Where should the housing go?

After a month-long delay, the Pleasanton City Council decided on a final inventory list of housing sites that will be included in the environmental analysis for the upcoming Housing Element update during a lengthy special meeting last week.

“I’m proud of the council; we worked it through. I think it was very clear that all council members struggled with picking these sites,” Mayor Karla Brown told the Weekly on Feb. 10. “We want to find sites that are low impact to existing neighborhoods yet meet the state mandates for additional housing.”

Four of the 28 sites originally proposed did not make the final list at the 5-1/2-hour meeting on Feb. 8, including Mission Plaza, Stanford Health Care-Valley Care, SteelWave on Pleasanton’s east side and Pimlico Drive south. The former two sites were removed for different reasons by the respective property owners while the council voted to remove both SteelWave and Pimlico south.

The council ultimately approved sites for 5,030 majority units to go forward in the environmental impact report (EIR) process. Vice Mayor Valerie Arkin told the Weekly that a 50% buffer was decided on “in case anything is deleted off due to the EIR” — as the ultimate site inventory list, as well as the EIR itself, won’t be finalized until the sixth cycle Housing Element is adopted by the council and accepted by the state.

In an interview last week, Councilmember Julie Testa said the city is “self-imposing additional density” with the 50% buffer that residents do not want.

“Staff’s recommendation is to go 50% over what the state is mandating,” Testa said. “There is some legitimacy but nowhere near that volume. 50% is already way beyond what is recommended by (the California Department of Housing and Community Development) even.”

Councilmember Kathy Narum supported keeping all of the sites on the inventory, and said that “it’s really important to keep as much maximum flexibility as we can” because some might not pass California Environmental Quality Act analysis.

“We could have the state housing department say ‘no, we don’t think that’s buildable,'” Narum said. “They could either say that doesn’t count or lower the density, we don’t know. You don’t know what can happen, and the other piece that’s new is the no net loss provision.”

Narum explained, “If one of the sites we zone for and actually do the rezoning has 100 units of 30 to the acre, that counts as very low (income). When in fact, a project comes through, the likelihood is that it will be 80% market and 20% below, so we have to rezone something to make up that 80-something loss.”

Because of this, Narum said “it’s important when we all get through this, not only are we able to rezone to meet our RHNA allocation of 3,100 homes, but that we also have some sites we can go to rezone in the event that the no net loss provision is triggered.”

Stanford-ValleyCare was removed itself from the list, with the hospital citing plans for future expansion, while Brown said the owner of Mission Plaza wanted to remove themselves and sent a letter to the council stating “they’re happy being removed” if neighboring Valley Plaza decides to move forward with development plans.

In a 3-2 vote, with Narum and Councilmember Jack Balch dissenting, the council removed the SteelWave sites on the city’s east side. Arkin said it was “a contentious issue with the public process that was halted awhile back” and that “going forward seems like it is circumventing the public process.”

Narum supported development of the SteelWaves sites and said that “at some point we need to have a conversation. Are we going to densify in the city or put some around the periphery?”

“If you don’t put these sites in the EIR, they’re out of the discussion. It’s easy to take them out, it’s hard to put them back in if you don’t have them as part of the CEQA process,” Narum said.

However, Brown said both of the SteelWave sites ranked “very low on transit-oriented development metrics” due to a lack of existing infrastructure, among other reasons.

“They’re far away from BART, regular bus service, trains, freeways, and not near schools, much shopping,” Brown said. “It just ranked extremely low for our metrics for our sites. It’s extremely expensive to build in those outlying sprawl areas and that’s why it ranked low.”

A proposal to build on several sites owned by the Pleasanton Unified School District proved to be controversial, according to Brown, and prompted “lots of emails against zoning” from community members.

Testa and Brown cast the two dissenting votes to include Donlon Elementary School on the list on the grounds that “we risk having in this cycle 20% more housing and no opportunity to mitigate school growth,” Testa said. “My message is, that is shortsighted and I would not support that.”

Arkin, who served on the school board before being voted on the council in 2020, said that the Donlon site “may be needed later for a new school or school expansion,” and opposed developing another district-owned parcel on Vineyard Avenue for similar reasons.

“From a historical perspective in Pleasanton, every time that I have known the district to give up land or land options, it was a mistake,” Arkin said.

When it came to the PUSD administration office site on Bernal Avenue, “This is a major piece of land downtown and I wanted some retail component and less density,” Arkin said. “I would have preferred to remove it entirely, but agreed to reduce density to 81-163 (from 153-254), include it for workforce housing, and a retail component is optional.”

Narum said she was “happy” the PUSD administration office site made the list. “It’s a good site to add some additional housing and be able to support the downtown, I was happy about that. I think that site’s underutilized for what they need.”

An environmental impact report of all the sites on the inventory list will be prepared by an outside consultant. Once the council has evaluated the data, the report will be submitted to the state for review and potential certification.

Site inventory list

Lester property

Stoneridge Shopping Center

Donlon Elementary School property

Owens Drive sites (Motel 6 and Tommy T’s)

Laborers Council

Signature Center

Hacienda Terrace

Muslim Community Center of the East Bay

Metro 580

Old Santa Rita area

Pimlico Drive area, north

St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church

Rheem Drive area

Tri-Vallev Inn

Valley Plaza

Black Avenue area

Boulder Court

Kiewit affordable housing site

Kiewit market-rate housing sites

Merritt property

Sunol Boulevard area

Sonoma Drive area

Pleasanton Unified School District headquarters

St. Augustine Catholic Church

PUSD’s Vineyard Avenue property

Oracle property.

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