Gilroy
– As part of its quest to bring BART to downtown, San Jose will
have to give some say in its land use planning to the Metropolitan
Transportation Commission, which holds significant influence over
funding for the $4 billion project.
Gilroy – As part of its quest to bring BART to downtown, San Jose will have to give some say in its land use planning to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which holds significant influence over funding for the $4 billion project.
The MTC’s latest master plan, called the Regional Transportation Plan 2030, includes a provision requiring cities to meet density requirements around the sites of proposed transit projects. A final version of the plan will be released later this month. To receive MTC funding, Milpitas, Santa Clara and San Jose, all on the proposed South Bay BART line, may have to tailor their general plans to meet the requirement.
The MTC is responsible for coordinating transit projects in the nine Bay Area counties. Spokesman John Goodwin said Monday that the MTC doesn’t expect to take land use decisions away from local governments, but it does want to use every tool possible to ensure that projects it funds will be successful.
“We want to make sure that our very limited transit expansion funds are invested as cost effectively as we can,” Goodwin said. “What the MTC is looking for is a change in policy and appropriate zoning changes that will enable housing to be built in sufficient densities that projects will be viable.”
Goodwin said that the MTC will work closely with local governments to iron out the details of the requirement, namely what population densities need to be achieved and over how large an area. Because the cities on the proposed BART are laid out so differently, it’s possible that the requirements for BART will be made across the project, not city by city.
Laurel Prevetti, deputy planner for San Jose said Monday that the MTC action is illustrative of a recent trend in city planning.
“We’re seeing all over California that many agencies are trying to get into the planning business any way they possibly can,” Prevetti said. “Whether they have an anti-growth agenda or a transit agenda, people want to influence the character of cities, and they think this is a way of making change happen.”
Prevetti said San Jose shares the philosophy behind the MTC plan. She said that San Jose has already made a number of zoning changes to encourage higher density along existing and planned light rail lines, including downtown, and is considering more.
“We’ve already done a lot of forward planning to intensify density along transit routes,” she said. “For us, it’s a matter of documenting what we’ve already done. Independent of what MTC is doing, we want to make sure we do the right thing for our communities.”
Transportation Engineer Don Dey said that Gilroy is taking a similar approach with its planning for downtown. MTC grants were used to build the Caltrain station on Monterey St., and in December, Gilroy received $2.5 million from the MTC to landscape Monterey between Fourth and Sixth streets.
“The city is working on a downtown specific plan and a lot of the actions that MTC is looking at are already factored into the plan,” Dey said. “We’re already working in the direction of having higher densities of businesses and residents.”
Ideally, density targets will be achieved with a healthy measure of affordable housing, said Stuart Cohen, executive director of the Transportation and Land Use Commission, in Oakland. Cohen supports the MTC, buts says the agency needs to do more to ensure that neighborhoods around transit stations are not “just full of people, but full of happy people.”
“What we think this process could ignite is a round of community-based planning instead of plot by plot rezoning,” Cohen said. “We want neighborhoods that are guaranteed to be walkable, and we want incentives for affordable housing because people who live there are much more likely to use public transit.
Cohen and Goodwin agreed that Milpitas and Fremont will have a more difficult time than San Jose in meeting density requirements. The proposed Fremont station in Warm Springs is located near the future site of a Wal-Mart.
“A big box just kills the pedestrian environment,” Cohen said. “It’s possible that planning can be linked together, but the difficulty is that when there are multiple jurisdictions no one is clear on a how a plan is implemented. What do you do? Put them all in a room and whoever is left standing gets his way?”
Goodwin said that cities in the Highway 880 corridor will have to change their zoning plans to qualify for MTC funding. A portion of the BART project between Milpitas and San Jose runs along freight lines with very little housing. Milpitas has already announced plans to build more.
“With the current densities, there’s no way they’re going to support that operation,” Goodwin said. “Unless local zoning is changed to allow them to reach the threshold the project could literally be illegal.”
It’s not clear how much of the funding from BART will come from the MTC. The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which will pay for the project is expecting about $2 billion to eventually be raised through sales tax revenue, and is hopeful of receiving at least another $1.5 billion in state and federal funding. Goodwin, though, said that the project won’t be able to go forward without MTC funds.
“There is no spare money, Goodwin said. “In order to put this project together you have to have every slice of the pie. That means not only baking the pie but having enough money to actually eat it. You have to be able to buy the plates, the forks and the napkins. If you’ve got no pie, you’ve got no project.”
