HOMELESS HOUSING OR PARKING LOT?
County staff say building ‘beyond its useful life’ but advocates and others disagree
With the deadline for making a decision looming, the battle over what to do with the long-vacant old City Hall Annex building north of downtown San Jose is heating up.
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors is set to vote in two weeks on a proposal to demolish the 6-story, 90,000 square foot office building and convert the space temporarily into a parking lot. If the board doesn’t approve the plan by Sept. 23, the county could lose out on the demolition bid currently before it and the cost could soar, county officials have warned.
“This building is clearly beyond its useful life,” Dave Snow, the deputy director of the county’s Facilities and Fleet Department, said Monday as he walked a
group of reporters through the dilapidated structure.
The county invested money in rehabilitating a nearby structure on W. Mission Street near the jail that now houses a reentry center that offers services to former inmates, Snow said. The Annex, he said, is not a good candidate for the same treatment.
But a group of local housing advocates who want to see the structure turned into badly needed temporary housing for homeless people disagree, and have accused the county of stonewalling their attempts to prove their point.
“They lack transparency,” said Shaunn Cartwright.
She and other activists tried to join the press tour Monday but were rebuffed by county officials, who said the building wasn’t safe for large groups and that the tour wasn’t open to the public.
During the tour, Snow and the county’s chief operating officer Miguel Marquez pointed out major electrical and structural issues with the 43-year-old building. The cooling system contained refrigerant that is now illegal to use and the stairwells harbored asbestos. The tar and gravel roof sagged visibly and water damage had stained carpets and caused ceiling tiles to fall. Bird droppings, left by birds who entered through windows propped open to minimize the effects
of water damage, littered the floor. A stubborn clock in one hallway remained functional, clicking away time even as it dangled precariously from the wall.
The cost to return the building to functional office space could range beyond $46 million, the pair said, adding that creating housing compliant with modern accessibility and environmental codes would likely cost millions more. Demolishing the building and putting in parking, they said, was set to cost less than $2 million.
The county is in the midst of rethinking how the entire area, which includes a number of county office buildings, along with the police and jail, should be developed in the future. The parking lot, Marquez said, is meant to be a temporary use for the space while that vision is fleshed out.
But Jim Salata, the owner of San Jose-based Garden City Construction, doesn’t buy the county’s figures and thinks the space is well suited for temporary housing, too. Salata — who was not allowed on the tour — has been among the most vocal advocates of converting the space to housing for homeless people and has been requesting a tour of the facility and county data on the building for days.
On Monday, Marquez said the county was “working on providing that access.”
Salata said his team’s estimate for converting the space to housing was closer to $30 million, adding that he’s already secured a promise to raise some $20 million in private funding from John A. Sobrato.
“There’s some things in there that look out of line with reality,” Salata said of the county’s figures. “They don’t want there. They won’t say it. Period.”
The county has said it’s open to putting housing on the site in the future as part of an “urban village.” Urban villages — dense, mixed-use spaces near transit where people can live, work and play all in one place — are in the works across San Jose and there is talk of developing a village where the Annex sits, but there are no concrete plans and no set timeline.
As debate around the future of the Annex has mounted, some supervisors have called for more affordable housing to be built elsewhere. Supervisor Cindy Chavez scheduled a press conference for Tuesday morning to urge the county’s legal and housing teams to consider putting housing for homeless and low-income people on the county’s school district and hospital properties.
And while the county does have a number of housing projects in the works to bring some relief to the thousands of people who sleep on the streets on any given night, advocates say the need for more housing is urgent.
“I am interested in supporting the project financially because we have chronic homeless people dying on San Jose streets and we need to do something about that sooner than later,” Sobrato wrote in an email to this news organization. “All we need is a ten year lease on the building while the county designs and commences the master plan for the site.”