Northern Saratoga residents were left feeling frustrated after city council finalized its Housing Element sites at a Feb. 16 meeting, allocating large portions of the city’s future housing development near their neighborhoods.
The vote came after months of community pushback and several late night council meetings that broke the record for highest community turnout and were largely dominated by public comment. Still, residents living above Highway 85 said they felt disappointed in the council’s decision-making process and disproportionately impacted by the proposed housing.
“We feel that it’s highly skewed toward a small area of Saratoga, north of 85. People have been asking for a more equitable plan,” Saratoga resident Karthick Iyer said. “We have the perception that the council seems to be favoring one part of the city over another.”
Iyer and a group of other residents said these projected housing sites will unfairly burden their neighborhoods with increased traffic and public safety concerns, and will overpopulate schools.
Saratoga Mayor Tina Walia said the Housing Element was the “biggest challenge the city of Saratoga has faced since its incorporation.”
Council was originally scheduled to finalize the list in January, but Walia pushed back the final decision multiple times until the Feb. 16 meeting, when the vote was cast.
The state said Saratoga has to plan for 1,700 new housing units at various affordability levels to be built between 2023 and 2031, or face consequences that limit local control over future development or litigation from developers.
City staff and the planning commission had been working since early 2021 to identify opportunity sites in town, but public interest peaked in December 2021 after residents received a postcard outlining the current draft of future housing allotments.
Nearly 600 residents attended council’s virtual meeting Jan. 10 to show their concern. Council held five more late-night meetings that brought in hundreds of residents,
“Once word got out, everybody got interested. You can tell by the number of people who were on the calls,” Saratoga resident Ron Leckie said.
Council ultimately chose to go back to the drawing board and host an all-day workshop on Jan. 28 to reconsider multiple sites across town before landing fairly close to the site list presented at the January meeting.
Of the of the total 1,919 units on the council’s approved list of development sites,1,005 are located in north Saratoga, and 201 units in eastern and southern portions of the city. Another 713 units that are in the pipeline or could be built as accessory dwelling units were added to the final count of sites.
The council allocated one of the largest shares of its affordable housing units to the area near Prospect Avenue and Lawrence Expressway with a development that could reach as high as 10 floors and hold 410 units. Another 344 units were allocated at the Queens Pumpkin Patch site on Saratoga Avenue.
Residents of north Saratoga are already concerned about San Jose’s El Paseo development, which is set to have nearly 1,000 housing units, and is located just north of the city’s border.
The Cox Avenue/Paseo Presada site, which was originally slated to have more than 100 homes, was taken off the final list. All other locations on the postcard sent at the end of last year remained on the finalized list.
Council and city staff said that large portions of the southern and western parts of Saratoga are in high fire risk zones, and developers would be unwilling to build there because of the risk. Residents expressed concern that increasing the housing in those areas would make fire evacuation traffic worse.
When asked about the frustration from the community, Walia said the council is working hard to avoid state-imposed penalties for not turning in a site list by the deadline.
“We would never undertake this process voluntarily, and finding compromise between the values and desires of our community and what the state is forcing us to do has left us all unhappy,” Walia wrote in an email. “However, the alternatives to a certified Housing Element could mean we face penalties that strip away all local decision-making on development applications or expend countless taxpayer dollars in a battle with the state that we have every reason to believe would be unsuccessful based on the experiences of other jurisdictions.
“We have made sure Saratoga’s state representatives know the city council’s positions on these laws, and I encourage voters to make their voices heard at the polls.”
Still, residents felt frustrated with council’s decision-making process.
A group of residents from north Saratoga sent council their own housing element proposal, which they said would more equally distribute the housing across the city by allocating more housing at the Heritage Orchard site and making the Argonaut Shopping Center a mixed-use development.
“The council kept making … statements that they were listening. We got tired of hearing them say they were listening because there was no significant change made,” Leckie said. “All we were asking was to share the distribution. We weren’t asking to get it out of our neighborhoods; we were just asking to make it more even.”
“This was really really sad to watch, and you just felt powerless,” said Catherine Watson-Short. “I was, like, ‘Wow, I live in a small town and 600 people show up, and nobody’s listening?’ That was eye-opening; it’s insulting, actually.”
Watson-Short, who works at Prospect High School, said she is concerned that the distribution of new housing will burden the Title I school, which she said is already struggling.
“They never gave any consideration to the schools and to the burden that they would put there,” Watson-Short said. “The distribution from a school perspective is just inequitable.”
Saratoga staff still has to complete the Environmental Impact Report and present its findings before council approves the list and submits it to the state for approval.
Source: www.mercurynews.com