Santa Clara has brought a hired gun to its border war with San Jose.
San Jose has threatening to sue its neighbor over the City Place Santa Clara project — a mega development that creates 25,000 new jobs for Santa Clara but could strap San Jose with housing most of the new workers.
Santa Clara fired back by hiring one of the state’s leading environmental and land use attorneys, Tina Thomas, to scrutinize San Jose’s projects along the two cities’ borders. The move came after San Jose sent attorneys and multiple letters to oppose City Place.
Every city wants jobs and thus business tax revenue but not the people, who they have to build schools, parks and housing for. Part of the Prop 13 legacy. It’s funny to watch Santa Clara and San Jose fight.
This has been happening for a long time with Santa Clara. They have been concentrating on commercial development to gain more jobs and expecting everyone else to build housing for their workers. I doubt they have approved more than several hundred housing units in the past few years and most of them have been infill in current residential areas. Meanwhile San Jose has been approving many residential and mixed use projects. I hope with all the development going on in North San Jose, Santa Clara hits a breaking point and has to pay the consequences. What I mean by that is traffic is going to get very bad soon in North San Jose. Maybe people will not want to go a few miles further for a job in Santa Clara.
The Regional Housing Need Allocation (RHNA) is the state-mandated process to identify the total number of housing units (by affordability level) that each jurisdiction must accommodate in its Housing Element. As part of this process, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) identifies the total housing need for the San Francisco Bay Area for an eight-year period (in this cycle, from 2014 to 2022). ABAG and MTC must then develop a methodology to distribute this need to local governments in a manner that is consistent with the development pattern included in the Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS). Once a local government has received its final RHNA, it must revise its Housing Element to show how it plans to accommodate its portion of the region’
Don’t blame Prop 13. All it did was set limits on increasing property taxes.
Cities don’t build schools. School Districts do. And, as all here know, often to their chagrin, school districts don’t follow the generally accepted geopolitical boundaries of cities or counties.
Fighting over city boundaries is as old as cities themselves. And, you’re right about the tax revenue focus. Prop 13 shifted the focus from property taxes to sales taxes. Fighting over boundaries to include auto dealerships and big box stores for the sales tax revenue they generate became so bad, that the state had to step in and pass a law to stop the poaching between jurisdictions.
Here is an example of the stupid results of city boundary fighting. Note the “finger” of land inside Pittsburg’s boundary on the left. It includes a major shopping center and a couple of newly built auto dealerships that they were poaching from Antioch. It helps when a politically (now jailed) powerful development family is involved.
This kind of stupidity only hurts the taxpayers and general public. To wit: When traveling south on Auto Center Drive across the end of this spit of land, there is a sign that reads “City of Pittsburg”. A hundred or so yards later, there is another sign that says “Welcome Back to Antioch”.
I think that’s a small part. Homes = schools and they cost a ton to run with all the pension obligations. You also need more police. How often do police go onto an office for an issue? How often to they go into homes?
The battle between the two cities highlights the competition for regional economic development opportunities and the burdens of housing the workforce that comes with those projects.
For Santa Clara, CityPlace promises to give the city a central gathering place, something it has long lacked. It also will generate a huge financial windfall — officials say that taxes, fees and lease revenue will generate nearly $17 million a year, plus millions more for schools and transportation improvements.
For San Jose, CityPlace represents more competition to the city’s main jobs district, North San Jose.
Valley Fair is half in San Jose and half in Santa Clara. There is literally a line within the shopping mall. You crossed that line and you are in a different city…
When I worked as a supervisor at the post office in the 80s, they had a big dust up about who would deliver the mail to Valley Fair. They finally decided on Santa Clara and San Jose would sort the mail and send over to the Santa Clara post office for delivery. Now they changed the zip code to a Santa Clara zip code to eliminate that. There are still a lot of of streets where the streets are half in San Jose and half in Santa Clara.
So @sheriff and @buyinghouse I think you guys are marshaling troops to annex Santa Clara? I heard they even have their own power station? What a bunch of anarchists!
