pay for some of that housing, as well as improvements to public transportation.
“We cannot deny that our community is rapidly changing, and the investment of Google will have a real and direct impact,” Carrasco said in a statement. “We will continue the work on the preservation of the unique character of San Jose neighborhoods, including East San Jose, by mitigating displacement and gentrification while guaranteeing career opportunities for our youth and opportunities for upward mobility.”
The City Council is expected to approve the sale of city-owned land to Google on Dec. 4. After that, the council members say they will push to mandate previously aspirational housing goals near the proposed Diridon Station-area campus. They want 25 percent aggregate of the housing built in neighborhoods around the station to be affordable, and they want to see long-term rent restrictions put into place.
The council members are also pushing for the formation of a downtown financing district where the city could impose commercial impact fees to pay for affordable housing and other things. While other cities in the region have such fees in place, San Jose has resisted following suit, concerned that it could slow the flow of development in San Jose.
But the move signals an attempt to respond to critics of the project, who have argued the new development will send already sky-high housing costs soaring.
“We need to change the narrative about the relationship between cities and tech,” Liccardo said in a statement. “Tech companies should be viewed neither as our saviors nor our supplicants. Rather, we have an opportunity to show another way – for a civic partnership that builds a more prosperous, equitable, and sustainable San Jose.”
©2018 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
