The Gilroy City Council crossed the good-neighbor line last
week, approving a lot line erasure and a development deal on Miller
Avenue that would put six houses on one acre where two homes once
stood.
The Gilroy City Council crossed the good-neighbor line last week, approving a lot line erasure and a development deal on Miller Avenue that would put six houses on one acre where two homes once stood.
Making policy by the seats of its pants – never a good idea – four Council members voted to allow this travesty despite unanimous objection from the city planning commission which forwarded the matter to the Council with a resounding recommendation for rejection.
Four Councilmembers – Mayor Al Pinheiro, Councilman Paul Correa, Councilman Charles Morales and Councilman Roland Velasco – apparently think of this as an “in-fill” development.
Please reconsider.
Miller Avenue is already filled in, and respect for the neighbors and the neighborhood should take precedence over a cockamamie land scheme to make a few million dollars.
The Dispatch is and has been supportive and sensitive to private property rights, but those rights cut both ways. The neighbors to 7861 and 7891 Miller Ave. didn’t buy homes next to empty lots. They purchased their property with a reasonable expectation that the neighborhood’s character would remain intact. Six new homes – four of them two-stories – and a new
cul-de-sac is a radical change that no homeowner could anticipate.
Is any traditional neighborhood in the city’s older core safe?
How about Fifth Street or Princevalle or some of the bigger lots in the Fourth Street area?
What’s to prevent two neighbors with larger lots getting together to make millions by combining their lots, tearing down the existing homes and putting up a handful of “in-fill” homes on tiny lots? Nothing – if the Council allows this precedent to stand without serious discussion and the formation of a clear city policy.
Erasing lot lines is not a decision that should be made on a case-by-case basis. If that continues, this will become a red-hot issue pitting neighbors against one another and resulting in acrid divisiveness just like it did in Los Gatos and in pockets of Santa Clara County. Both of those agencies have clear policies now.
It’s incredibly surprising that Gilroy has stepped into this with little forethought.
Stay this decision, take a broader perspective and write a policy that will honor Gilroy’s traditional neighborhoods and keep them intact. That’s the right course of action, a course plainly evident by a planning commission that’s making sound choices for residents, not developers.
