Even with general consensus that downtown Palo Alto is the great position to insert household progress, the City Council clashed on Monday above irrespective of whether to shift ahead with a housing system for the transit-friendly space just east of the University Avenue Caltrain station.
The debate was prompted by an $800,000 grant that the town received previous 12 months from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to produce a downtown housing strategy, a eyesight document that would take a look at tactics and insurance policies for incorporating housing. Though the grant would aid facilitate the organizing method, City Manager Ed Shikada warned that it would not be more than enough to steer it to completion and estimated that the metropolis would have to have to expend about $150,000 in area cash per year more than the three-calendar year organizing interval.
The hard work got off to a shaky commence on Monday, with just four council customers — Mayor Pat Burt and council customers Alison Cormack, Greer Stone and Greg Tanaka — voting to acknowledge the grant funding to transfer forward with the program. Three of their colleagues — Vice Mayor Lydia Kou and council associates Tom DuBois and Eric Filseth — dissented and argued that the housing system would serve as a distraction from other ongoing arranging attempts.
Whilst the 4-3 vote will allow the metropolis to trudge in advance with accepting the MTC funds, it casts a cloud about a arranging effort and hard work that workers was setting up to kick off in the coming months. Crucially, the vote does not present setting up employees with the funding it had requested to start the system — funds that would be reimbursed by the MTC as section of the grant. That is for the reason that altering the council’s budget demands a two-thirds council vote, a threshold that the council failed to satisfy.
The vote does, nonetheless, set the council up for a different discussion above the downtown prepare in the coming weeks, as associates kick off community hearings for following year’s budget. The setting up energy could hinge on whether council associates pick out at that time to authorize the funding.
Some council associates strongly supported shifting forward with the system, which targets a 76-acre portion of downtown that is about bounded by Alma Road on the west and Cowper Road on the east, involving Lytton and Hamilton avenues. Council member Alison Cormack suggested that the timing of the prepare is especially suited given the lots of alterations that the region has experienced above the previous two many years, with the range of workforce diminishing, the emptiness level growing and parklets getting to be a lasting fixture of the streetscape.
“To me this approach will be 1 of the cornerstones of our new downtown,” Cormack reported. “And our downtown is likely to have to adjust based on the pandemic. It really is going to be unique than it is been.”
Other people, even so, argued that the downtown system would acquire consideration and means absent from the many preparing attempts by now underway. These contain the drafting of Palo Alto’s new Housing Element, a state-mandated document that lays out approaches for household advancement and potential housing web sites to accommodate the 6,086 residences that the town should strategy for amongst 2023 and 2031. Palo Alto is also continuing with function on streetscape advancements on University Avenue, crafting a long lasting parklet ordinance and placing jointly an area plan for a part of the Ventura neighborhood.
Kou recommended that the town must concentrate on the ongoing efforts and on “undertaking them effectively,” fairly than introducing much more to the workload. Filseth concurred.
“I just fear the full matter is heading to be a huge distraction,” Filseth stated. “There is certainly a ton of ways this can go erroneous. I imagine it is really likely to just take on a lifetime of its personal and it truly is going to suck bandwidth, interest and methods away from what we genuinely need to have to get the Housing Ingredient carried out.”
The strategy of putting jointly a coordinated plan for downtown Palo Alto is much from new. The city’s In depth Plan involves a coverage that explicitly calls for such an effort. And when the council debated its solutions for redesigning its rail crossing at Palo Alto Avenue in 2019, users agreed to defer the discussion so that the issue can be viewed as as aspect of the broader arranging process.
The downtown housing strategy that the council debated Monday would not incorporate consideration of rail crossings or transportation enhancements. Its most important focus would be housing and the boundaries of the arranging region notably exclude the transit middle at 27 College Ave., which features a Caltrain station, a lot of bus stops and the MacArthur Park restaurant. Organizing Director Jonathan Lait stated team had proposed a somewhat slender scope — with a obvious target on housing — so that the hard work could be aligned with MTC’s funding proposal.
“This would seem like a very well timed grant so we’re hoping to peel off the housing piece and truly focus on that and we are going to come back to the council when the time is ideal for the coordinated location prepare,” Lait reported.
The Monday dialogue implies that the plan could continue to advance, nevertheless some of the facts remained unresolved. DuBois took difficulty with staff’s system to employ consultants to shepherd the downtown energy and proposed that it would be much more helpful to seek the services of a long-phrase planner who could work on the a variety of efforts pertaining to downtown. He also prompt that the downtown strategy is “out of get” supplied all the other arranging efforts currently in the functions.
Supporters of the downtown program managed that the work, while time-consuming, aligns properly with the city’s efforts to create much more housing and to convert some of the professional houses in transit-pleasant spots to household use.
“I imagine that hunting at housing prospects and specially types that would possibly alter us from better workplace development to larger housing progress downtown is an proper strategy and worthy of our effort and hard work,” Burt said.
Stone, who also supported advancing the strategy, argued that a failure to do so would reveal to regional and state organizations that the city is not earning the necessary endeavours to meet its housing ambitions.
“I think it’s damning proof that we left $800,000 on the table to be able to redevelop a housing get the job done program,” Stone said.
