Though it was not initially envisioned for major residential development, a shuttered golf course near East San Jose’s Lake Cunningham could become the site of a new neighborhood, potentially providing thousands of homes to a city in desperate need of more housing.
San Jose city officials have approved the “guiding principles” for the redevelopment of Pleasant Hills Golf Course, laying out the overarching land use themes that residents have asked developers to provide during an innovative community engagement process spanning over a year.
However, while the developers have submitted initial plans for 1,716 units on the 115-acre site, some neighborhood and housing advocates have questioned the process, including whether San Jose is missing the mark in not requiring higher-density housing on the property.
“We need to be building and planning for the future,” said Jake Wilde, manager of development projects at Catalyze SV. “As is, this project is just more of the status quo that will only have to be mounting negative impacts from decades of urban sprawl. Pleasant Hills presents a unique opportunity. Please make sure that we use the site and land wisely in a way that can bring the greatest benefit to the most people.”
Pleasant Hills Golf Course opened in 1960 but has remained dormant since 2004, except for intermittent grazing on the property.
Lakeside Community, headed by South Bay real estate veterans Tony Arreola and Mark Lazzarini, is the development firm behind the project at 2050 White Road.
Unlike other development projects, community members had a voice from the beginning to express their concerns about how development could impact them and what types of residential and nonresidential uses they would like to see.
Community members asked for included a mix of densities, rental and for-sale units, and affordable housing. They also requested that the residential components not exceed three stories and that the developer locate lower-density units closer to the existing nearby single-family home neighborhoods.
For nonresidential uses, small-scale retail, including shops, restaurants, and a mid-size grocery store, was at the top of their minds.
The initial proposal included 1,374 for-sale houses and 342 high-density affordable rental apartments for seniors and local workers. The development also includes up to 50,000 square feet of neighborhood-serving retail adjacent to a public plaza.
“Our proposal reflects exactly what residents want to see at this site, a development that respects the neighborhood’s character and also delivers a significant number of new homes to help the county and the city achieve their housing goals,” Lazzarini recently told The Mercury News.
However, community members have conflicting opinions on whether the feedback process went far enough to solicit diverse voices, engage nearby residents and consider the impacts of building a brand new neighborhood in the area.
“This development represents perhaps the most substantive change to the character of Evergreen over the past 40 years,” East San Jose resident Jonathan Padilla said. “It goes against dozens of years of city policy with the retired East Hills development plan. With the likely accretive development from both Reid Hillview and Eastridge, this will have dramatic impacts on quality of life, traffic and other localized resources.”
While he admitted the process was not perfect, District 8 Councilmember Domingo Candelas – who represents the Evergreen neighborhood and a large swath of East San Jose – disagreed that it was flawed.
“In addition to the 2,500-foot radius or nearly 4,100 homes, I went door-to-door in the adjacent neighborhoods, knocking on thousands of doors, dropping off literature, and telling folks about this to ensure that residents in my district and the folks who would be directly affected by this had an opportunity to weigh in,” he said.
The City Council has also requested that San Jose conduct a fiscal analysis of the impacts of the land uses and densities and how financial tools like a special assessment district could potentially pay for increased infrastructure, public safety, and other costs once the city receives a completed application.
“If we’re going to develop, particularly on a site that wasn’t supposed to be developed this way, at least originally in the general plan, we should certainly make sure that it’s not going to be a hit to our fiscal stability as a city and cost us money,” District 4 Councilmember David Cohen said. “We also need to make sure we’re going to get enough benefits out of it, including the housing that’s part of the general principles, but we know there’s a certain density required to be fiscally positive for the city rather than negative for the city.”
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San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan stressed that the city would need to evaluate the tradeoffs, including the implications of density on an area that isn’t well-connected to transit while generating enough revenue to pay for city services.
“There’s no perfect project,” Mahan said. “It’s all tradeoffs. This will not have the kind of density that a project next to a BART station could support, bottom line, but it also can’t be so low density that we can’t afford to provide basic emergency response.”