Santa Clara County refuses to budge on its housing requirements
Despite Stanford University’s concerns over adding more housing to its massive expansion project, Santa Clara County is moving ahead with a plan that calls for nearly four times more housing units for faculty and staff than the university proposed.
The County’s Planning Commission has unanimously endorsed the general use permit that will control Stanford’s growth over the next two decades, with the Board of Supervisors expected to consider it for approval in the fall.
The county’s additional housing requirements were added amid a growing housing crisis forcing Bay Area residents — and university employees specifically — to move farther away and withstand longer commutes, contributing to the region’s traffic problems.
The unanimous decision by the commission came just three days after the university offered to pony up $4.7 billion worth of new housing and community benefits as part of its expansion proposal.
Stanford announced on June 24 that it was willing to spend $3.4 billion to build 1,307 new housing units — including 575 at below-market rates — $1.17 billion to finance transportation improvements and $138 million to boost Palo Alto Unified School District’s coffers.
In exchange, the university requested that the county provide it with development rights and repeal two county ordinances that require the university to pay affordable housing fees and designate 16% of new housing units as affordable.
County staff, however, balked at the university’s proposal and disagreed with its definition of “community benefits.”
County Executive Sylvia Gallegos pointed to the 2,600 student beds that have been a part of Stan
“We are not asking Stanford to solve the current affordable housing crisis, what we’re asking them to do is to address and avoid future exacerbating of the housing crisis.” — County Executive Sylvia Gallegos
ford’s expansion plans since its original application in 2016 and account for $1.4 billion of what the university is calling community benefits.
“Those aren’t community benefits. That’s the project application,” Gallegos told the Planning Commission at its June 27 meeting.
Gallegos instead valued Stanford’s community benefits as $168 million — eight times less than the value Stanford touted. The county’s valuation included $138 million that the university has agreed to provide the Palo Alto Unified School District over the next 40 years and $30 million that the university offered to various cities in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties for transportation improvement such as bicycle lanes and crosswalk enhancements.
In April, the county suspended negotiations with Stanford to jointly draft a development agreement after the university and Palo Alto Unified School District brokered their own agreement. The development agreement — a voluntary, legally binding negotiated contract between the county and Stanford — would supplement the conditional agreement and allow for more negotiations.
Stanford continues to try to persuade the county to head back to the negotiating table, but so far no progress has been made.
Gallegos told the planning commission that staff did not support the university’s proposed development agreement offered to the Board of Supervisors, and urged the commissioners to recommend that the board reject it, which they did.
“What they want from the public in exchange is the loss of important community protections,” Gallegos said about the university’s proposal.
In November 2016, the university applied for a general use permit to build an additional 2.275 million square feet of academic facilities, 40,000 square feet of transportation and child care facilities, 2,600 beds for students and 550 housing units for faculty and staff, entirely within the current campus footprint.
In May, the county released a 125-page document that outlined all its proposed list of requirements that would have to be met for the university’s expansion plan to gain approval.
Most notably, the county required Stanford to increase staff and faculty housing from the proposed 550 to 2,172 units and provide 933 of those units at below-market rates.
“We are not asking Stanford to solve the current affordable housing crisis, what we’re asking them to do is to address and avoid future exacerbating of the housing crisis by fully addressing the housing that would result from its development,” Gallegos said during last week’s planning commission meeting.
Catherine Palter, associate vice president of land use and environmental planning for Stanford, did not agree with the county’s take, calling some of the county’s conditions relating to housing and transportation “unreasonable” and “infeasible.”
“We continue to have some very significant concerns about whether this project can be delivered under the conditions that are before you today,” Palter told the commission.
Under the county’s proposed conditions, Stanford also would be required to limit reverse commute trips from increasing more than 2% from the base year and to ensure average daily traffic does not increase more than 3%. Failing to adhere to the limits could jeopardize the university’s ability to proceed with the future phases of the expansion.
Palter called this condition nearly “impossible” for the university to meet.
Unlike in the area of housing, some commissioners were more sympathetic to the university’s traffic concerns.
Commissioner Bob Levy worried that the reverse trips could be spouses or roommates of Stanford employees and said that Stanford should not be held accountable for those trips.
“We’re in a situation right now here, we’re in a traffic crisis and we need to mitigate everything that we possibly can, but I also want to be fair and make sure that the mitigation is fairly applied to Stanford for what they’re responsible for,” Commissioner Bob Levy said during the meeting.