Neighbors urge San Jose officials to put the brakes on urban village plan

Urban villages may be all the rage in planning circles about future development in San Jose, but some residents are imploring city leaders to slow things down and consider their impacts on neighborhoods.

Take the South Bascom Urban Village area, for example. San Jose, Campbell and Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority officials have held several community workshops this year to discuss revamping a 6-mile stretch of the major corridor. Already, some patches of the street are being overhauled, such as where a burned-out old bank building at the corner of South Bascom and Stevens Creek Boulevard is making way for a new convenience store and diner.

At a Nov. 8 San Jose Planning Commission meeting, neighbors said building heights and setbacks allowed within the urban village’s borders encroach on their privacy and conflict with the community’s character.

One woman who says she has lived in the neighborhood 23 years asked the commission to “please consider the privacy” of residents before approving any plans that would allow developers to construct buildings several stories higher than the mostly one-level single-family homes in the area.

“One of the highlights was the privacy that our 6-foot fence provided,” the woman said. “I want to retain that privacy and … if this building was going to be built behind your backyard, would you approve it?”

Randi Kinman, who also attended the meeting, told the Bay Area News Group later that the urban village plans are problematic because they “can and sometimes do conflict with the city’s residential guidelines.” She said neighbors often feel misled by vague assurances from the city that buildings won’t be as tall or dense as the urban village plans allow or that guidelines could be changed in the future.

“They should never put an overlay and then tell us it’s never going to be that tall because of other guidelines,” Kinman said. “They’re making us promises for somebody else to keep.

“They’re passing the urban village plan based on the idea that in the future we will set some guidelines,” she added. “In the future we’ll do a number of things whereas those developers could come in now … and you’re going to be asking them to do what? There’s no guidelines, so if we know we need guidelines for this then let’s develop them.”

During their presentation at the meeting, staff planners said they “did take a look at building height and privacy through this process” and concluded the setback policies and other building guidelines “are ones we’ve used in other villages throughout San Jose thus far.”

Planning Commissioner Ed Abelite said he was “very reluctant to try to introduce any new guidelines this late in the hour” and doing so would be “impossible and not necessarily responsible at this point.”

Planning Commissioner Michelle Yesney said she also felt “confident” about the efficacy of the existing guidelines, which she added are set by the General Plan to ensure new urban village residential uses blend into neighborhoods with many single-family homes.

“We have already put in place the tools necessary to meet the standards that people have expressed concerns about,” Yesney said. “An 85-foot-tall building 15 feet from your property line would be a horror and it would never get approved. But that’s not to say there won’t be an 85-foottall structure on the street frontage.

“There can be a lot of design features that protect your children playing in the backyard … and at the same time provide a decent living environment for the people in those high-density housing,” she added.

The San Jose City Council is scheduled to review the South Bascom Urban Village plan at 6 p.m. Dec. 12.