Opinion: Google plan will help San Jose fix 42-year-old problem

In 1976, Mayor Janet Gray Hayes announced that the biggest challenge facing San Jose was the city’s jobs-housing imbalance. 42 years later, little has changed. San Jose only has .85 jobs per employed resident, while neighboring cities have as many as 3 jobs per employed resident.

The number of jobs a city has directly translates into tax revenue for residents. For example, Palo Alto rakes in $407 per capita tax revenue, while the same calculation for San Jose equals only $140. Cities cannot provide services based on goodwill and good intentions, and instead must rely solely on tax revenue to pave roads, deploy police officers and keep libraries open.

San Jose has historically excelled in one area in particular, to our own economic detriment: It is the most generous city in providing housing stock for the entire region. Other cities built scant housing and instead focused on commercial development, which brings in substantial tax revenue to pay for city services.

For most of my own career, I have commuted outside of San Jose for work, as do 60 percent of our employed residents. Not only does commuting take away from family life and contribute to traffic congestion, when consumer spending occurs in other cities, San Jose also loses out on tax revenue to help our neighborhoods.

In 1984, the San Jose Redevelopment Agency sent a representative to visit my school to present a three-dimensional, visionary model of what downtown would look like in the future. The goal was to create a job-centric downtown, so people could live and work in the same city, and future buildings would be thoughtfully designed to coalesce around a true city center, adjacent to mass transit. As a middle-school student, I found the vision to be inspiring, and still support such goals today.

Presently, San Jose has an opportunity with Google to enable what has been envisioned for decades. Unlike other companies, Google is requesting absolutely no taxpayer subsidy from our city. This is unprecedented, and we’d be foolish to pass up a partnership with such an established, forward thinking, well capitalized company. The proposed downtown office development would be accessible to the public, and would combine thoughtfully designed, environmentally mindful architecture with landscaped pedestrian and bike paths connected to the rest of downtown and mass transit.

Despite the symbiotic, smart growth opportunity that the Google partnership presents, some have been trying to raise fear, uncertainty and doubt about this project for a myriad of reasons. Google has many viable options for expansion locally, nationally and globally, and vilifying the company only serves as an incentive for them to go elsewhere.

Google has approximately 4 million square feet of entitled unoccupied office space in Mountain View and Sunnyvale. If San Jose is perceived as too difficult, Google will simply expand elsewhere. Our neighbors will still have long commutes, we will forgo additional tax revenue, and downtown will continue to limp along with piecemeal development. When Adobe, Cisco and IBM located to San Jose, they ultimately employed thousands of our residents, to our great collective benefit. These companies contributed mightily to San Jose, as would Google. Why should San Jose treat Google any differently?

So the question remains: if not now, then when? If not Google, then who? There is no other company that could bring about such a positive economic and environmentally beneficial development without taxpayer subsidies. If we miss this opportunity, the land may remain vacant for decades, and the next generation of San Jose middle school students will be doomed to an adulthood of long commutes and lackluster city services.

Pierluigi Oliverio is a former member of the San Jose City Council.

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