Podcast explains zoning rules in housing
San Jose’s online initiative, ‘Dwellings,’ dissects complex policies and proposals
Perhaps, no other single issue — except for the COVID-19 pandemic — has provoked as much debate and angst in the Bay Area as its housing crisis.
So the region’s most populous city is turning to a podcast in hopes of educating more residents and unpacking the issue in a way that’s more approachable and easier to understand than reading dense city reports and sitting through lengthy meetings.
Launched this month by the San Jose Housing Department, the new podcast, called Dwellings, explains complex housing policies and proposals and informs residents about the work the agency is doing to address the city’s homeless population and build more affordable housing.
And it has wasted no time wading into contentious waters.
So far, the department has aired two episodes of “Dwellings” — the first centered on Santa Clara County’s Community Plan to End Homelessness and the second, released this week, explored the highly debated concept that San Jose refers to as opportunity housing, which would change the city’s zoning code to allow for duplexes, triplexes or fourplexes on a single-family lot.
In San Jose, 94% of the city’s residential land is zoned for single-family homes and prohibits multiunit structures. Opportunity housing effectively would wipe out that city law as well as the typical constraints of traditional single-family zoning.
The cities of Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, and the state of Oregon all recently have passed regulations that eliminated traditional single-family zoning. Sacramento, Berkeley and Tacoma, Washington, also are considering similar plans.
Though housing advocates across California view the densification of single-family neighborhoods as a promising way to boost “missing middle” housing stock for moderate-income earners, many homeowners fear the zoning shift would decrease property values, create parking short
ages and cause an overall knock to their quality of life and neighborhood character.
Some San Jose residents recently have formed a grassroots organization called Families and Homes San Jose to lay out their opposition to the proposed zoning changes, saying that it would “forever and irrevocably change San Jose’s ability to have diversity of neighborhood choice.”
In this week’s episode of “Dwellings,” podcast host Alli Rico spoke with Michael Lane, state policy director for the public policy nonprofit SPUR and a South San Jose resident, about what opportunity housing entails.
They discussed how single-family zoning has perpetuated the exclusion of lower-income people and people of color from certain neighborhoods over time, how organizations like SPUR are trying to provide more historical context around single-family neighborhood zoning and what government employees and advocates can do to change the conversation around opportunity housing a “more positive” one.
Despite the controversial topic of the podcast’s second episode, Rico, who also serves as a content specialist with the city’s housing department, said she hopes that residents opposed to opportunity housing “wouldn’t feel offended by the episode.”
The show, she said, is meant to make it easier for residents to get up to speed on homeless and housing issues in their communities and to feel empowered to get involved.
“Housing is a pretty significant issue in the Bay Area — nationally, too, but it’s also really complicated and definitely not the easiest thing to understand at times,” Rico said. “So we really wanted to create something that would provide residents with information that was a little bit easier to digest than say reading a council memo.”
By the end of each epi
sode, Rico said her goal is for residents to “feel a little bit more empowered.”
“We hope that they can finish the episode, walk away and say, ‘I’m going to listen to a city council meeting and provide input,’ ” she said.
The first season of the podcast will run through April 1, with new episodes released every Thursday. Each episode will feature conversations with experts from local nonprofits and staffers within the city’s housing department.
Jennifer Loving, CEO of the housing nonprofit Destination: Home, was featured on the first episode along with Lee Clark, a formerly unhoused resident who now aids nonprofits like Destination: Home with outreach to the city’s homeless residents.
Loving, who has served as a housing advocate in the South Bay for years, said residents constantly are asking the city to solve its homeless and housing affordability crisis, but that when projects are proposed around them, they “fight with all their will to stop them.” She hopes that continued education, such as through the city’s new “Dwellings” podcast, might help reverse that trend.
“Hopefully, this podcast will allow for differing opinions and perspectives about what’s going to be the right solutions,” Loving said in an interview. “And for the people who listen, I think it could allow for some centering around the facts.”
It’s not the first podcast produced by the city of San Jose. The city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services this summer unleashed a podcast called “A Walk in the Park” to educate residents on what was going on behind the scenes and in the city’s parks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Five episodes of the podcast were released during the summer and fall.