San Jose to consider denying Santa Clara University housing proposal

Even Santa Clara University isn’t immune from the Bay Area’s housing crisis.

Employees of the top-ranked Jesuit institution are turning in their resignation letters “on a daily basis” to flee for more affordable locales in Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana, said Chris Shay, the associate vice president for facilities.

To stop the exodus, Santa Clara University — along with Bellarmine College Preparatory and Cristo Rey Jesuit High School — wants to build a 290-unit apartment complex to house faculty and staff along with a tech business incubator similar to UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck, which is aimed at helping students and others at the university turn research and ideas into local businesses.

At least 15 percent of the complex’s units would have to qualify as affordable under the city’s own rules, Shay said. The rest would be designed to be priced as low as possible. The complex wouldn’t boast an expensive pool, for instance, because the university already has one people can use.

“We have to have people living close by,” Shay said.

But there’s a catch.

While the university owns the land on Campbell Avenue where the proposed development would be built, it’s located in San Jose and zoned for industrial use. And even as it wants to add more affordable housing, San Jose is grappling with a notorious jobs-housing imbalance and trying to preserve shrinking industrial land.

This week, the city’s planning department shocked the trio of schools by suggesting the City Council deny their request to have the space — close to a Caltrain station and a BART station slated to open in the future — rezoned for transit-oriented residential use.

“Industrial businesses provide many quality employment opportunities that do not require a college degree, paying non-management hourly wages ranging from $15 to $35 per hour,” the head of the planning department, Rosalynn Hughey, wrote in a memo.

The city’s planning commission rejected the staff recommendation by a vote of 4-2. In May, the City Council will take up the issue.

Currently, the Campbell Avenue space houses an environmental company with several dozen employees, along with warehouse space that was used as a kitchen and bath showroom. Nearby are several residential complexes, along with train tracks and a stadium.

Acknowledging the close proximity to other housing, Hughey said that industrial lands are in high demand but make up a very small portion of the city’s land portfolio. And, she added, that’s unlikely to grow, given their relatively low value compared to residential and commercial land.

“Office and higher-end industrial uses, such as research and development, are discouraged in order to preserve the scarce, lower cost land resources that are available for companies with limited operating history (start-up companies) or lower cost industrial operations,” Hughey wrote.

Santa Clara University and the other schools don’t think that makes sense, though.

The incubator, they say, will bring new businesses and jobs to San Jose. SkyDeck helped launch LimeBike. Stanford University spawned Google, the tech giant that is set to bring some 20,000 jobs to a formerly industrial area west of downtown in the coming years.

And, they say, they cannot continue to operate at the same caliber if their employees can’t afford to live in the area. At Bellarmine, Chris Meyercord, the school’s president, wrote in a recent letter, turnover rates in faculty and staff have been higher in the last few years than at any other point in the school’s 168-year history.

“Currently, we have two employees who live north of Sacramento and commute to school every day, several in Oakland, one in San Francisco, two in Santa Cruz, and a number in the South Valley communities of Morgan Hill and Gilroy,” Meyercord wrote. “As several have expressed to me, the time they would save in not having to commute is critical to their long-term job satisfaction. Moreover, this proximity [to the school] is very much in line with our efforts to be a green employer, doing all that we can to care for the environment.”

John Ottoboni, the chief operating officer for Santa Clara University, and Michael Crowley, the vice president of finance and administration, expressed similar concerns in their own letter.

The university, they pointed out, employs more than 2,000 people but risks losing workers because of the housing crisis.

“This crisis significantly and negatively impacts our ability to recruit accomplished educators driven to teach the next generation,” the pair wrote. “These educators are employees who would live, work and spend their money in the area, but only if they can afford to live here.”

And, they argued, people living in the apartments can walk bike or take BART to work, depending on which school they work for, so the development wouldn’t make traffic worse.

“Simply put,” they wrote, “we cannot continue to serve San Jose and the Valley without ensuring that our staff and faculty can live closer to work and have suitable housing they can afford.”

Angela Holzmeister is a full-time lecturer in the university’s Classics Department, meaning she’s not on a tenure track and makes less money than her tenured peers. Now, she lives with a roommate — the only way she can stay near campus without a car.

“Housing is astronomical,” Holzmeister said.

Educators, Holzmeister continued, “really do want to put down roots and invest in the community. We’re not able to do that unless we have stable and secure and affordable housing.”

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