Correcting SVBJ Misinformation
Today I read an article on the Cupertino City Council race from the Silicon Valley Business Journal, which I subscribe to. The article labeled me as anti-development. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, my background in Civil Engineering is emphatically pro-development. What do civil engineers do? We engineer roads, bridges, sky-scrapers, tunnels, pretty much every large-scale project a homeowner cannot do themselves, has a civil engineer involved. What the developers don’t want to talk about is unreasonable and irrational growth and the problems that causes.
The SVBJ article also stated that I supported the Vallco lawsuit. That is not so much misinformation as an understatement.
I personally volunteered for the Friends of Better Cupertino (FoBC) attorneys, nearly two years of my time and up to 15 hours per day on that lawsuit, the Vallco Town Center SB 35 lawsuit: FoBC v City of Cupertino. We lost, even though in order to claim that the project was 2/3 residential as required, it involved the developer counting 500,000 square feet of amenity space (gyms, laundry facilities) as housing and 1.4 Million square feet of residential parking garages as housing while the judge also allowed 3.4 Million square feet of non-residential (office and retail) to not be counted on the non-residential total. This worked to the developer’s advantage, otherwise with the 1.81 Million square feet of office and 3.4 Million square feet of non-residential parking, the project is dramatically too short on actual, livable housing.
The Vallco SB 35 project had no environmental review and bypassed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process even though it is larger than all of Apple HQ and sits on less than 1/3 the acreage, that CEQA bypass is how SB 35 is written.
The Vallco SB 35 project uses the new Sen. Wiener housing law, SB 35, allegedly written to help the housing crisis, and worsens it dramatically. How? Because the 1.81 Million square feet of office will generate over 7,400 employees while there are only 2,402 residential units and it is highly unlikely that Class A office types of tech workers would qualify for Below Market Rate housing. We can expect at a minimum, 5,000 employees commuting in. The project has a whopping 10,500 parking stalls, therefore, even without an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) traffic study, we already know a lot of people are going to be on the roads looking for places to live elsewhere.
Parking Summary from Vallco SB 35 Final Plan Set, September 21, 2018, P-0101.
What should probably have been done in hindsight, was challenge the constitutionality of SB 35. Because, as written, if a city leaves an SB 35 project on a shelf collecting dust over the 180 day period after the application is submitted, it will be deemed approved without them even looking at it. In fact, the City of Cupertino did not review the changed final plan set which came in September 19, 2018, they simply stamped it “approved.”
During the hearing on SB 35 back in December, 2019 I wrote a couple of things down that were said (20 pages of a couple of things). One was from the developer’s attorney, calling SB 35 ‘an open door to developers.’ He was spot on.
