We all want Gilroy to grow smarter

Nobody is paying me to talk about Gilroy Growing Smarter (http://gilroygrowingsmarter.org). In fact, we’re going to need help to pay for our efforts to bring smarter growth to Gilroy.
One thing is perfectly clear: we all want Gilroy to grow. The questions are: Grow how? Grow how fast? Gilroy Growing Smarter (GGS) supports the Compact Development alternative that the GPAC2040 came up with, as improved by public input and by the Planning Commission. This plan emphasizes infill and multi-use development within the city and very careful and well-planned growth immediately around the city. Nobody can truthfully say we are about “No Growth.”
Gilroy had a period of slow growth from about 2008 to about 2011 because of the recession. Since then we have seen home construction explode with around 4,500 homes and apartments planned, permitted, started or finished. At our city’s average occupancy rate of 3.5 people per unit, that represents nearly 16,000 new residents who will join our city within a couple of years or so. That is a 30 percent increase over the 53,000 residents as of 2015. It’s almost impossible to get precise numbers on this, but any way you count it, that is explosive growth. And it makes us very uncomfortable. We don’t want to continue this growth without pausing to consolidate, evaluate and proceed very carefully.
Gilroy’s growth rate since 1950 has been very fast. Longtime residents have seen orchards and farm land and open space gobbled up. We have reached a tipping point, we believe, when we are in great danger of permanently losing the character of our town and becoming another Bay Area bedroom community for commuters to jobs elsewhere. If we value the character of our city, we must be very cautious about adding more housing and destroying more agricultural and open land.
We believe that smarter growth means above all improving what we already have. For too long we have complained about a languishing downtown with damaged buildings and absentee owners. We are all angry about crumbling streets. We believe that our outstanding police, fire and emergency teams need all the support we can give them. We’re all concerned about falling levels in our aquifer that are leaving wells bone dry for some and causing us all to conserve water while dreading the forecasts of more and longer droughts. Smarter growth means paying attention to these problems and solving them, and adjusting to the growth we have already committed to before planning much more. If we build homes more slowly we can do a better job for all of our homes.
Fixing our downtown doesn’t just mean fixing the buildings. It means creating a place where businesses want to locate and where employees and customers want to live, visit, dine, shop and enjoy life. Ideally we could create plentiful jobs for people who already live in Gilroy, and at the same time attract lots of visitors to a wonderful place to spend time and money. That would be growing smarter.
David Lima is secretary of Gilroy Growing Smarter. He wrote this for the Dispatch.