Evergreen initiative threatens your neighborhood, too

Wealthy developers are seeking to pull a fast one on San Jose voters.

Today, their target is Evergreen — the community that I represent on the San Jose City Council — but they’re making clear that this is just the beginning. This developer will come for your neighborhood, too.

The proposal — the socalled “Evergreen Senior Homes Initiative” — is a bait and switch, combined with a don’t-look-behind-the-curtain. They’re counting on San Jose voters to not ask any questions — the questions that they know the City Council would ask, if they were to take their proposal to Council. The way everyone else does.

Here are the questions they don’t want you to ask:

Who would benefit?

At its core, this is about billionaires building a gated community for millionaires. And making obscene profits for themselves. They plan to build over 700 mansions that they can sell for more than $1 million each. The land was purchased years ago for almost nothing, so the land owner alone stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars selling to the developer if voters approve this scheme.

I thought this was about veterans and seniors?

The developers say they’re going to build affordable senior housing for veterans. But they make no actual commitment that one home would ever go to a vet. They can build over 150 market-rate homes before they start building any affordable housing. And “seniors” is defined as 55 and over. Many tech executives would qualify.

If they do build any affordable housing, they’re going to put it outside the gates, guard houses and walls, according to their 367 pages of plans.

Don’t they still have to follow the same rules everyone else does?

No. With this initiative, the developers, quite literally, have written their own rules for their own project and would have a blank check to do as they please. They’ve even provided themselves the flexibility to re-write the rules later, with references to being able to make changes to match changing “market conditions”. And the council would have no authority to stop them.

Can this get worse?

Yes — there’s clever language that would allow these developers to stop paying traffic mitigation fees, weaken the city’s affordable housing rules for their project and ignore the state’s environmental review process. So when they make traffic worse by introducing 2,000 more cars into our neighborhood, they wouldn’t be on the hook to pay for road improvements, increased public transit or anything. Taxpayers would be responsible for improvements.

What should be built on this land?

This property was set aside to build a campus for hightech jobs years ago, to bring jobs closer where our residents live. We need jobs for San Jose families to be in San Jose. Otherwise, we’ll all keep spending more time fighting through brutal rush hour traffic, like we currently see on Highway 101. The only reason the property hasn’t become that tech campus is that the owners have visions of making the even bigger profit that comes with housing.

And remember, it’s not just about this one project. They’re creating something they call the “Senior Housing Overlay”, which is designed to make it easier to push through future developments. If this initiative passes, the new — weaker — rules will help developers build projects detrimental to your neighborhood. Assume your neighborhood is next. What can I do?

Talk to your friends, family, and neighbors. Reach out to leaders in your own community. Evergreen is uniting in opposition to this attack in our community, but we need help from our neighbors across the city.

And most of all, don’t sign the petition to get this on the ballot.

With this initiative, the developers, quite literally, have written their own rules for their own project and would have a blank check to do as they please.