City Efforts to Purchase Hilltown Continue
— by Jeffrey Wisniewski — 9 July 2010 — 1 comment below »
The City will return to the negotiating table in renewed efforts to purchase the Hilltown property — currently assessed at $14.2m — in closed session prior to next Tuesday’s City Council meeting.
The City has not yet officially released its intention to purchase the property, explain the possible purchase to its residents, illustrate why a private developer could not develop the property (as shown in the developer’s approved IPDP), or demonstrate the financial resources to purchase the property, assume all design costs, and ultimately construct the project.
The property is owned by Santa Clara Valley Housing Group (SCVHG). The City’s negotiators are City Manager Nelson Oliva and City Attorney Mick Cabral.
In September 2008, the Redevelopment Agency adopted a Development and Owner Participation Agreement (DOPA) with SCVHG. According to the DOPA, the developer would pay an “in-lieu fee” in order to not build affordable housing as part of the project, and that all affordable housing units would “be developed by [the Redevelopment] Agency at an offsite location within the boundaries of RDA-3.”
In other words, the affordable housing units would be transferred to the Sycamore Crossing project.
Adjacent to Sycamore Crossing is the Sycamore North project, currently under construction, which will be 77 percent affordable housing as a result of no units being built in the neighboring Bayside development. Contrary to effective affordable housing policy (and New Urbanism), the City has opted to cluster or isolate these affordable housing communities, rather than integrate them in sustainable mixed-use and mixed-income developments.
Hilltown will also be exclusively residential.
The City’s website highlights the community’s vision for Hilltown:
The City’s public planning process (the 2000-2001 Charette, etc.) noted that the tank farm site was “evocative of the Italian hill towns built centuries ago” and envisioned “urban density in a highly livable, marketable, picturesque package”.
The City has since apparently altered that vision.
Talk about not learning from history.
San Francisco developed through its Redevelopment Agency a project known as the Fillmore Center, starting in the late 1960′s and finally becoming a reality in the late 70′s. It was predicted by many, especially in the law enforcement community, that this would be a disaster. Millions were spent through eminent domain, moving old Victorian houses, etc.
The idea was to build a shopping center (in this case in a disadvantaged and blighted neighborhood) and a high rise apartment complex in very close proximity to one another. The final project is bounded by Geary, Webster, Fillmore and Eddy Streets — three square blocks.
The first problem was the inability to find an anchor tenant; and that delayed things for many years. The next problem was crime. Studies have shown the relationship between diminished economic status and criminal behavior; and reports of crime committed by persons who fled the scenes into the 70’s and 80’s versions of affordable housing were very common.
Here our City’s “leader” propose to bring a large group of economically challenged people into a shopping area where it is safe to guess that people walking around have spend able cash; concentrating these into a small area rather than dispersing Affordable Housing throughout our City as envisioned by State and federal authorities.
This ignores the experience of law enforcement and social scientists over the last 50 years and ignores the recommendation of those supporting new urbanism where Affordable Housing is interspaced throughout the community not concentrated din one area.
The “in lieu off” process is what has been done over the past several years and has resulted in Hercules absolutely failing t meet the standards of affordable housing and now faced with concentrating affordable house in one place.
This doesn’t been ask the central questions where is the money coming from and who profits from the change here. Standard and Poors has already downgraded Hercules bonds pointing to predictably reduced tax revenue and over dependence on RDA money.
I can’t help but ask whose friend of a City Official is going to profit this time?