Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

hang on sorry let me mute my okay welcome to the planning commission meeting for june 23rd 2026 please rise for the pledge of allegiance thank you very much city clerk may we please have the roll call

Commissioner Fung?

Present.

Commissioner Linskog? Here. Commissioner Rao?

Here.

Vice Chair Scharf?

Here.

Chair Kasol-Scheron?

Here. All right. And we will now move on to the approval of the minutes. Do we have a motion to approve the May 26th, 2026 Planning Commission minutes? So moved.

Okay.

I'll second. May we have a vote?

The motion carries with Commissioner Fung abstaining.

All right. We will move on to oral communications. Do we have any oral communications today, City Clerk?

We have one speaker in person and one hand raised on zoom. Our first speaker is Jonathan Chang. Welcome Jonathan.

Good evening, Chair, Vice Chair, Commissioners, and staff. My name is Jonathan Cheng. Today, speaking on behalf of Alpha X RE Capital, we are a local residential infill developer working on many projects throughout Silicon Valley and focused on delivering high-quality missing middle housing to all the communities that we work in. Partly here today because our company is one of the ones mentioned in the staff report as it pertains to the housing loan. Pardon me.

Sorry. So this is actually a comment on the agenda item. So if you don't mind please making this comment on agenda item two, that would be excellent. Sure. Thank you. So that'll be in a few minutes. Okay. Sure. Thank you.

Okay. And we have one hand raised on Zoom, Jennifer Griffin. Welcome, Jennifer.

Can you all hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay, good. Thank you. I'm almost over my call. So thank you very much. It's good to see you all. As summer begins, I just wanted to pass along a few comments about being safe on the road. I drive over to Santa Cruz frequently on 17, if you all were not aware. You're probably tired of hearing about it when we go over to my mother's. And believe me, the things that I see on Highway 17 would scare anybody. parent to death over the safety issues first of all make sure that your child when they are in the car or anyone in your family that they wear their seat belt we have had numerable accidents where people are thrown out of the car when there are accidents or collisions Lives can be saved if they wear their seatbelt. You will have people that will argue with you that it's safer to be thrown clear of the car. But I have a family member who, when he was a teenager, was actually in a car crash at 17 and one was thrown out of the car and broke his leg. Now, it's debatable, but I would say if you guys are going on the road, buckle up. The other thing is it is legal in California for motorcycles to split lanes. Please, if you have motorcycles coming up behind you on highways 280, 101, 17, let them go by. Don't freak out. Don't turn on your turn signal. Don't go into the adjacent lane. I have two brothers that had motorcycles, rode them for many years. They know what they're doing. Defer to them. Do not cause an obstacle that is going to endanger their lives. Believe me, on 17, I see people who are startled, yes, when the motorcycle comes up, and we often have two to three to five riders. But they will do some of the most bizarre things, the cars. They turn in front of them. They stop. You just, I know it's difficult, but you hear the noise. I had to train myself because I get startled probably from the 1989 earthquake. You sit there. You hear a motorcycle. You let them go by. Give them space, too. I see people on 17. The motorcycle goes by. They get in the lane in front of them, and the person tailgates the motorcycle. That is a disaster waiting to happen. Please do not tailgate motorcycles. If you do not drive in the blind spot of a truck, the truckers know, and they will wave you on if you're in their blind spot. The other thing is parents on motorized vehicles or anyone, don't put children on the handlebars. Thank you, Jennifer, that is your time. Thank you.

We have no speakers in person and no hands raised on Zoom, Chair.

Thank you very much. So then we will move on to our study session, which is on the housing element update to add capacity at all income levels. And we will now have a report from our planning department.

Thank you, Chair, members of the Planning Commission. Tonight we want to kick off what is a big discussion more informally than usual. We plan on having several more. So I think the goal of tonight's, I would say, discussion more than just a formal presentation is to kind of touch on big picture items, recap the housing element for people who aren't familiar, though I assume most of you are. and to try to start getting some direction for how we proceed with, again, amending the housing sites inventory so that we can kick off the presentation. I don't know if the video is showing it yet. There we go. OK, so as I said, we're going to provide some background mostly on the housing element process. The housing element was adopted about two years ago. And then get into essentially what has happened since that time because we've had a lot of residential development activity in the last couple of years. And then really why we're here in terms of updating the priority housing sites inventory, the reason for that and how that could best be approached. All right, this is probably the most familiar side in the city the last four or five years, but this is essentially the city's arena for the sixth cycle that HCD and the state essentially assigned to the city of Cupertino. So a lot of you I know are familiar with this, but the things that jump out again is not only the big number, the 4588 number of units, which was about four times, over four times more than the previous cycle, but that 57 and a half percent of the units fell into the very low to moderate income categories. You had almost the same number of units in the very low and low as you did in market rate. So not only the total number but just the feasibility of getting those lower and moderate income builds was really primarily a challenge. The note below again I think you're familiar with that in addition to the 4588, HCD had recommended that you provide a buffer of additional units of between 15 and 30 percent. While this was not required, it particularly helped in the lower income levels. So the city did do that and get into that. We actually had a buffer of 28 percent overall, but we'll get into that a little more detail. But on this next slide, again, I wanted to show that the majority of the city's RHNA requirements fell into the lower and moderate income categories. But when you look at the feasibility of BMR production, Cupertino, like other cities, is hampered to a very large degree that Your requirements for BMR housing in this case, ours is 15% for rental housing, 20% for ownership housing, creates a very large gap. Unless you're fortunate enough to get a high percentage of 100% affordable projects, you essentially find yourself in a position that your housing element can become certified and then as development rolls in, You're not meeting those estimates. And this is largely what has happened to Cupertino because we've had 1516 development projects come in. So essentially the good fortune of getting an approving housing, which this body in the city council has has altered those estimates. So we're now looking at what to do with the site inventory. Okay, so the top row on this again is the city's RHNA and the total capacity is where we ended up through our approved housing element. So that's actually what we did up zone where we stood in May of 2024. So as a lot of people noted, we overshot the RHNA by 28% or a little over 1300 units. But I think one thing at that time in the race to get the housing element certified that When we had talked about the buffer, the issue really comes in by income category. So while overall we had a 28% buffer, when you look at the very low low and moderate, we didn't have much of one in those categories. So I think the very low low comes out to something like 8% and moderate 12. So we knew going in that in those areas we had a pretty slim margin. Some of you may remember, too, that the week of the City Council adopting the housing element, we had a site that had been on our list that was going to provide 372 units on Stelling and Homestead. I forget the number, but a lot of those were low and moderate income. The property owner essentially pulled out at the last minute, asked to not be included. So that was something that impacted the low and moderate income much more and was right at the point where we were being certified. So there wasn't a lot of time to go back and address that issue. So I think what this means is a lot of us expected we could find ourselves at a point of revisiting the inventory. It's just happened sooner because you've actually approved housing. just to recap again the six cycle housing element we had 58 individual properties a lot of those were contiguous so it came out to about 35 individual development sites 69 almost 70 or set at a density of between 50 and 80 units per acre so for what was largely a suburban community like cupertino this was a big change you didn't really have um very many suburban type sites the other 15 were in the 20 to 35 range to really address the townhome demand so that only leaves three sites that were below that 20 unit threshold this was a much more urban plan that i think the city met the intent of what hcd wanted we really were not looking at doing it too many low density projects And the last bullet too, the sites were almost evenly divided between mixed use properties and residential only. The mixed use were largely those along Stevens Creek and De Anza, and they probably made up a little under 60% of the total units. This is, I think it's table B4 of the housing element supplement, if you want to look at that in detail. Okay, so what has happened in the last two years? We've received over 16 housing development applications and as I touched on is some of these we had in the latter process leading up to certification. Developers interested in pursuing townhomes on housing element sites submitted SB 330 applications. So we had sites that would say have a 50 unit per acre minimum and they came in around 20. So we had several projects, one of Summer Hills, Toll Brothers, dividends on Stevens Creek and the Stevens Creek Office Center behind Whole Foods. All of these were examples of that. So you not only got far fewer total units at that density, but you got a lower proportion of affordability than what we had anticipated. One other thing to notice since we've pretty much gotten only townhomes have been approved to our townhome density, and we only have one higher density project on file, that even when we're getting things in the 20 to 35 range, they're always right around 20. And for sites that we've seen that are not priority housing element sites, but allow development, that's usually in the teens. So 20, while it's a minimum on paper, it's almost operating as a maximum. uh... the second-to-last bullet where it says we have one project that's utilizing state density bonus that's under review uh... that is at stevens creek and finch it is a housing element site and that's really only the anomaly we've seen where it's not only not townhomes it's a very dense project we're talking over a hundred and thirty units per acre so Among our housing element sites, that is the only one we've seen an application that's exceeding the estimates. All the others are under that. With the other exception of the Mary Avenue and the teacher housing site north of Valco, they came in right on what we expected. And those were the only two 100% affordable projects. We have no others that are 100% affordable. So I think one of the themes we're seeing in this is you're coming in around 20 or you're coming in five or six times that. What is Government Code Section 65863? I think people tend to refer to this very commonly as no net loss legislation. This first was adopted in 2002 to essentially look at cities not losing the potential capacity in their housing element. It really did not develop teeth or be anything that was actively monitored until you had Senate Bill 166 nine years ago. And the big change with that is it required cities that anytime you took an action on a priority housing site, not housing projects as a whole, but you needed to revisit your housing element and see how that site was developing in relation to what your housing element anticipated. So what it really did in a sense along with annual reporting is made your housing element much more of a living document. I know I had worked in planning departments where your housing element update was seen as something you did every five years or eight years and then you put it away on a shelf. You just don't have the opportunity to do that anymore so you're constantly reassessing and reevaluating and that's kind of what we're kicking off tonight. What must cities do to comply if they find that they are not developing at the density and the density by income category that they anticipated? You're really faced with looking at other sites to identify to provide additional housing or upzoning existing sites you already have identified in your housing element. You've got to find more units. AND WHEN YOU'RE IN THIS CATEGORY, I THINK AS WE SHOWED ON THE EARLIER SLIDES, IT'S REALLY WE'RE AFFECTED MOSTLY BY LOW AND MODERATE INCOME. WE'VE GOT AN AMPLE SUPPLY OF MARKET RATE HOUSING IDENTIFIED IN THE HOUSING ELEMENT. SO IT'S REALLY BEING ABLE TO IDENTIFY SITES THAT WILL GET YOU OUT OF THIS SITUATION AND KEEP YOU OUT OF IT. When you identify a potential shortfall, you have 180 days to address this issue under state law. I've said this before, I think that's not only impractical, it's probably impossible because you actually have to up zone properties, which means you're subject to CEQA. So that said, that is still state law, so it means you have to get working on this as quickly as possible. And again, the strategy is probably a combination of new sites and upzoning existing sites to the extent you can do that further. CITY'S CURRENT STATUS, WHEN THE CITY COUNCIL APPROVED THE TOLL BROTHER PROJECT RIGHT AT THE END OF LAST YEAR IN DECEMBER, THAT PUT US AT I THINK IT WAS LIKE A TWO-UNIT DEFICIT IN THE MODERATE INCOME CATEGORY, PUT IT JUST UNDER. SO THAT WAS WHERE WE INITIALLY HAD TO FIRST LOOK AT THIS. IT DID NOT AFFECT THE LOWER INCOME CATEGORY UNTIL A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER. ON THE THIRD MODIFICATION FOR THE RISE OR VALCO'S PROJECT WHERE THERE WAS A FAIRLY SIGNIFICANT HIT TO THE ANTICIPATED LOW INCOME HOUSING. THAT'S REALLY THE AREA I THINK THE CITY NEEDS TO CONCENTRATE ON WHILE WE'RE NOT GOING TO GET INTO DETAILED NUMBERS TONIGHT BECAUSE THE CITY HAS APPROVED A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF TOWN HOME PROJECTS AND ALL OF THOSE HAVE PROVIDED 20% MODERATE INCOME. by incorporating the non-housing element sites into the housing element, we're already gonna have addressed the moderate income shortfall because we've gotten much more total units built at that density level and at the moderate income level. okay so we get to a slightly more complicated table where the upper rows you have seen before but what we're looking at here in this table importantly does not factor in anything that is not already in the housing element so at the bottom where you see a minus 22 for moderate that is not taking into account sites we have approved development on that will be providing moderate so that number is not going to remain negative now if you were to add those back in But essentially, again, the top column shows ARENA. The second shows what we had through our housing element. And then the last three, you get the one with the parenthetical B in there is what was anticipated for those sites that were either in the pipeline or have had development subsequently entitled. And then what did we actually get? And what you notice in the row beneath that is there's almost always less than what you anticipated, which is why we're now looking at having to deal particularly in the low income. What are we gonna do about getting that number out of the red? Okay, which leads us to site selection strategies. And this kind of kicks us back to where we were four years ago with the housing element. As I said earlier, we only had two of the 58 properties that were providing 100% affordable housing. Mary Avenue has been approved. It is also in litigation. The teacher housing project, I would anticipate coming to a hearing in probably the next couple of months. So those are really the only two where we have 100 percent affordability. The others are going to be, you know, arranged with the greater density. The assumption and HCD's part is that you're going to get more affordability. So. if you look at detail in our in our housing element the sites that were listed at 50 units per more per acre the assumption was about 40 to 42 percent of those units would be low income and about 15 percent would be moderate which comes out to about 57 percent tied into our arena Again, our problem becomes you have a 15% BMR requirement for rental, 20% for ownership, and anything that exceeds a 20% program is something HCD can consider a hindrance to housing development. So you can't really just modify your BMR ordinance to try to address this and say make it 40%. One thing to think about though is that the actual rent, whether deed restricted or not, if you have an affordable by design project, which again, we're anticipating we do have a project like that that is under review, you do get credit for units that actually rent at affordable prices, which in Cupertino and Santa Clara County can be in the $4,000 to $4,500 a month range. Yeah, though that's tougher to do with a townhome that's selling for two and a half million. So that's one thing to bear in mind is while our BMR program can't possibly make up the difference, having more affordable by design studio, one bedroom, particularly rentals, that can be something we get credit for. Current development pattern, this isn't news to anybody at this point, is a lot of townhome projects and these are very often 1800 to 2500 square foot units, three, four bedroom, three, four bathroom. So they're essentially become single family homes with a common wall is what you're getting. I had mentioned the Hanover project. It's actually over 130 units per acre. So this kind of gets us back to a quandary that There's this real gap between 20 and over 100 plus where just nobody is building now. Don't know if that's going to stay the way it is, but we're not getting things like four-story podium projects that might be coming in in that 40, 50 unit per acre range. We're just hearing from developers. We've only had one tell us that they would consider doing that. So it's also something to think about that in terms of development You're they're gonna go low or high or that mid-range describes nothing that's actually getting submitted Our site selection considerations honestly really haven't changed much from how we identified sites doing the housing element a couple years ago. I think one thing we've learned in the last two years, too, is that it's more feasible to get the density on the major corridors. They're designed for higher density. We mentioned AB 2011. This was a strategy we had two, three years ago when that was new legislation. It went in in July 2023. The city never got an AB 2011 application, I think because you had affordability requirements for prevailing wage and other what were considered fairly onerous restrictions by developers. But what it did do was set minimum densities along commercial corridors where you could build residential even without rezoning and exempt from CEQA. So that became a strategy we had looked at is trying to go with the 50 units per acre or more along Stevens Creek, De Anza and other busy corridors. We're not deviating from that now. Another thing to keep in mind is much of the city's major corridors are already designated PCG res. so they allow commercial or residential already up to about 25 per acre maximum they don't have a minimum but what that tells you is you already have a city full of townhome sites whether you make them priority housing sites or not i think that's why we've seen a lot of these sites come in where maybe one of the lots was a priority housing site or none because that that up to 25 that's the townhome sweet spot already so i don't know that PUTTING MORE PRIORITY HOUSING SITES IN THAT DENSITY RANGE IS NOT REALLY HELPING US ADDRESS A POTENTIAL NO NET LOSS PROBLEM. ONE OTHER THING I THINK WE'VE SEEN FROM PROJECTS IS PUTTING EVEN TOWN HOME DENSITIES IN NEIGHBORHOODS DOES NOT GO OVER TERRIBLY WELL. THEY TEND TO BE PROJECTS THAT DRAW NEIGHBORHOODS OUT. THEY'RE NOT TERRIBLY POPULAR. THEY HAVE A LONGER APPROVAL TIME. And I think one other thing we've seen too is some of those tend to be on the west side where we may even have issues potentially with evacuation. So some sites that we're getting considered even in the last cycle now that we know a little bit more than we do about the very high fire zones, that's another thing to keep in mind. And the last bullet I think is just sort of the theme we have of if you have fewer sites and higher density, it is fewer sites and less acreage to rezone. I think our strategy as staff right now, I've referenced, we had two density categories, 50 to 65, 65 to 80. We have nothing higher than that. I think one thing we can look at is sites that were listed at 50 to move them up to 65. You get a few more units by doing that. And any new sites added along major corridors, we should be looking at 65 minimum to try to get the greatest number of affordable units we can. Another thought just in terms of getting more total units, not necessarily for housing element sites, would be establish a minimum density for a lot of those PCG res sites. However, that would be 15 per acre, whatever the number is. Right now, there's no bottom. So having something, maybe it's 20. So you don't get a 12 or 15 unit project, you get a 20, 21. It would help in terms of the annual reporting when we got actual development on those properties. I think I had touched on, too, I know when we went through the housing element last time, there was thoughts about putting a lot along the Bub Road corridor in. We had one site on McClellan. Also, we're looking at things like Foothill and West Stevens Creek. All of these, based on the evacuation study we did last October, have vehicle to capacity ratios in the event. of an evacuation. So just something else to keep in mind that the major corridors and the central city area don't have to deal with. um related density density considerations these are sort of hard to avoid which is not central to no land loss but i think we know our city council the commission and residents have had concerns that most of our housing sites have been displacing retail whether it's underperforming or not none of our housing element sites were displacing existing housing so this is something else you need to keep in mind is the retention of retail centers or office jobs even because that's been another factor that as these sites convert to housing that retail and those jobs are gone so while we need to find the housing there are ways to to try to identify commercial centers you want to retain and make sure that happens so one of the things we have thought about and it's at the thought about stage is to essentially transfer density on a site. So if you had a 10 acre site that had 25 units per acre maximum, taking a portion of that site and allowing much higher density while the remainder could stay commercial, it would be a way to not lose the housing potential. because HED's concern really is the potential housing. And to keep in mind, Cupertino Village has been a housing element site that was identified for the last time. And when we had talked to them, their plan was always to keep an equal amount of retail, not displace it when they redevelop. So that was an example that Kept their retail but also added residential density through the last cycle. If you do essentially zone away the retail potential that is again sort of lost housing we need to pick up somewhere else. And I think the last bullet here, too, is one of the things we've thought about is, you know, why is retail struggling and it's not struggling just in Cupertino is perhaps by getting higher density and close proximity to the retail that's retained, it may actually help it thrive and do better by having more residents close to it. So the key takeaway, this slide maybe could have saved me from talking 15, 20 minutes, is higher density equals fewer sites, less acreage to up zone, and more feasible in the sense that it probably helps us in a no net loss situation because certainly townhomes are feasible as well. come to this map i think this was in your packet it's probably a little too busy to go into in detail but kind of the basic color coding if you're in the yellow to orange brown you're already in the housing element in some capacity and the greens and blues are potential housing sites we I can say we have had several property owners express interest in being included or being up zoned, but we have not done a big community outreach to properties. I think one thing we wanted to do tonight is see where the commission is at in terms of a strategy. I know four years ago we did a mass mailing to every household. i don't know that that was terribly effective in terms of getting people to come forward we did have a lot of property owners express interest in being included and allowed an online option for them to to enter that information but i think what we would would be thinking about now is doing something more targeted to reach out to these people if they're interested to, you know, get them alerted that we're undergoing this effort. And Pew, you can feel free to chime in because I know you spent a lot more time on this map than I did. okay well okay again this is a mix of again what we're looking at is existing housing element sites whether they're under development have approved projects or not or potentially new ones i think there are a couple more yeah this slides to the extreme west the the pink areas are builders remedy projects which i don't think are terribly relevant to tonight i we would not be recommending either of these as a housing element site GIVEN THEIR LOCATION, AMONG OTHER THINGS. AND THIS IS ALSO IN THE EXTREME WEST. I THINK THE TRIANGULAR NARROW SITE AT ADRIANA OVER NEAR HIGHWAY 85. that site i would point out is our least dense housing element site i think it was like five to ten units per acre the only one at that low density there is not an active application on file but it had a negligible effect on adding units i think it increased what you could develop by about five but it has also brought out a fair amount of community opposition um since it's at the end of a cul-de-sac and is relatively hard to develop even feedback from people involved in real estate have found that the site is more suitable for single family development so this would be an opportunity to essentially down zone that site because it does not have a development application on it and we're not really losing any units by putting it back to where it was so i think that's the one uh the one of the 58 we have that really didn't make a lot of sense other than the property owner wanted it included And that is all we have. I'm sure we can flip back to other things. And again, I think this was like more of an unstructured study section workshop format that I think we all had in mind. So any feedback we get is great. We do plan on coming back with much more detail with our consultant as well. So I'll shut up for now.

Thank you very much, Assistant Director Connolly and Pew. I know a lot of work has gone into this and it's not an easy question to answer. So I appreciate it. And I think since this is a pretty broad discussion, I'd like to try to just structure the conversation a little bit. So I'd like to break the conversation into three parts. The first would be, you know, let's talk about ways we want to add housing. The second would be, let's talk about areas we want to either protect or avoid, whether it's retail or evacuation prone areas. And then the third would be the BMR policies that were listed briefly. So since we're not quite following a typical format, I would like to actually just move to public comments first, and then we'll bring it back to the commission for discussion. So city clerk.

We have seven speakers in person and one hand raised on Zoom. Our first speaker is Greg Endem, followed by Ken Bell, followed by Muni Matipatla. Welcome, Greg.

Good evening, Chair, Commissioners. My name is Greg Endem. I represent the ownership of Marina Plaza Shopping Center and the parcel next to it, which was formerly Mandarin Gourmet. I'm here this evening to support the upzoning of our property. It was detailed in a letter I sent to each of you and staff yesterday. We would also ask that the up-zoning be to a 50 to 65 units an acre zone. Other than Commissioner Sharpe, who was the chair of the Planning Commission when we last brought this project in, in December of 22, ownership presented and was approved at both council and commission, or commission and council, a 206-unit project. This is a for sale project. We had 36 BMR units and about 39,000 square feet of retail. Once that was approved, interest rates exploded, construction costs went upside down, and ownership took a step backward to really look at the project and see how we could turn it into something that made financial sense. During the hearings, both at the commission and council, it was interesting, while it was approved unanimously at both of those bodies, both bodies suggested that we needed more density on the site. And so taking that into consideration, we have wrestled the last year with probably two dozen designs. And last week, we submitted to the city a proposal for 340 units and 42,000 square feet of retail, along with $750,000 40-some-odd parking spaces in an underground garage. So we are very excited about the project as it has come together. We're just looking forward to the housing update process, and hopefully we'll follow very closely after that with our proposal to you all for approval. So that was all I was here tonight to speak to. I'm happy to answer any questions.

I have a question. So the 20%... Are we allowed to ask questions? Yeah, we're allowed to ask questions of the... The 20% BMR, that's all moderate income?

Half is median, half is moderate.

Oh, median and moderate. Okay, but nothing low or very low?

No.

Okay. So I'm just wondering if the council ever decided that they could...

I'm going to have to interrupt. I'm sorry, Commissioner Scharf, but if you have brief questions, it's fine, but we're not agendized to discuss this project at this point. Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Greg. Our next speaker is Ken Bell, followed by Muni Manipatla, followed by Vicky T. Welcome, Ken.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, Hi, guys. Planning Commission, city, you, Luke, good to see you again. I'm here to make a statement on the project 20865 McClellan Road again. I have several of the neighbors out here today with us, and we want to volunteer that site and let you do whatever you want with it and upzone in other areas, and you can make all those low-income units and... Anyway, I'm not sure the status of that. There's other construction going on across the street, single family units. Again, I'm echoing something that I brought up to council some time ago, that we would prefer those units to be single family as well across the street. We're not sure what the status of it is right now. We know there's an SB 330 lock. This is a housing element site. If the developer is willing to trade this off at this point in time, if the SB 330 is expired, we're not sure. Maybe you can give us an update on that and let us know what's going on with that. We have had some communication with Terra Holding, with Samir Sharma, but it hasn't been ongoing very much recently, so we don't know exactly what's going on. But we appreciate all the hard work that's going on there that you're doing, and we understand that you've got some issues out there you're trying to address, and we just want to make sure you understand that You know, our original request was to try and down zone this if we could, and that's still out there. So when you go behind closed doors or in your open forum here and you're discussing this, if this is up for discussion, then, you know, please consider doing something else with that if at all possible. Okay? Thank you.

Thank you, Ken. Our next speaker is Muni Madhipatla, followed by Vicky T., followed by Esther Wong. Welcome, Muni.

Good evening, Planning Commission Chair, Vice Chair, and the Commission staff. My name is Muni Madhipatla. I'm a former Planning Commissioner and currently serving on the Bike Commission. I'm here representing myself. I'm not in any official capacity. I'm here to talk about the McLaren project. So that one, to me, I live on McLaren Road. So that project, as it's conceived, doesn't belong there. So if the council and the planning commission hasn't authority to up zone something, you should have authority to down zone as well. You'll have plenty of opportunities on the Stevens Creek as well as De Anza to do high density housing. I, in fact, when I was serving on the planning commission supported and I was one of the commissioners who voted for and asking for that project, Marina Praia project. to be uh up zoned and even add you know one more floor to it because they were going for four floors and i wanted five floors because that's an opportunity you know to kind of uh increase density in the city right so there are places you know where high density belongs single family home residential neighborhood does it high density condos and town homes don't belong there right so please You are elected and you are appointed to serve the community, so please listen to the community and do what's needed, right? And I also remember during that time meeting both the owners of, when I was a planning commissioner, meeting both the owners. The development I'm talking about, Sameer, I met him on Zoom, and he reviewed a plan with four single-family homes. With me right so I also and I gave my feedback And I was hoping that you know it will come back as you know for unit development single-family units But it ended up being you know what it is now, but it doesn't belong there and the one across which is you know six unit single-family homes even that developer met with me and i reviewed the plan and you know and of course it got approved and i was on the commission you know at the time approving it and you know it went through the council approval as well so i'm really happy to see you know how that shaped up so so i think your neighbors everybody is happy about that and i'm so proud of you know our uh Council and the Commission for standing up for residents against you know, the Schofield property, right? So the way this thing works in in our city It's so attractive a lot of these real estate investors, you know from outside They come in and grab up grab these properties and try to maximize profit and leave the mess to deal with us mess for us, right so this particular one with You know, that street being, you know, 400% war-subscribed for a fire evacuation, the high density doesn't belong there. That street serves four schools and, you know, and there are bicycle lanes. So please take all this into consideration. Downzone that property to single-family homes. Thank you.

Thank you, Muni. Our next speaker is Vicky T, followed by Esther Wong, followed by Jonathan Chang. Welcome, Vicky.

Hello. Good evening, chair and commissioners and staff. I just wanted to express my concerns about also the McClellan property, the 28065 McClellan Road. I live right next to the property, so this directly affects me. I pretty much lost hope that there's going to be a huge change in it just because of what you have provided as far as being in the housing element and all that stuff. Besides that, I guess I just wanted to find out how do we address our concerns about the properties around that particular property when the new development is being built, specifically like fire and emergency services access, because it's going to be a new single road going into this new property off of McClellan during high traffic times. I'm sure everyone who lives in Cupertino knows that it's really congested on that road. And if there are cars coming in and out from the town homes onto McClellan and the fire truck or emergency service needs to get in there, they won't be able to get in there. There is no other streets to get near that property or even across the street. Another concern is parking. Right now, we did ask Samir at Terra Holdings to add additional parking. He did, I think, add maybe five or six spots for the over 20 units, which I don't think is sufficient. Where is all that overflow parking going to happen? There is no parking on McClellan. Is that going to heavily impact the neighbors on Bonnie? Does that mean we have to permit our parking so that we don't have parking in front of our homes like all the time? And I also wanted to find out how we keep up to date with what's going on with the plans on the property. We have been in contact or I have been in contact with The person in charge of the project and we get really vague answers I'm also in contact with Samir the last time he sent me a copy of their plans was I think June of last year so that I could like deep dive into the plans and find out exactly where drains were gonna be and sewer and all that stuff but Since I know it's the law, the only way I can see plans is getting an appointment and then looking at it and I can't take pictures of it. So it's really hard to actually go through the plans in detail to find out exactly HOW IT'S GOING TO AFFECT OUR PROPERTY. FOR EXAMPLE, LIKE, THE LAST TIME I SAW THE PLANS, IT SHOWED THAT THERE ARE GOING TO BE OVERFLOW DRAINS ON MY AND MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY, AND, LIKE, WHEN IS IT APPROPRIATE OR WHO DO I TALK TO TO ASK FOR, LIKE, WHY IS IT BEING SHOWN ON MY PROPERTY AND NOT ON THE DEVELOPER'S PROPERTY? BUT, YES, SO THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.

Thank you, Vicki. Our next speaker is Esther Wong, followed by Jonathan Chang, followed by Jennifer Griffin. Welcome, Esther. Hi.

I just want to echo that I support all of what they've said. I'm just really concerned about the lack of parking, the sewer line. I think we asked a lot of questions about how do you get the sewer from the back of the property of a one-acre property. land up to McClellan. Do our sewer lines even support that much more? And then there's gonna be another development on the corner of McClellan and, is it De Anza Boulevard? No, Stelling. There's going to be like a huge development there. I mean, there's so much going on.

Sorry, do you mind getting a little closer to the mic? Thank you so much.

Oh, sorry. Anyways, I just basically want to say I support everything that they're saying. I'm just adding nonsense right now. Thank you.

Thank you, Esther. Our next speaker is Jonathan Chang, followed by Jennifer Griffin. Welcome, Jonathan.

GOOD EVENING MEMBERS OF THE COMMISSION AND PLANNING STAFF. SUPER EXCITED TO BE HERE. MY NAME IS JONATHAN CHENG WITH ALPHA X RE CAPITAL. WE ARE A URBAN INFO DEVELOPER BASED HERE ACTUALLY IN THE CITY OF CUPERTINO. PARTLY HERE BECAUSE WE ARE ONE OF THE NAMES MENTIONED IN THE STAFF REPORT. BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY WANTED TO JUST KIND OF EXPRESS OUR APPRECIATION FOR THE CITY AND JUST HAVE A GREAT EXPERIENCE WORKING HERE. particularly with planning staff, Pew, Luke, and John and Shelby. We just found that you guys are very communicative, transparent, and just really makes the whole process of development much smoother and more productive. We have our experience here in Cupertino includes six single-family homes next to the New Life Church on McClendon Road, which is currently under construction. And more recently, we submitted a formal planning application for three parcels at the intersection of North Foothill Boulevard and Stevens Creek Boulevard. And that's planned for 25 townhome units, four of those planned for below market rate. One of those sites was actually our home for two years. We recently graduated to one of Apple's old offices, and we look forward to really just bringing a really cohesive and well thought out project to the city of Cupertino. And once again, just wanted to thank staff for all the work you're doing with the housing element and looking to deliver more housing. Regardless of the determination for that, we're just really excited to work with you and bring a really valuable and nice community to the city of Cupertino. I just wanted to thank everybody for your time. Thank you.

Thank you, Jonathan. Our next speaker is Jennifer Griffin. Welcome, Jennifer.

Thank you. Can you all hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay. Thank you. Hi, I'm Jennifer Griffin. I live in the eastern part of Cupertino, Rancho Rinconada. I purchased my home in 1995 as a single person, and I had lived in the neighborhood for 15 years before that renting. I sent an email earlier, which you all were kind enough to print in the communications concerning the and I'll make a few comments about that, but I am very, very concerned as a city resident that too much money is being spent on picking up the pieces of our city from the bad statistics arena. The staff and the city have done a remarkable job of trying to deal with this. They know that the residents are concerned. This has been going on for probably six years now. They have done a fantastic job. They know that the residents are upset. We know something's wrong, but we can't. In some cases, they say our hands are tied, not the staff, but the state. And the RHNA numbers are wrong. I have stated that over and over again. And unfortunately, the governor and our elected officials at Sacramento State are not paying attention about the issues from the bad RHNA, bad statistics. They have not, in fact, even Senator Cortese is aware of how bad these numbers are because he voted with confidence straight to have an investigation into HCD's handling of the RHNA numbers at the state level. There have been two investigations. But I, as a city resident, do not want any more money spent on upzoning anything in our city because the RHNA numbers are wrong statistically. My husband is a math brain. He has a master's degree in statistics and he has worked in statistical modeling most all of his time in working in public industry. He was also in supply chain. I have a long background in statistics. I tutored it at De Anza for five years and I have a chemistry degree and the first class I took at De Anza that's required of chemistry majors is called qualitative analysis and it is using statistics in chemistry in the economic sector. I learned a lot. I have heard too that at the state level, I have been on six Zooms with my husband involved too with people people who have vast statistical backgrounds, heads of companies saying that the RENA numbers are magic. Thank you, Jennifer. That is your time.

We have no speakers in person and no hands raised on Zoom, Chair.

Thank you, City Clerk. So we will bring it back to this commission now. And just as a reminder, we'll start off on the topic of how strategies to increase housing. And this can be open. It can either be questions of staff or comments. So do we have any commissioners with questions or comments?

Can we first ask questions about the staff's presentation?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, so I'll go first then. So I have 19 questions. So first of all, who prepared this report? Which consultant?

The report tonight?

Right.

Staff.

Okay, so this was not by Placeworks or anything like that?

No, we're trying to save them for the future meetings.

Okay. The next question, does a site owner, do they have to express interest in order for the city to rezone their land for high density?

They do not have to, but it is helpful. In the case if they were to say they do not want to be included, then that would be unlikely to get approved by HCD.

Okay. This is a side issue. Whatever happened at the McClellan and Foothill site that was approved years ago, there was a bike shop and a market there and nothing ever? Canyon Crossing. Yeah, Canyon Crossing. Whatever happened to that?

That was a pipeline project. Can you hear me? Sorry, I can't tell. No. That was a pipeline project, and that expired or is close to expiring. They have reapplied with a different project on that site.

Okay, is it a higher density than...

It is a little bit higher density than what was... Okay. But it does not have any commercial component. Right.

Are there any churches that are ever interested in putting low income and very low income on their land?

We have one church that is interested and they're already in the housing element.

Okay. So about evacuation routes, what... What is the actual law? I was looking at Bub earlier and I remember Bub used to have two lanes in each direction and now it has one lane and a protected bike lane in each direction. If it still had two lanes, would that make it okay for housing there or is it just not possible?

There's nothing I'm aware of that says you couldn't approve housing there. I'm just keeping the community's views in mind. Fire safety and evacuations seem to become a major issue in recent discussions, but it's possible you would have more scrutiny if you proposed housing certainly if you had dense housing and it were in a very high fire zone but there's nothing that's going to prohibit having a housing element site you know aviolich has evacuation issues and that

YOU KNOW, THAT GOT APPROVED.

I WILL ADD TO THAT, AND I'M SORRY, I CAN'T TELL IF YOU CAN HEAR ME OR NOT, BUT I WILL ADD TO THAT THAT BOB MOSTLY HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN INDUSTRIAL SITES, SO THERE MIGHT BE CONTAMINATION ISSUES ON THE SITES THEMSELVES BECAUSE WE AREN'T QUITE SURE WHAT MATERIALS HAVE BEEN USED. I KNOW ONE SITE THAT ACTUALLY HAS A COUPLE OF WELLS ON IT. RIGHT.

WELL, I CAN TELL YOU I WORKED IN ONE OF THOSE BUILDINGS AND WE DIDN'T SPILL ANYTHING ON THE GROUND. and we didn't fab any boards or anything there. Okay, the next question is about, it was mentioned about in lieu fees, how even though we don't normally have developers do that, how do we make sure our in lieu fees are commensurate with the cost of actually building low income housing?

going through that process right now to figure out what the, sorry, got my train of thought got lost there for a minute. We're actually going through the process of issuing an RFP to ensure that we can hire a consultant to develop in LUFIs that would be commensurate for this particular situation.

Okay, so this is related to Valco and SB 423. So since it was the state, that caused Valco to be allowed to put in so little low income housing? Is there no consideration for the fact that we're falling behind because the state changed the law like that?

I mean, SB 330 allowed developers to lock in lower densities than we were hoping to put in on some of the sites on Stevens Creek. So no, state law doesn't.

I wasn't talking about SB 330. I was more about how SB 35 got modified. We went from 50% to 33% to 13%. Right.

No, state law doesn't take that into consideration at all.

Okay. And then it was mentioned about sites under construction did not displace existing housing. But on Stevens Creek across from Whole Foods, we had naturally affordable rental housing that did get torn down. But was that not a priority housing site? Is that why that was

It wasn't deed restricted housing. State law requires displacement requirements if the units had been deed restricted specifically or there's a very specific definition for what protected units are.

Right, and that Bianchi project was a pipeline site. It wasn't one of the 58 sites.

Okay, and then I guess my last question is about the Hamptons. Since that was mentioned, it's about to expire. Once it expires, are we free to up zone that to something higher?

It right now is about, I wanna say 78 dwelling units to the acre already. Right. I don't think that there's anything that would preclude us, but it was a site in the fourth cycle. So for this cycle, I think we might have to up zone it by more than 20%.

I was looking at some sites in Palo Alto that just got approved for, it was like 125 units, no, sorry, 272 units per acre. And then in downtown San Jose, the Fay is 800 units per acre. So yeah, I mean, 100 to 200 is not unreasonable.

No, it's not unreasonable at all. It's just a matter of whether HCD will buy into the fact that there's going to be a project that would replace those 342 units, which there was already an entitlement on it and move. So it's just a matter of trying to figure out whether that could happen.

Yeah, and just that even though that was entitled, we did not get credit for the Hamptons in the housing element because in HCD's determination, it was not likely to redevelop by 2031. Right. Which is looking to be, I'm not even sure if it may have expired already. I know it was.

August this year.

Oh, okay. Two months because it's this year. Yeah.

I know former Mayor Paul and I talked with Irvine like six or seven years ago down in Southern California, and they were just totally noncommittal saying, well, things would have to change before they would be willing to build it. The demand was just not there right now. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Rao.

Thank you. I want to appreciate staff for the presentation. That was pretty detailed and comprehensive. Can staff comment on, I believe, if the site is zoned as office or commercial and residential as much as Stevens Creek is? I believe our Mooney Court says if you choose to do 40% affordable housing, then you can get 100% residential. Can you clarify that?

There is a land use policy that kind of states that.

And so how could we use that to our advantage to get the 40% affordable housing out of each site that we select?

We can't. That's a voluntary standard for a developer.

Right. But if the path to getting 100% residential on that site is to choose to do 40% affordable housing. I believe that is what the money court says, is that correct?

Yes, but there are paths under state density bonus that would allow them to bypass those requirements.

And could you expand on what those are?

They just have to ask for an incentive as long as they provide some minimal number of VLI units, which I think the minimum amount that they have to provide is 5% VLI.

It's under 10.

Yeah, it's 5% VLI. They get one incentive, and that's all you need to bypass that requirement.

So effectively, that 40% affordable housing is now sort of obsolete because they can use the waivers and incentives to get this down to 5%. Correct.

Has anyone ever done it? No.

Yeah.

And there's no way for us to hold them to that 40% affordable in any?

State density bonus law is the biggest hole in zoning requirements, really.

All right, different line of thinking then. So can staff comment on, I believe we have on our three sites the ability to have up to 25% of the site if non-habitable as ADUs. Are ADUs designated as affordable housing?

Not all, but some portion, yes.

So let's say we could, just for hypothesis, let's say we could get 180 views on a site. I'm just picking a number. But if you got 100 ADUs, how many of those ADUs would be affordable units?

So it's an exercise that happens every other year essentially right now where you do a survey and HCD. We do a regional survey and HCD makes the determination on what that breakdown of affordability would be. Currently, they are allowing us, up until the last reporting period that we had, they allowed us to use a 30-30-30-10 split. Essentially, 60% of the units would go towards lower income, which is VLI and LI, 30% would go to moderate, and 10% would go to above moderate. However, that is already factored into our housing element. So we will get credit for those units should they be built. We just can't build it into the accounting mechanism of the housing element.

Okay, so fair to say that a large percentage, maybe as much as 90%, could be affordable units out of ADUs.

Absolutely, yes. We've seen some of those ADUs come online. We just recently had a couple of apartment buildings, but they're proposing maybe 16 ADUs. It's not very large numbers.

I have been reading about San Diego having a lot of high-density ADU on projects. Are staff aware of what's going on with San Diego and ADUs? There's a lot of noise around ADUs in the system and anti-ADU. So how could we learn from San Diego on how to use ADUs as a strategy to maximize the number of affordable units per site?

So we allow up to three ADUs. I mean, state law allows up to a certain number of ADUs, and I think we're up there with or even beyond what state law allows. I think what San Diego did is, I think it was if you deed restricted an ADU, you get an additional ADU. So I think there was up to a certain number, like maybe five or ten. So people could build up to seven or eight ADUs on their properties, and that was becoming an issue in terms of how large the structures that were accommodating those ADUs were becoming. Parking was also an issue in the neighborhoods. That was kind of where that was stemming from.

Okay. So we don't think that the R3 site could be packed with ADUs in some ways. Is there anything that staff can think of that would leverage ADUs as a strategy on R3 sites to maximize affordable units?

be something that we'd have to think about but it's already factored in like we looked at arena adu productions and built that number into the housing element production so could we for example zone a site in some way that says this is an adu uh site for example i understand these are accessory dwelling units and so it's not the primary dwelling unit but could we you know just

bouncing ideas off here, but could we zone a R3 site with one DU per acre and then say the rest of it is conversion ADUs and you could go up to 25%? Well, I guess that's 25% of the units allowed, so that would not help. But how could we allow the developer to utilize the remaining space beyond the one DU per acre in the form of ADUs?

I mean, the only multifamily or townhome project we had was Toll Brothers included, I think 10 or 11 ADUs. But that was also, like with most developers, that was part of their thinking and their design, which they had said we, being Toll Brothers, were the ones that had figured this out. We have not had any other townhome developers really go that route. It's a good idea to think in terms of how do you incentivize it. Between incentivizing and getting people to do it is always the trick. And that developers, it's always that until somebody does something successful to break the model. I mean, I remember working in Santana Row when I was an associate planner and everybody said they're never going to build it. It'll never work. Then it worked and people did other projects or wanted projects like that. But that always seems to be the case. I mean, I think maximizing ADUs would be great. I don't know that it. IT WOULD BE A WAY TO HELP THIS ISSUE. I DON'T KNOW THAT IT'S NOT GOING TO BE THE WAY TO TAKE CARE OF THIS.

SO JUST EXTENDING THAT SOME MORE, I BELIEVE CONVERSION ADUS AS A STRATEGY ALLOWS FOR 25% OF THE UNITS ON THE SITE TO BE ADUS, CORRECT? SO IF I HAD A R3 SITE THAT ALLOWED 100 UNITS, THEN WE COULD 25% OF THE 100 units could be ADUs in non-habitable space. Is that correct?

That's true.

That sounds right. What are some examples of non-habitable space that we could, how could we use a site such that enough space is proportioned as non-habitable to allow for or encourage the developer to build conversion ADUs?

So most of what we're seeing right now is conversion of garages to EDUs in rental projects. We're seeing some consolidation of laundry facilities and converting those into EDUs. I think I've seen one where the office that they had was a bit larger than normal, so they converted some portion of the office that they had for the rental project into an EDU. But beyond that, there aren't really any other non-habitable spaces. There aren't very large corridors, for example, that you could, if you have to access the existing units, you can't convert those. So there isn't really anything that's non-habitable space that can be converted.

Yeah, so just staying creative there, could we... On an R3 site, are there ways to proportion the site such that some part of the land is treated as non-habitable, but could be used for conversion ADUs? Where I'm going with that question is I believe the Mooney Court allows for the non-habitable portion to be up to 25% of the units as conversion ADUs, but that is restricted to only the non-habitable portion. So what I'm trying to do is how do we maximize the non-habitable amount of land on a lot?

So under state housing law, I don't think we can really maximize anything. The developer brings in a project and we have to conform our standards to what the project is designed as.

So just kind of playing that out a little bit, I believe storage is considered non-habitable. So could we... Could we zone an R3 or a mixed-use site such that part of the site is storage?

And then you use a waiver to waive that requirement. I'm just being practical about it. I mean, that's what's going to happen. Yes, we could establish the regulation, but the regulation can be waived.

So if a site were zoned to be storage alongside with the R3, whatever we call it, the dual zoning that we have, Can the storage zoning be waived, or is that a GP amendment?

That would have to be a general plan amendment. If the land use allows residential uses, you have to allow residences on it.

How long does it take for a GP amendment?

Two years?

It depends. It's all subject to CEQA, city council.

I'll pause here, but I just want to throw out that one way to disincentivize or incentivize, depending on the case. is if you require a GP amendment to make changes, then that stretches a project out. But if the storage zone portion of a lot could be used for conversion ADUs, how can we allow for that portion of the lot to be conversion ADU-based construction? So look at basically taking our R3 parcels and trying to maximize up to 25% as conversion ADUs. Leave that for now. Thank you.

Do we have any other questions? Commissioner Fung.

So here's an easy one, actually. You had a no net loss slide. I was just curious, can we bring that back up just briefly? One of the comments you had was that the moderate level number, which was currently showing the formal calculation was negative, that that probably wouldn't be as a result of the townhouses. I'm just curious, so the negative 327, if the current plans were to move forward, the same things that would cause a negative 22 to be cleared, do you believe that the negative 327 would still be negative 327 or so? Yes. Or would that number actually increase?

It might actually increase. We'll have to, yeah, again, these numbers are not final. They're just very tentative numbers.

No, it's good. I think it was actually a really good illustration, you know, one of the you know, unexpected consequences of the economy and all the different things was that it did make a change which boosts the moderate number of units being built. You know, the fact that these were going to, you know, had converted to for sale units when that wasn't anticipated, you know, had a benefit. But I just, you know, the problem is that if that makes, you know, there are not going to be very low units for sale. So, you know, what I was really curious was just to understand, you know, is that kind of the number you expect? Or is it, do you need to be concerned that it will become 500?

No, I don't think it would go up to that number at this point. But I think it might go up a little bit.

Yeah, it can grow. I mean, the one other thing to the housing element assumptions is for all those categories these bmr requirements so it assumes you'll get some portion of low and some portion of moderate which when a project comes in you're going to get one or the other yeah and and low has obviously this was impacted by one project doing a modification um but yet we've done better in the moderate category just because of the sheer number of projects that we got moderate income units where we didn't plan for housing really yeah in the spirit of trying to make uh achievable

to set achievable objectives. I mean, I think one of the challenges here is that, you know, the market has shown not much preference for rental housing, and that that makes it difficult to achieve these. I mean, you know, you can radically increase the density that's allowed. Nobody will build it, and then we fail.

There is a difference between what will practically occur and what has to occur on paper, unfortunately, and we have to bridge that gap because that is the law.

Yeah, I would even say that in the planning process, the moderate targets and the goals that were set in the housing element were actually very realistic. Yeah, I don't think it would have anticipated all the townhouses we expected, but you know, the intent of building for sale, I think that was probably very clear from the people who were coming to speak to the city during the housing element. I was curious, there was a question, Commissioner Rao had asked about ADUs. One of the things about the counting of ADUs as affordable units, that is, In the past, that was treated as something where ADUs got that designation because they were affordable by design, by nature of being smaller. That means that they rent at market rates but would still qualify. Is that basically correct today?

That's the basis of the survey that I was talking about and the basis of ATD's determination based on those results.

Okay, and then let's see, I had one other one. Let me just kind of make, at a high level, one of the notes that I made. So first of all, thank you very much for the report. It was very informative, particularly at this early stage. I did want to comment that perhaps one of the things, and one of the things that kind of leapt out at me was that I think as an objective, you might want to look to see if there's a mechanism, and this may be something, you know, something that you might go away and think about it and then we might talk about in the future to try to develop perhaps an index an objective index the rates you know that's kind of a scoring factor on some of the different sites in particular the one that kind of leaps out is the impact of adjacent single-family residences So one of the things that the illustration for that is that the Bandley project doesn't have adjacent single family homes. The Marina project that I think they brought here today doesn't have adjacent single family homes. So some of that friction that comes in the community, I think that that's something that gets looked at on every proposal. And it is hard for the community to understand that to understand the things that their sites are being judged on because we didn't try to make that an objective number. So the examples of the mid-range ones are some of the townhouse projects on Stevens Creek. immediately adjoin next to true single-family home areas, and that actually has been an area of friction. Again, I think when people are trying to evaluate the sites, if we had a reasonable way, and this is something, again, discussed with the public so that people don't feel that they're being railroaded here, that that would be a great way to help steer the thinking of sites. And then, you know, the example of the high ones for Uvillage, for instance, would be, I think, probably pretty high in terms of the neighborhood impact. So having that kind of rating I think would be useful. That would also apply in the opposite example. This is something we discussed with the Bandley site about industrial impact. If there are industrial uses, in particular, we have a bunch of PR areas. The Bandley one happens to be in a PR area where you just say, there isn't a designated industrial area here. Any place within the region could have been an industrial site. This would be true with Bub as well, I think. So it would be interesting if there's a way to score that as well so the people get a sense of, yeah, you can build Bentley, but you need to be careful because the people around you, you might be next to a building that has manufacturing in it. And I would say that fire and evac, translating that to a numeric measure as part of what's presented to the community would help people understand. Sometimes that question would really be, you know, I think that the study does raise some question about, you know, how serious is this problem? So if there's a way to translate into something that allows you to comparatively understand the science, it would be great. And then the final one, I'd mark down four. The final one was the retail potential. This is one that I think the Planning Commission has repeatedly kind of said, hey, there's an opportunity to change the form, to steer the form in a way that allows commercial uses to be, you know, retail uses to be successful. We ought to do that. And so, you know, I think there was discussion around one of the Apple sites, you know, and how that could be structured differently. to perhaps encourage a retail center that was related to Main Street. I think that would be the same case for some of these mixed use ones, even though it seems like the interest in having mixed uses seems to be extremely, extremely low among the developers. I think that's it for my comments, thank you.

I just had a quick follow-up on your question regarding the negative, I think, 342 or so low-income units. What exactly have we not counted yet that would be factored in? I'm assuming Marina Plaza, and then is Wolf Road teacher housing, and where's Valco and all of this?

Valco is affecting that number, so it's already included?

Valco is already in that number, yeah.

What's not included would probably be ADUs, building permits that we've issued. If there are any projects that are outside of these areas, for example, Hanover will probably have a lot of VLI units. I don't believe that's included in that count that we were looking at, I don't believe so. But again, it's not settled. The dust hasn't settled on this calculation yet. And once we have those numbers, we'll be happy to bring it. But again, with the understanding that that's a moving target because we're issuing building permits every day as we speak. So yeah, it's just a snapshot in time.

Thank you.

Any other questions? Commissioner Lenskog? Hi. I have a couple of questions. One is you make a recommendation in the staff report to increase the minimum density to 65 dwelling units per acre for sites that are in already priority housing sites. Just had a question for how do you account for property owners who are already in the housing element, like the one at the corner of Stevens Creek and, I mean, McClellan and Stelling, for example, that are in the process of creating a development? Will that affect the plans that they are putting in place or preclude a planned project that's in the works? Or will you... Are you planning for somehow adjusting for those?

No, actually, if you look at the map, I've actually gone through and identified some of the sites that we potentially would up zone, but that continues to be a clear orange, which means that's a priority housing site we aren't proposing. At least we aren't thinking. Again, we don't have a list of sites yet. This is just very big picture, but that is not one that we wanted to touch. Okay, so it wouldn't be like a blanket, upset everything, got it, okay. Anything that's in the 50 to 65 range, because we haven't seen any development in that range, we were thinking of bumping those up to 65 to 80, because that's what we saw at Hanover. That's where we saw some development occurring.

Got it. Okay, great. And then the other question, and I guess this is more of a comment in line with what Commissioner Fung said. I noticed in the report you talk about avoiding neighborhoods. That is kind of a confusing... NOMENCLATURE BECAUSE NEIGHBORHOODS IS PRETTY MUCH ALL OF COOPERTINO. SO I THINK TO BE MORE PRECISE WOULD BE TO AVOID NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE PREDOMINANTLY SINGLE FAMILY RESIDENCES. AND, YOU KNOW, I THINK TO AGREE WITH COMMISSIONER FUNG, IF WE CAN PUT SOME SORT OF OBJECTIVE MEASURE AROUND THAT, I THINK THAT WOULD BE USEFUL BECAUSE JUST READING THIS AND SAYING WE'RE GOING TO AVOID NEIGHBORHOODS, IT'S KIND OF LIKE, WELL, The entire city.

The goal is not to go into the neighborhoods like happened with the last housing elements, such as Adriana, .

You mean don't go into neighborhoods that are predominantly single-family residences. Yes, absolutely. We can just clarify that moving forward. and then also define what we mean by predominantly. And in line with that, when we are talking about increasing density for properties that are along major arterials, but they back onto single-family residences, Can we consider a step down requirement that says you can be 30 to 35 density facing the main arterial, but you have to step down to like 20 or 15 or whatever. as you get adjacent to the single family residences. So I don't know if that's a possible thing that we can require or request.

We can certainly look at that. Again, I mean, with the understanding that it'll probably impact numbers for what you get to. And then again, there is a waiver for that.

Because we did factor that in and had diagrams showing building form, how they would step down, and unfortunately it gets waived. It's almost like you'd have to have two separate districts with density ranges there, which, because... You're right. We realize this. When we say in the neighborhoods, I think by that we meant projects that are squarely in a single-family neighborhood with nothing else around them.

Right.

Because many of the sites, even in Stephen Creek and De Anza, share one property line at least with a single-family neighborhood. I mean, that's just the nature of Cupertino. We've seen that. Even with townhomes people are showing up saying hey this overlooks my backyard So that that's gonna be a very common issue throughout so I think we can clarify that more but the split density is something I know we've wrestled with with how do you get like a 20 units per acre close to single family stepping up to 50 or more near the street frontage and it's just a tough problem to solve especially with density bonus I mean the only project I know since I've been here that kind of did that was the first approval for the 1655 De Anza had Rental out near the street with townhomes adjacent to single-family and that projects not going to get built and

Right. So my third question is, you mentioned we have two 100% affordable projects in the works, right? One under litigation. Is there anything that we can do as a city to incentivize or to partner with county or school districts to... to bring one or more of these 100% affordable projects to the city because that would make a big dent, whether it's educators or essential workers or some other population that we want to protect.

Offhand, I don't know, because what we consistently hear from affordable housing developers is the lack of tax credits and the lack of funding. I mean, it's just universal, especially for the 9% tax credits. They're ultra competitive. And I think that's one reason we're just not seeing. We actually had more inquiries two, three years ago than we're getting now for 100% affordable projects where I don't even know the last time we had one.

But I think we already have policies of the housing element that talk about collaborating and coordinating with school districts and other affordable housing developers on bringing such projects into the city. And I know our housing division meets with affordable housing developers on a fairly regular schedule and clip.

I guess I'm talking about actually putting incentives in place.

The only way, that's what I was going to get to. The only way they'd be interested is if they got dollars. And that's dollar speak, and that's the only way you can get somebody interested to do a project like that.

Okay. So we're in the question phase, right? So, okay. Okay, I'll stop for now.

Commissioner Ralph?

Thank you, Chair. So I had a question about what is the basis for inclusion of some of these sites in the map that we have here. For example, I would have thought you could just show all of Stevens Creek in a color code of some kind. So why are there gaps in the color code where we are not showing? I'm excluding the residential units. For example, city center I would exclude. But as I glance through the map here, for example, opposite the recent dividend homes project, there is an office parcel that is currently, I believe, Safari Kid and some kind of pizza joint and the Rose Tea Lounge that just closed. So why isn't that a potential site? This would be to the West of Sweet Maple?

Oh, yeah. The West of Sweet Maple is the retail building for the Biltmore Apartments, which used to be Counter Burger. I mean, there is a very shallow parcel there. Again, we're looking for sites that bring numbers to the table, so we're not upzoning everything. The way that we were looking at it is identify buildable, developable sites that would generate numbers to achieve the VENA targets. That site is probably about a third of an acre.

Are you including the SafariKit in that? Because if you include SafariKit, That's a fairly large parcel.

No, no, and it does not. Again, we were looking to have contiguous parcels that were fairly large that would generate those numbers.

Right, so again, maybe a Google map would help here, but if you looked at- I know what you're talking about. Those are contiguous parcels.

The safari kit is to the west of the retail. Yes, it is. But they have different property owners as well. But yes, absolutely. If that is the commission's, you know, this is, like I said, this is a subset of the parcels that we were looking at. And if that's of interest, we can certainly look at it.

Okay, but that is something that potentially we could add on, and that would be at least the Safari Kids side of it would be an office building as opposed to sort of street front retail. But, all right.

I think if that was the direction to focus, if we were choosing between, say, retail and office that retain retail, if retail preservation is a higher priority, we could target office because by no means is this map. We tried not to eliminate things, but certainly you could look at any of these properties. I think our goal is then, again, to try to target property owners to gauge owner interest.

Yes, so my preference would certainly be to target offices more so than retail where we can, especially if it is Class C office, Class B office. I don't think we have much Class A office that would be even a target. They're all mostly Apple buildings, I guess, these days, or otherwise, but yeah, Class C, to the extent we have any Class C office, Class B office. Along those lines, I noticed that the gas station at Stevens Creek and Fort Hale was included, I think.

I don't believe so. There is a pipeline project on the southwest corner of Stevens Creek and Foothill, and there was interest on the northeast corner.

I guess I'm looking at this map that's called central and the southwest corner is red. So is that just considered part of the retail site and therefore it's included?

If video can share the screen right now.

The Chevron gas station on the southwest corner of Stevens Creek and De Anza.

Oh, yes, of De Anza. Yes, not Foothill. Yes, southwest corner of Stevens Creek and De Anza. We included everything as a retention site if there was interest in it.

So is there any reason we couldn't also then include the other gas stations on De Anza Boulevard in the... And maybe that's the direction you're looking for.

Yeah, I mean, that could be. There is a newer office building that's occupied by Apple on the northeast corner next to the Valero gas station there, which is why we didn't include that particular corner. But absolutely, if there was interest, including all three, there's three parcels. There's a standalone bank building behind the Valero gas station there. And there's an office building to the east of it, which is occupied by Apple.

Yeah, I'd certainly be in support of designating the most expensive gas station as the designated housing element site. Certainly want to preserve our affordable gas stations, but I wouldn't mind trading unaffordable gas for affordable housing.

I just had a quick clarifying question since we have this map up. So the potential priority housing sites, are those currently counted in any numbers or these are all new? Just all new. Okay. And then the non-priority housing sites in blue are also not?

They are not counted in that number that you saw the table, but they are projects that we have seen and approved or in review right now. So examples being Dividend 2, and we have a project in at an office building on Stevens Creek, which is the... there's a large office building there that's in blue and hashed in the middle of the screen right there.

Okay, and then the red commercial, those are currently counted in our numbers at the moment?

No, there's no number counting on the red at this point. This is just, these are sites, and if I had to go through them, there's Homestead Square on the top, There's the Target site next to Marina. There is the Whole Foods site next to that, west of that, along Stelling and Stevens Creek. On the other side of Target is the Crossroads development. This also includes the Mardisage site, which is not owned by the same property owner, but that's the former Sprouts market where the Starbucks is. Really, it's not the Sprouts. It's next to it. And the gas station, as Commissioner Rao pointed out, South of that is McClellan Square, which is where 99 Ranch is going counterclockwise, I guess, is Marketplace. And then further east of that is the Main Street. Thank you. Thank you. Vice Chair.

Did you look at any of the hotels that have been approved but not moved forward?

That's right, we did. They're both on there on the screen in green. One with a dashed black line through it because they have indicated interest in being a housing element site. And then the one on De Anza, which we just put in as a potential. The Goodyear. The Goodyear site, yes.

Okay.

There's strong owner interest on the one next to Homestead Village, where the Duke of Edinburgh is. Right. That was probably the first group that reached out to us to include that property.

What about some of the other hotels that are tucked on the, I guess it's the northwest corner of Wolfen 280? I mean, those hotels don't seem to be doing very well. I mean, has anyone contacted them to see if they're interested?

We have not reached out to them, but if there's interest, if there's direction from the commission, we could certainly do that.

And then I think I heard Cupertino Hotel was considering going to some kind of long-term stays instead of nightly because of the demand. I don't know if Mr. Vidovich is interested in any conversion there.

We could certainly reach out. I think major property owners, we probably want to talk to all of them because they own multiple properties that potentially could. I know over time, I haven't heard anything recently, but I know Aloft at one time was having issues as well. So hotel conversion would certainly be an option.

And then what about the Joanne's site? Is that?

Yes, it is. It's right west of the big yellow blob for Valco.

Ah, okay. Very good. Yeah, because I noticed that, like, Joann's is gone, Cupertino Market's gone. I don't know what is happening with that site.

I think it's being replaced by another market at that site. That is my understanding. But on the issue of hotel conversions, I will point out that will reduce TOT for the city. Yeah, see, I was thinking of that as well. I just want to point that out, that that is dollars for the city.

Well, and losing retail, we lose sales tax too, but the state's not really concerned about that. And I do appreciate what you mentioned earlier that we're just trying to get to the theoretical capacity. I don't think anyone expects all this housing to ever be built, but we need to rezone enough so we stay in compliance with our housing element. Was there anything else? Oh, this was, I guess it's up to the city council. So right now we have 20% requirement for BMR and for sale it's all moderate income. I mean, has anyone ever thought, hey, maybe we could say if you do low income, maybe it can be a lower percentage?

That is also part of, going to be part of the discussion that we're gonna have when we redo our fees.

Ah, okay.

We are gonna look at that to see if there's any capacity in the financial performance to do that.

Okay, and then one resident mentioned about I think it was the McClellan project not having sufficient parking and being concerned about permit parking. So what does it take for a neighborhood to do permit parking so a new project doesn't export their parking onto adjacent streets?

It's a it's a public works process but I believe the neighborhood has to get together and fill out some sort of an application that is then processed through Public Works and Presented to Council is my understanding.

Okay. All right.

Thank you Thank you chair, so if we were to I designate De Anza College as a priority housing element site and look at putting housing on De Anza College and up zone it appropriately, would that count towards the city's RENA units?

No.

I don't think HCD would necessarily buy that unless De Anza had to plan to take 112 acres and make it housing.

Well, I mean, their parking lots are rather large, so we could designate portions of their lot as... So I guess my question is, if it's property owned by FHDA but located in the city, do we get credit for the arena units?

I think they would have to have some real show interest in doing that. I know Stanford does that with the county because Stanford has some sort of an arrangement where they... you know, swap units from the county. They want more, they want fewer. There's arrangements that they have to make.

But your question is really if they added housing that would not be like dorms, but actual housing on their campus. I think we'd get the credit for it. I think dorms are accepted out, though, because it's student housing on a temporary basis. If De Anza wanted to sell off 10 acres and develop it as housing, because it is in the city of Cupertino, I don't see why we would not get the credit for that.

Okay, so I would be supportive of taking parcels of parking lot and doing a reasonable density, not something that just dwarfs the rest of Cupertino. I mean, we do have single family homes around by Stelling and McLellan and the schools. So I think part of this exercise is the art of meeting our numbers. Because the more we deliver actually financeable and buildable projects, the sooner we'll be back doing this exercise again because developers waive their affordable units. And we have sort of learned that no good deed goes unpunished, and that's exactly what we're dealing with here.

Yeah, I wanted to follow up on that. I did just speak with an FHDA board member that had mentioned interest in housing on their properties. And so I think maybe tonight out of this conversation, there could be a motion around just expressing interest in exploring a partnership or working with FHDA to see if there is an opportunity for housing.

Yeah, through the chair, I'd go even stronger than that and just look at if we designate the site and we get the units and whether they choose to build is their prerogative, but the bigger question in my mind is what is the accounting for RENA units when the land is owned by another agency? And I would extend that question to the school district as well, if we build. I'm not saying we should, but hypothetically if some you know, very low density, maybe five to 10 unit, five to 10 DU per acre on a school site, accommodated housing for first responder and teachers, such that it didn't overwhelm the neighborhood, very, very low density. Do we get credit for that?

Yes, you would get credit for that. Pretty much anything that is an actual housing unit, you would get credit for.

Okay, so yeah, definitely want to see if there's any nuance there, and if there isn't, then we should. I would support De Anza College as a potential site because there is large parking lots at very reasonable, moderate, or whatever densities that don't barf the city skyline and neighborhoods. Along those lines, what is the accounting for the wolf road teacher housing that is county land does that go to the county or comes to us that comes to us it's a housing element site okay any units that are generated within the city the city would get credit for okay but but where they land in terms of administration that's a different conversation in that sense the county is more like the developer applicant but we we absolutely get the credit for that okay and then how about the Public land, I think it's zoned BA. So we have the PG&E yard. I believe we have some other agencies that have land in Cupertino by Homestead, I believe, right? So how would that be accounted? Do we get credit for those if we were to zone it?

you would have to change the general plan and rezone it and in that case i think certainly have owner interest because right now that does that designation doesn't allow housing at all um so it would be a case of if you wanted to do that if the property owner wanted to do that it would be a matter of rezoning changing the general plan putting in the housing element but if the housing is built on it the city would get the credit

And so it would be helpful for the next revision to show those properties in here. I don't know if the map shows it.

You can. Again, HCD may not buy it because, you know, to indicate that PG&E would actually remove their substation in order to build housing. It's an essential facility from a utility perspective. That would be a hard decision.

Yeah, again, I would not limit it to just that one site, but look at BA zone sites, particularly agency sites that are not city-owned at this point. I think there's one on Homestead, right? I don't know what that site is. Is that PG&E as well? Yes. Yes. That's next door to a housing element site.

If you look at the zoning map, the only BA sites we have are city properties, the school district, and utility sites like PG&E.

Okay.

That's it.

OK, very good. So just to recap, I think my preference would be gas stations, the hotels, and De Anza Boulevard, and De Anza College, hopefully.

Can I better understand your gas station's suggestion? Are you just saying that the gas station would go away and entirely be replaced by housing, or that it would stay and you'd have housing on one side?

Specifically, I'm willing to do an in-lieu swap of unaffordable gas for affordable housing. I would not target our cheapest gas stations. I would focus on gas stations that are prohibitively unaffordable.

Vice Chair?

How about guest stations that never open?

Right. That was what I was going to say. What the heck is happening with the 76 station on the corner of Pacifica and De Anza?

Your guess is as good as mine at this point.

Oh, I know. Mine is guess is no good.

I will try to find out more, but I haven't heard any updates on that at this point.

Yeah. Actually, speaking of that site, what about the... buildings right behind it, the Ways Fish, and there's something else, and there's the Chamber of Commerce. I mean, that might be a site that's possible.

That could very well be a site. We didn't go down that path because they were single family homes kind of along there. It's right at that mouth. But if it's the commission wants us to look at, again, we're looking for larger sites that would generate those numbers who are not looking. That's not a very large site.

Okay. Okay.

I just wanted to quickly confirm, just north of 280, since this map is up to the northwest, that is a church, Valley Church. Have they approved?

Last time they wanted to be off. We're just throwing it back on, you know, to see what the appetite is and, you know, see where the commission and council want to go.

Yeah, those were the sites that at the beginning of the presentation that came off at the last minute. There were four lots and they were actually in a lot of ways ideal because they were tennis courts, volleyball courts. There were no structures on them. and we had had owner interest early in the process. So I think it's worth asking again. They apparently changed their mind last time. Maybe it's changed back because if I remember, I think it was 372 units on four lots that we had credit for.

Okay, thank you.

Through the chair, I would just add that I would be opposed to the Valley Church or any church being zoned up, but specifically the Valley Church because they are also a recreational space. The tennis courts there are a thriving facility for sports and more importantly for students that are taught tennis at that location. So I would be opposed to taking away our ability to teach students and to maintain recreational facilities in Cupertino.

Okay, do we have any quick questions before?

I did, Chair. So the Adriana, how many units are there? And I know staff mentioned something about downzoning Adriana. What does that involve?

It's just one house now, but the max capacity, I think, was 13. And before the upzone, I want to say it was six, five or six. So it doubled, but again, we gained the potential of about five or six units.

So was staff looking for a motion to down zone that tonight or just directional guidance?

Just a study session. So no motion.

Direction. And would any future motion then require the addition of a site with the equal number of units?

No, actually we may not need that for this site.

True.

Yeah, because SB 330 requires us to have, we cannot down zone below what the levels were as of January 1st, 2018 because this was up zoned after that. We do not need to find any replacements for those units.

So to clarify, we were not designated as a housing element site?

Right, we would take it off, and that's what we would, that's currently the direction that we were.

It's in anticipation of if there were an application to be filed that this would be a contentious project, and in terms of benefit to the city and from the housing element perspective, you're talking five units out of thousands um and it is a very difficult site you can't really change is it it's the end of a cul-de-sac um and i know having looked at photos where you have uh garbage and recycling pickup day it's already a very difficult street to get in and out of so IT'S PROBABLY A LOT THAT JUST DOESN'T HAVE A LOT OF POTENTIAL, CERTAINLY FOR THE DIFFICULTY THAT IT WOULD BE TO APPROVE A PROJECT.

AND THEN MY LAST QUESTION HERE REAL QUICK. SO I'M LOOKING AT THE MAP OF DE ANZA BOULEVARD NORTH OF, I GUESS, NORTH OF STEPHENS CREEK, NORTHWEST, THE WESTERN SIDE. Large parts of the western side are not being designated as potential sites. But much of that are office properties, so would like to see that. Is there any reason it wasn't?

Most of those buildings are occupied and leased by Apple. So we didn't throw those on there because they do have long-term leases on many of those buildings.

So there's a property that is opposite the gas station that is fenced off right now. I think it is the old outback.

That is owned by the county. That, yeah, that is property that is owned by the county, and I believe that might be the subject of some sort of real estate deal that the county is working out.

And so the thought process is if a building is leased or occupied by Apple, we would not touch it, but we just did that with the Panera site, right? And with the Panera site, I guess.

Right, that is under the state law purposes, right? I mean, at this point, we're looking at sites to make the numbers. And if we want to include as many sites as possible, we could. But again, if we're at the 65 million to the acre range, we may not need more than 20 acres.

Yeah, I would definitely support the corridor on that stretch to be included, partly because we just have a precedent with the harvest properties, I think was the site. that changed use from apple to to uh to something else and partly also because this is a numbers exercise and so if the lot owner in the future wants to do something it's their prerogative but you know this is a corridor with no resistances adjacent to it and we should make it take advantage of it if we if we can

Sure, and I do want to, yeah, we can, and I do want to reiterate that HCD doesn't see this as a paper exercise. I just want to be clear about that. They do want us to find sites that would get developed.

Right, and I think it's actually a precedent we have. Harvest properties just changed from what is it, 100 something homes now, 110?

122, I think. Yeah. But again, they harvest controlled the site and wanted to develop. So that's always the trick of if you have a large employer with a lease, because we went through this in the housing element the last time, you have to show the feasibility. And now the window is 2031, which is close. So you have to show some short-term development potential. It might be tough to convince HCD of office buildings occupied by Apple that they're going to develop as housing in the short term.

So if it were leased, if the property were leased, not owned by Apple, wouldn't that be similar to the Harvest property? What is the difference?

You know, a city can actually get down to the level of requiring lease documents and things like that to indicate whether that there is a potential for it to redevelop. And they have done that to other jurisdictions in identifying sites.

Commissioner Lenskog?

Yeah, so staying on De Anza for a second, and Stevens Creek, actually, there's several single-story banks that there's a chase. I think it's a Washington, well, it's a chase now, right? It used to be Washington Mutual, or is it now Washington Mutual? It's a chase. It's Chase. Okay. That one. And there's a Wells Fargo. And they back onto office space behind them. So they would be prime for redeveloping and without affecting any single family residences. There is that... It used to be a barbecue place. Oh, the Pho, Pho Hanoi used to be Willie's Barbecue, right? Again, single story, you know, with office behind it. I mean, you know, worst comes to worst, we can keep the bank on the ground floor and, you know, put retail, I mean, residences on top. You know, we are seeing examples of, you know, like there's a big hullabaloo in San Francisco right now where the Safeway is building housing on top of their Safeways. Right. So is that something that's an opportunity for us to explore? Looking at our single story grocery stores like our Ranch 99s and our Trader Joe's and No, Trader Joe's is not on ours. But, you know.

Yeah, I mean, that is actually what Kimco was proposing, was to relocate 99 Ranch up closer to Homestead and build housing on top of it. That was their... goal, at least from what we had understood when we last talked to them. So that is absolutely possible. And if the banks that you're talking about back on to Marina Plaza, I will say there's a very small office building on that block that actually did not want to be included in the housing element last time. vociferously, we were told. But if there is interest in looking at those three bank buildings that front Stevens Creek, which are Chase, Bank of America, and California Land and Trust.

There's also Indianza. Yeah. Wells Fargo and Chase. Rodriguez.

Yeah. Yeah. And that is some of that is on here except for the the Chase building is adjacent to a building that I believe Amazon leases or owns. So just that one Chase site would probably not develop. We'd have to look at that entire block at that point or half that block at that point. But yes, we are looking at the three office buildings that were actually recently for sale on Rodriguez. And we could certainly include the Wells Fargo at the corner there.

So one of the things that I would really like us to do as an exercise is think about the concept of retail clusters. Because I think one of the reasons, and there is a lot of data behind this, that retail thrives only when it is close to other retail. So there is kind of this virtuous loop that happens. And we are seeing a lot of small businesses in our city that struggle because they're basically just spread out, right? It's like it's this sprawl of individual little retail that's just, you know, basically you have to drive there to that specific retail, and that's setting a very high bar for our small businesses to be able to succeed. So if, you know, in terms of how we're thinking about kind of our overall city strategy if we can think of where we want to create retail clusters and then we you know we set zoning standards and and policies based on that where we uh we lock in the commercial and retail use so or above it or around it more high density to make that retail more successful and basically create these clusters of retail and commercial around the city. focus our efforts around you know what how we look at what properties we up zone to try and create these clusters because I think that would set up our small businesses to succeed as well as you know help us meet our more strategic manner

Yeah, I would certainly add to your point, you know, creating a cluster. You know, we had a discussion with the change at the site, which includes Panera, you know, what happened with the coffee shop. You know, if you found areas, again, if you had an index kind of model, if you found areas where there was going to be some impact on single-family homes, they may find that having a retail area there may be something that was more acceptable to them than having a very, very tall building where what they, I mean, I think the kind of feedback we get from some of the proposals like the Oaks is that what you're bringing is traffic, you know, traffic with nothing to do. And this gives the opportunity, I would definitely say the biggest challenge, it's exactly what Commissioner Linscott said, you know, everything is so spread out, you would never walk from one place to another. And nobody can be successful because it's too hard to park. But if you put a bunch of people together, you create an environment that

you may be able to if you can solve the parking then you may be able to allow those places to thrive i had a quick follow-up question on the idea that commissioner linskog mentioned around the housing on top of the retail so the staff presentation proposed sort of splitting the zoning you know densifying residential on one side and then keeping the commercial on the other but does that possibly include for the idea of just building residential on top of commercial, or how does that get zoned for, if at all?

It's a great question, honestly. Housing law doesn't To the extent that a developer possibly wants to do that, they will do it. But if they don't, there's an incentive for it. So we can have those policies and hope that developers will want to do precisely what you're saying, have vertical integration, vertical mixed use. But it's going to be harder to enforce. Cities can't really make it a requirement unless they propose it themselves and integrate that into their project.

So just to follow up on that, Santana Road did that very successfully, right?

Right.

Voluntarily, yes. Voluntarily. So are there any lessons learned from there that we can bring over?

I will point to Luke since he was party to that development.

Well, I know initially after federal realty did it they thought they lost everything and said they'd never do it again But I know they also opened with Retail going in and no restaurants so I remember going through to see what it looked like and it was a ghost town and that Changed pretty quickly as the restaurants came online. I think the other The other issue with Santana Row is how many of them can you have within an area? And I mean, I know having grown up here, the mall expanded at the same time Santana Row replaced Town and Country Village. And as soon as that happened, that... killed valco oakridge all the other retail centers that were doing well up until that time it pulled everything away it became such a regional draw um i mean in a sense you know main street's sort of a version of that you have housing adjacent to it but There just seems to be from conversations we have had a lot less appetite to do that kind of mixed use. Even though people see Santa Ana Rose very successful, it's crowded, it's a destination. People come from counties away and stay over at the hotel.

Right, and to be clear, I'm not saying we build the next antenna row, right? We're not looking for that kind of traffic.

But a smaller version of that.

Yeah, so that's where I was kind of going also with the retail clusters, right? If you create kind of a... What's the word I want? you create that multiplier effect, right, where the density brings in more customers, the retail is clustered. Critical mass. Yeah, it's a critical mass kind of thing on a small scale, but you kind of create these clusters all around the city in a more deliberative manner, and then we focus the density around them on the main corridors. I think that would be a more strategic way to approach it than to just kind of do a scattershot, which, you know, which I understand why we're doing it right now, but it feels kind of scattershot and opportunistic and reactive versus being proactive and strategic.

So two things to that, you know, Any down zoning that the city does has to be accompanied with up zoning, which is part of the reason why it appears a low scatter shot because we're presenting it right now because this is an opportunity. So that clearly is one reason why it looks like that. The other thing that I will say, I mean, you know, in terms of maybe encouraging the retail is that you have a certain density. You know, you take away the density on one part of this site and put it all on one part, let's say. But then you might want to have some sort of an overlay that basically says if you provided this much retail, then you open up a different density bracket. that could be an idea. I'm just ad-libbing here because I haven't thought about it, but that is a general plan policy that allows you to maybe open that door if you provided XYZ. And I don't know how, but that might be a program, but you still don't have any residential designation. I mean, there's a lot of legal stuff that'll have to go around that, but that is an opportunity, maybe a possibility.

Yeah, by all means, I know we haven't thought through the details of it, but starting to think in a more proactive and strategic manner I think would be beneficial to the city as a whole, so just something to think about.

Great, so we have been going for two hours now, so I'm going to briefly adjourn for a five-minute break, and then we'll return. Thank you.

I'm glad you know all the locations of all the sites. No, I'm glad I don't. No, but it's good. I couldn't tell you which banks behind which banks, but that's...

But this is... Oh, jeez.

Thank you. Thank you.

May everyone please return. Thank you. All right, thank you very much. We will now resume the Planning Commission meeting and go back to more questions from the Commission. Commissioner Rao.

Thank you, Chair. So I noticed staff had the Villages Prometheus on this as a potential site. I would like to offer up the McLellan Terrace at a low density as a potential site. The reason being that's a 1960s vintage property. Several reports of leaks from current occupants and recent tenants that left. So lots of problems with that site, as I've heard. So there's potential for a 1960s property to hit end of life at some point shortly. So again, I would keep it at the lowest density possible. I think it's 17 DU per acre right now as currently built, and I would try to keep it at 5 to 20 or whatever is the minimal we can do. We want to be very sensitive to McClellan Road, but if we can keep it as low-rise housing that is basically rebuilding to a more modern product, that's an option to think about.

Can you hear me? Yeah, there we go. The McClellan Terrace property that was recently purchased by the Foothill De Anza District, that already allows densities of up to 20 dwelling units to the acre. I'm not sure if the commission would be interested in upzoning that even further.

No, that wasn't the proposal. The proposal was to just put it as a PHS or a potential PHS or whatever the color code in the map.

So then we would only get credit for the difference of what they could put on there. We won't get credit for all the units on there.

Oh, I see. So then the villages that are shown here... Oh, you're saying no recommendation, okay.

Yeah, we have no recommendation on that. That is the recreational facility for the apartment complex. It has, I believe, two tennis courts, their sports center, and community hall, et cetera, et cetera. And there was a verbal conversation in which the Prometheus developers were interested in putting units on it, and so they wanted to be up-zoned for that particular site by removing those amenities.

Is there a way we could show some of these sites as potential housing unit sites with the incentive for ADUs to add units? I know there's a fair amount of space on McClellan Terrace.

Not take credit for ADUs as a priority housing site. That is a separate category that's already accounted for.

Okay, thank you.

I had one follow-up question from the public comments. What is the status of the McClellan townhome project?

It's in review.

And would there be an opportunity to potentially encourage the developer to change their zoning to a lower zoning, understanding that their SB 330 application was originally submitted, but just to see if there's interest?

There could be a courtesy conversation, and we've had that conversation with them in the past. There hasn't been interest.

Okay, thank you. Vice Chair.

Oh, maybe it's on the map. 10275 De Anza, it's an empty building that's been for lease for a long time. Somebody wanted to buy it and they wouldn't sell.

That's actually the gentleman who just spoke this evening. They're actually, Alpha X is going to be occupying that building. And that is on the map, just so you know. It's the northwest corner of Lazanillo and De Anza on the map.

Oh, so they're leasing that building? Correct. I see, okay. Oh, well.

Through the chair, I had a question about some of these locations that border San Jose. We noticed that San Jose tries to port fairly high density along those lines. Is there anything on Homestead Road that is basically facing Sunnyvale? How could we leverage our gateway locations in the city?

So I believe the site that we have at Homestead and Stelling is already 85 dwellings to the acre. If there is interest in upzoning that further, we do not have a zoning category for over 85 dwellings to the acre, we would have to create one. But that is something that, you know, if there's interest, we could look at. We're also considering...

Sorry, if I may pause, which site were you referring to?

Yes. You said Homestead and Stelling. If video could share the screen again.

The eastern side.

It's the north, southeastern corner of Homestead and Stelling.

Bowling Alley.

Yes. Okay. And then there are the sites up by Cupertino Village. Again, there are already portions of the site are up zoned to allow the density that they had requested with the last housing element update. If the Commission wishes to see more density across the whole site, I'm not sure what their plans are for it. We would have to talk to them. Their interest was in actually upzoning only the hotel site. So that is on the shown in green.

Yeah, I think my general feedback and preference would be if we find suitable locations that are as close to the border with other cities, let's explore those, especially on major corridors like Homestead, Bollinger. Yep. The answer.

Yep.

Church, wow. I'm a man of faith, so I do not want to.

What about Homestead and Blaney, where Oakmont and Gochi, that's not on the map as a site.

It is not on the map as a site right now, but if that is where Commission wishes to see whether there's interest in developing that.

I would hate to lose that retail, it's very popular, but.

That was our thought as well. We didn't add it on this map, but if the commission wishes to see it go, then we can add it.

Yeah, I mean across the street from there is Sunnyvale. I know there used to be a high school there. They tore that down and built single family homes. So there is some precedent for converting existing buildings to more housing.

Do we have any other questions? Commissioner Rao.

The Public Works Service Yard, do we think that's one of the sites that Director Mosley isn't here tonight? Could we make that a mixed use, modernized facility where we have housing for staff? I'd love to support 100% affordable housing for our ground crew alongside with the Public Works Service Yard.

That's an interesting idea.

I'll make a motion to include that if you'd like.

We may need to demonstrate to HCD that that's in the CIP and budgeted, but we could see.

I'll just throw it out there. It's an option. It doesn't impact anybody. It's right by the freeway. It's a good location. It's a single floor right now. It could go higher. things we could do.

So where would you move the service yard? Sunnyville or what?

Well, I was thinking high rise mixed use where we could put some housing on top of that and find ways to use that lot.

They need land for the trucks and all. I can't see that changing.

I'd probably assign some numbers and if it doesn't develop, we at least got the numbers.

Do we have any other questions from the Commission? Okay, then I think it would be helpful. City Attorney, can I confirm we can make motions for this just for recommendations?

Hey, Chair, I just understood from the Planning Manager Pugh that the item's coming back here to the Planning Commission again. So they've taken copious notes. I think that might be adequate. I mean, otherwise, if it's going to the Council, then perhaps you can make a recommendation to them, but it's not going to the Council.

Okay, then if... Okay, then we'll move on to comments then. And if anyone feels strongly about something, they can make a motion. But otherwise, comments are probably sufficient.

So you'll bring us back like a list of sites based on everything we talked about today with recommended densities?

Or what's the next step? I think we do want to start focusing on particular sites and if we start owner interest as well. I think one of the challenges having gone through this before is not to have meetings where the number of sites grows because it did happen to some extent four years ago and I think in this case we're not the focus is, unless I'm hearing differently, I don't think people want to over add. I think we're trying to get the housing element in compliance. So we've taken notes on what we've heard, but I think to try to focus that, because even what we've shown here is far more sites than we even have in the housing element.

But it's not going to be sending a letter to someone. I think that was an issue before. A letter was sent. There was no response, so it was just site was, well, forget it. I mean, you really have to engage with these landowners directly if you can even find out who owns it.

I agree, and that's the difficulty in some. People who are motivated hear about it and contact you, and sometimes some of the landowners are difficult to get a hold of. BUT I ALSO THINK IF THERE ARE SOME SITES IN PARTICULAR LIKE WE HAD TALKED, THE TWO HOTELS YOU HAD BROUGHT UP, WE KNOW THOSE PROJECTS ARE NOT GOING FORWARD ANYMORE. WE'VE BEEN TOLD THE DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENTS AND THOSE HAVE LAPSED SO THOSE WOULD BE GOOD CANDIDATES TO BE ON THE LIST IN MY MIND BECAUSE WE KNOW THERE HAD BEEN CONCERN ABOUT LOSS OF TOT BUT THOSE HOTELS AREN'T GOING TO GET BUILT. Yes, we will definitely be coming back with sites and I think trying to focus as much as we can on the sites that make the most sense. also listening to what you said today to look at those and i think we also want to discuss with our consultant who's got a lot more experience dealing with hcd as to how viable the sites are going to be but i think i think the goal is to try to focus the discussion like you said we could be talking about 10 to 20 acres only in order to make this work. Again, if we're talking about much lower densities, the acreage is gonna go up and the number of sites is gonna go up. And in my view, that also doesn't address the problem because we're not gonna capture low-income units at low density.

And the issue might be in the event that those sites do develop at those really low densities, now we've lost those sites because the seventh cycle is looming upon us.

Yeah. So if I can just comment. Yeah, I mean, I would just encourage you to do more of a top-down rather than a bottom-up and be a little bit more strategic about some level of city planning, like where do we want to take our city versus, you know, right now I think we're a little bit into what's available, right? But just kind of trying to think about where do we want... what do we want our city to look like and what is our goal at the end of the day and just you know like we like i was talking about the retail clusters right like we we want to activate our small businesses how do we help them how do we use this exercise to help our small businesses to to concentrate some of that density so just do a little bit more strategic exercise and and hopefully you know if if we are creating opportunities like that, it might get more homeowners, I mean, property owners excited about participating versus right now, there's not a lot of incentive for them, right? I mean, everybody's making a decision on their own, but there's no, like you were saying, like critical mass.

Yeah.

But if we create opportunity for critical mass, that might be a way to get more property owners to get off the fence and say, this sounds like something cool that I want to get involved in. So just, you know, I would encourage you to do more of a top down.

If I may, I mean, you raise a very good point, right? I mean, right now, this is here's what's available, right? So. One of the things that would be helpful for us to know from the commission, whether there's interest in maybe looking at densifying around retail centers to be able to support that retail that exists, for example, whether that's around Main Street, whether that's around Crossroads, whether that's around McClellan Square. So maybe say, look at sites around these particular retail developments, and look to see whether those can be densified first. That's exactly right.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

And if that's the direction rather than, you know, look here, you know, and this site's not there, that's, you know, now we're adding to the list, like Luke says. But if the direction given is, you know, here are the retail sites that, you know, are genuinely... Loved by the community and you know, how can we support that we can support that by densifying the uses around it Then that's something that if the Commission tells us to do we can present a list of sites with that knowledge and that thought

So I wanted to kind of share some... It's okay. Oh, sorry.

It's okay.

Okay. I'll be quick. So I wanted to share, I had done some looking at the very comprehensive site list that you had put together, and I had some thoughts. Let me just bring this to the slideshow. So I highlighted in green the sites that I kind of more prefer to up zone and I kind of boxed in reds the ones that I would be hesitant about. And I think I thought about it similar to Commissioner Fung in a matrix of how you would score these sites. I think some of these are, the ones in green are not close to or not immediately adjacent to any single family homes, and they're also in central thoroughfares. Fully caveating that not all of these potential housing sites have even agreed to upzone to be residential, but if they did, these I think are the sites that would be least controversial and you could potentially put more density on and no one would be objecting. um because you know i think i i took the staff report to heart in the sense that if we are going to up zone a few properties higher then it can avoid us from having to just sprawl the up zoning all over the city so if i was to pick a few concentrated sites it would be sites like this and then in red i boxed these are sites that are trickier because they actually do serve the community So the one that I pointed an arrow at that's a dental, this is a complex that has a number of dental sites, and my understanding of the reason why they have, they are located there, because my dentist is there, so we've asked them, is that their equipment is there, and that's why they all prefer to be there, and so to change that zoning, I think you would, It's hard to just shift that zoning around and say we would have dental on one side and residential on the other. I think they're fixed in the places that they're located. Potentially, you could build on top of them, but I'm not sure that you could just move them. And then same with the most southern cluster of potential housing sites right next to Bollinger. I did look online and that is a pretty highly utilized retail site right now. I saw very low vacancies. I think I saw one vacancy total actually for both of those highlighted in red. So I think these sites I would be a little more hesitant to turn into housing because they seem to be in demand from businesses and the community. And then going along Stevens Creek, the other ones I put in red, I'm actually not sure. I think I may welcome thoughts from the commission, but the St. Joseph's Square, that one does have a number of new businesses that just moved in, and I think it'd be a little bit unfortunate to to just uproot them. So whatever, if it did become a housing site, it would certainly need to be one that found a way to protect that retail. And then next to Valco, you have Chuck E. Cheese, which is basically the only entertainment, one of the few entertainment places in the entire city that Cupertino has. Not saying no to this type of site, but if there was some retail upzoning, ideally there would be a way to protect that retail. And with that, I see Commissioner Rao has some comments.

Through the chair, could you clarify or zoom in so we can understand? Where does St. Joseph's Square, or where is it?

Sorry, that's the one that my mouse is hovering over right now. So St. Joseph's Church is kind of at the corner, not exactly, of Stevens Creek and De Anza, and then I think it owns a bunch of that land, or I'm not sure actually. It's just labeled St. Joseph's Square on the map. It's the one in...

Sorry, for some reason when I zoom it, I lose it on the...

It's where the arrow was pointing to.

I understand. What streets are those? I can't see any streets.

That would be Steve...

It's like Lee's Sandwiches, right?

That has the Lee's Sandwiches and some hair salon there as well.

Right, and that's also owned by Vidovich, I believe.

Always good.

And was the chair proposing to encourage the site as a housing element?

No, everything that I boxed in red, I have hesitation about.

I see, but the site currently is low density, single floor. Is there a reason we wouldn't do mixed use retail to retain the retail and intensify it?

You could. I think that's just not something that you can mandate though, so it's hard. Once you change the zoning, you could get anything.

Yes, that's certainly true. There's a bigger question of can we protect retail, I guess.

So just to kind of, so I think this is perfectly, I mean, this is like the kind of input that I think is very valuable as you're thinking about it. So can we ask you guys to come back to us with some proposed retail clusters based on all these considerations like proximity to single family homes or specialized equipment locations or things like that? Could that be a good next step?

I think that's fair. I mean, in terms of trying to create an index, I'm not sure, you know, what that index would necessarily indicate because, like Luke said, almost every site backs onto. If you have a site in Stevens Creek or De Anza, almost every one of them backs onto a residential site. except in the North De Anza areas. With that said, and then putting on the hat that you were talking about, the planning hat of let's create these five-minute, 10-minute walking distance and see what sites around retail is available to densify. I think if we just use the five that are on Stevens Creek and look at Cupertino Village and Homestead Square, I think we could meet this exercise of upzoning. I don't think we need to go beyond that. If that's where the commission wants to head, we can look at that and see what we come up with.

Maybe even as a possibility rather than So with all the discussion of Santana Row, I would actually say that what you really wanna do is figure out how do I ignite a downtown Campbell kind of thing. You may not be able to drag a luxury clothing designer, will not be incentivized to come here, but a restaurant will. And that's the kind of thing that I think people would like to see. So maybe the other way to look at it is rather than try to figure out where that would be, I think actually the comment of doing something on Stevens Creek that makes that advantageous close to Main Street is actually a great example. I think the place where Lee's is actually would probably be one of those as well. I don't know whether there's any interest in doing that, but I think perhaps trying to score some of the places that you were thinking about so that we can have an illustration of how those sorts of indexes work. Because I think that if you slant it pretty hard, the kinds of things you would do at Marina, so again, obviously Marina's high potential, there's interest in redeveloping there, there's low impact, low neighborhood impact, and that would be true in Homestead Square as well. So those kinds of things, those guys are gonna get an extremely high score, I think an extremely high score, if the right kinds of opportunities could be found there.

We can certainly rank the site. We can, like I said, look at potentially, again, this is all, I haven't even talked to Luke or anyone about this, but using, I don't know, let's use Marketplace as an example, right, and kind of maybe looking at the sites that are around it and rank them based on what, we think would be appropriate to up zone potentially and do the same exercise for these five or six or seven retail centers.

I think people can kind of understand even without having a kind of objective index. People can kind of understand when you talk about four or five places that everybody knows. But the problem is that by the time this actually turns into the thing people are voting on, there are 30 or 40 sites there. And when you're 20 sites down, it's very hard to tell. People don't know. Is there high neighborhood impact? Is there suburban neighborhood impact if you're completely surrounded by single-family homes? I think that if you have a number that just kind of captures, hey, this is a 25 versus there are choices here that are 90. So that will really help guide people.

Can I just clarify? We're not talking about upzoning the major commercial centers themselves, right? We're talking about sites around them.

Sorry, but we could potentially, if it's possible, do like what we were talking about where you preserve the retail on the ground floor and build above it. So, I mean, I think that's a possibility if the property owner is open to that. So we're not looking to get rid of the commercial. We're trying to preserve it and make it more successful, really. So then you would look around it to look at how can we densify potential existing housing element sites or potential housing element sites to create these kind of clusters. And, you know, actually, this is a good exercise because like we keep running into issues like, you know, with Panera where we're disenfranchising these small retail places, but we're not setting them up to succeed. We're basically just letting them sink or swim on their own and we don't have. a home to propose to them where they can go and potentially be successful. So I feel like if we can create these kind of retail clusters, we can more easily, when we're displacing a small restaurant or retail somewhere else, we can make a stronger argument that we will keep you in the city and we will help you succeed.

Thank you. So I would say that the site that made the most sense for that to me was the proposal in the staff report for Cupertino Village, where there already was housing around it. The other sites, like Marketplace, for example, I just don't think that there's space to put any more housing there without significantly changing the property and the parking that's available to it. But Cupertino Village, absolutely, I think that makes sense.

So that's the exercise.

Right. Commissioner Rao.

yes so uh thank you chair i think it's important to to recognize that while the desire of all of us is to preserve retail the state laws and the current zoning do not necessarily allow us to enforce it and so while the intent is definitely acknowledged and agreed to in practice what could end up happening with these kinds of changes is the site becomes 100 percent residential and we cannot safeguard retail as we have just seen with westport and so on and so what i would actually ask us to think about is should we focus on low density sites on De Anza Boulevard that are offices first, and really target the office sites where the loss of office is actually beneficial to arena calculations over time, hopefully, but also something that we don't really need to protect as much as retail so if i had to limit this to the minimum number of sites and not create a very large excise i would rather focus and prioritize non-retail sites i think the chair was saying the same thing maybe just because we do not have the ability to protect retail that's it's more that than anything else and so i'd like to see if we can just focus on offices gas stations Anything that's low density commercial focusing on De Anza, Stevens Creek, and then the Homestead and other gateway corridors. Thank you.

Vice Chair.

No, I just want to point out that over the years, whenever I talk to developers and they tried to do mixed use, I said, well, why are you doing this mixed use here? And they go, we don't want to, but we're being forced to. And then they can't rent out the retail. And it stays empty for years and years or recycles like over at Trevigna. It's just one after another. And at City Center, there's been a meat cheese and then like six different restaurants and the bakery's gone. So it almost has to be organic. You can't really just force this kind of thing. And I remember at the veranda, Originally, it was going to be 11... extremely low income and retail on the bottom it was like and we were like why are you doing retail right here when we desperately need more extremely low income housing and the developer goes well we didn't want to do the retail but you know the city said we had to we would love not to and the city council at the time when i was on it we said you know forget the retail build eight more vli units or eli units and they did and i think that was a good decision And I just don't see us forcing retail into places where the developer just has zero interest in doing it. Myself and Commissioner Lindskog, I guess, you know, we live in a place where you can walk to tons of, I can walk to five grocery stores. Other people on the commission, they can walk to no grocery stores, or they used to be able to, but the grocery store is gone, like Commissioner Rao, that grocery store was torn down. And so I don't know, I mean, the cluster sounds great, I just don't know how we force a developer to be interested in that.

Thank you. Any other comments from Commission? Yes, Commissioner Rao.

I want to make sure staff still has clarity on what you're going to come back with because you could end up with conflicting feedback that kind of spreads you in different directions. You could end up with different directions that then lead to too many sites, which is not the intent. And so we just want to do the bare minimum to meet the numbers and recognize that we have opportunities coming up very soon for the 2031 housing element, the next housing element cycle, which I think we should start as early as next year.

So that's a good question. I guess we don't want to use up too many sites, right? Because we want to save them for the next cycle. We don't want to do too much here. Again, it's an exercise to get not necessarily the housing, but just to stay in compliance. So we want to be really, really, really careful here to do it right.

Right, and I think as a first exercise, we wanna see what existing sites can we up zone and what can we gain from it. We have the owner interest from Kimco. Am I to guess that there is no interest in looking at the Prometheus site as a potential site that eliminates the residential amenities at the apartment?

So does Prometheus, they're willing to give up those amenities in order to put even more housing in there?

Right, they don't, I mean, it's maintenance for them. They'd rather get rent from it.

Right, but doesn't the presence of those amenities help them charge more rent? I don't know.

Again, this came from them, so it's just to ask that question, right?

So will it be very low income?

It'll be no, I mean, it'll be, yes. I mean, for the new units that they develop, it'll be 15% lower income, but between BLI and LI. Per our city's BMR program.

Yeah, I don't know. I have mixed feelings about that.

Commissioner Rao.

Thank you, Chair. I want to echo Vice Chair Scharf's comments. I think we need to be careful about, because an owner showed interest, that we will proceed with it. This is what led us to the Linda Vista property, the Avalanche property, then the McLellan property, and some of these other builders' remedies, I guess, that we ended up with. I don't want to be influenced by what a greedy lot owner wants to do. I want us to focus on How do we convert, in a very deliberate manner, Class C office properties into housing element sites? That's really where there's no regrets in losing Class C office properties. So let's focus on De Anza Boulevard, Stevens Creek, Homestead, office properties, gas stations. That's my ask. And I want to hear back from staff. If you're getting conflicting guidance, we can do a motion if you need that. But I don't want us to albeit being well intentioned i don't want us to go after sites where there is interest from owners where the where the development may actually be causing more neighborhood turn and the villages is actually one of those few remaining affordable housing sites we have lost mcclellan terrace i know a lot of people that rented the villages i go there very regularly because i get invited for parties on weekends and i know a lot of families school families young families that choose to live there because that is one of the few affordable places. And I know very well how these projects play out. When they invest, they need to recoup that, and it means rents go up. And so development isn't always beneficial to the overall site. It just gentrifies into a more expensive site. So I'd encourage us to really take those offices and see what we can do with it and put the numbers in.

Yeah, I think generally, I think I've heard two main things. One is being more proactive, focusing on the commercial cluster concept and going and looking at that, keeping those and trying to strengthen them through adding housing in close proximity. So that's one thing that's just more proactive, more of a true planning exercise. Whereas I think the other thing that you, Commissioner, I've also focused on is properties that really aren't adding a lot of value aren't I guess for lack of a better way to put it as big a loss to the community Class C offices not retail but offices that are kind of seeing the end of their life gas stations things that would be less missed in a way so those have been I think the two biggest points of discussion which are coming at it differently and I think maybe we can just combine them both I mean, they're, I don't know, they're necessarily, it's a different approach. They're not necessarily at odds with each other. I think, again, one is kind of planning around what you have and the other is sort of cleaning up what you won't miss.

Right, certainly, but I'm not sure I... worldview the combining of both is really being protective of the villages or the retail so i uh i want to see how we can protect affordable housing and class c multi-families the last bastion of affordable housing other than edu's right michael and terrace the villages and have the adus we can't plan for we get credit for it but yeah right so if we may protect by not designating them as a housing element site, indirectly we protect affordable rentals for our community.

If I may also state this, that up-zoning the office buildings, yes, to the extent that it makes sense, that's certainly one strategy, but that doesn't necessarily retain the retail that is larger in the sense that a developer at any time could walk in right now and propose townhomes across all of Marketplace, for example, or the entire Target site. So that reality does exist today. So from the council's work program, which is something that the council is looking to see whether there are ways to retain that retail, specifically the larger retail that brings in copious amounts of sales tax to the city, I don't know that that strategy necessarily helps with that.

And that's true. While we cannot prevent any landowner from moving forward with a project proposal on a site where they have the zoning, I think designating a housing element site has certain benefits. We just saw Marina interested in being designated a housing element site. Why would they be interested in that? Because it helps with financing, perhaps. And so I just want to be cognizant that when you do provide that city recognition of that site, financing and investor fundraising is a lot easier. And so we want to try and not encourage that and instead target the offices and target non-retail sites and non-impactful sites to our existing housing inventory. Thank you.

yes um i have also thought extensively about this question of do we want to explicitly protect you know the marketplaces and the crossroads of the world and i think after i reflected on it i have some concern that explicitly moving to change that zoning may do more harm than good because you know we then have to approach the landowner and they may freak out and decide they want to do something entirely different and i think right now at least from what i see with marketplace and crossroads those major areas they they're doing very well um i i don't see them changing anytime soon and i think you know the way that we can protect them as a city is actually through economic development initiatives that help those businesses succeed and the more successful they are i think the more safe that they'll be in not turning and wanting to turn into housing anytime soon. So yeah, my preference would not be to try to mess with something that's working well. Any other comments?

I guess I have one other comment. You had mentioned in passing about the mass mailing. I would definitely say that it's definitely, although it may not be effective to raise general interest in the process. It probably is an important part of just having a matter of record that it happened. But I would encourage you to, when you bring back the recommendations, hopefully there will be some around how to communicate this. I think there's been a lot of discussion certainly across this version of the Planning Commission about things that probably could have worked better. Part of that is I think it's the immensity of things when things are happening on the housing element level. What you regularly hear is, I didn't know this was happening, and the reason they didn't know it was happening is because there were 40 places being discussed, and there's not a sense of, of what does that mean? So I can't wave your magic wand and change that, but then again, I do think things like having camping things like relative scoring so that people can kind of understand this versus that might help communicate that a little bit more rather than being more specific than saying, hey, what we realize this has, this development on Stevens Creek had some exposure to, is visible to single family homes. Hopefully there can be a model here that kind of measures, I think, I think it's unavoidable for this to be successful, that you would probably be increasing density for buildings on Stevens Creek. That's going to have that impact. But for people to understand, you know, that there was consideration of that impact and kind of see where they stand. Now, some people, of course, at the end of the day, you live somewhere and you care about that. So if you say, if I build up at Marina, there's zero neighborhood, residential, neighborhood impact. Of course, you're going to say, why not build there? Maybe that's a reasonable question to ask. I think for somebody who lives, who backs up on Stevens Creek, when their measure is sort of 20% versus... versus McClellan, where it's probably an extremely low number in terms of how you would value that in terms of the impact on the community, on the neighborhood immediately surrounding. I think people can kind of understand that, understand that better than the way we've been able to communicate it today. A lot of that is really how do you figure out how to do this in fewer actions rather than more. Maybe that is a little counter to what, because I think, I actually agree with a number of the comments here, which were really, you're not trying to solve, you have a big problem to solve, but you might not want to solve it by trying to solve it all in three places. So that does say, needs to look at more places, but then that really does create that, the need to make it clear that this was a thoughtful decision to the people who are impacted?

Yeah, I wanted to go off of that point, and we had a number of residents in here this evening that were very upset about their parcel, and I understand where that is in the process, but since we are currently identifying many more sites, and this, McClellan parcel is at most going to yield three or four units of affordable housing. My request would be that you do ask the applicant and maybe continue to keep it on your radar. If they ever change their mind and have an interest in down zoning, that that be made known to them that it is very much on the table. And I'd like to actually just briefly straw poll this commission. Does anyone disagree with that? Thank you, because I think that is a evacuation-constrained area, and we have seen multiple times now on the Planning Commission that when the community, you see the community going in a certain direction on a property, you know where it's gonna end up on the public hearing, you know there's gonna be a lot of dissatisfaction, and to the extent that we can preempt that, it would be really nice. Commissioner Rao.

Through the chair, if you can repeat the straw poll you caught me at the moment of dozing off, I guess.

The straw poll was just would anyone disagree with having staff make clear to the McClellan applicant that the option, and there's an option and a desire to downzone that property because we are in the process of upzoning many other areas, and that one will yield at most three to four affordable units. So, and I did not get any objection on that, so.

Yes, agreed. On... I know I made my closing comments, but I realized I did not make a comment on the Alpha X project. I wasn't entirely clear on what the member of the public that spoke was asking for, but I would ask us to be very cognizant of the fire evacuation bottleneck in the area, coupled with the very high fire hazard severity zone. I really would like to avoid any sort of density that further impacts exiting the Monta Vista neighborhood and the Creston neighborhood and so on, Inspiration Heights and so on. Thank you.

Thank you. Any further comments from the commission? Okay. I think, staff, you have a lot of feedback to deal with. Do you have any questions for us before we adjourn?

No. Kind of what I figured. That's why we wanted to just have a meeting that was more open and not burn our consultants time sitting through just because there's a lot to take on we know how this started four years ago even though this is a small version of it um i think the comments were good and the retail cluster is probably going to be coming back before you in some form i'd say by fall since that is a council item so it's impossible to not have these dovetail and if you're going to do something affecting retail zoning this is the only time to do it so

All right, so with that, we will conclude the study session, and are there any staff or commission reports?

Go ahead. I have a commission report afterwards.

To the chair, if you may, let staff go first, and then we can go that way. We can give ourselves some time.

Actually, I was going to say we don't have any reports, so that's an easy one, and if something comes to my mind as you guys speak, I will let you know.

Through the chair, are we allowed to ask a question on that, on the staff report?

There was no staff report. There was none. I know.

I will make my statement anyway. Is there a timeline for ODS to come back to this body?

At this point, we don't know because we are tackling this and the health and safety element as time-sensitive projects.

Okay, Vice Chair.

Oh, okay. So I'm assigned to attend the Housing Commission meetings. So this is from May 28th, 2026. First agenda was CDBG discussion. The second was a study session to meet the affordable housing requirement, which we discussed here today. And I would like to compliment Luke. He did an excellent job educating the housing commissioners on the realities of RHNA SB 330, SB 423, Valco, explaining why the developers were not interested in building at higher densities. So the housing commissioners, I guess they're pretty new, but there's this misconception out there that every developer is chomping at the bit to build as high a density as possible and it needed to be explained that no, that actually is not the case. Everybody really wants to build townhouses at this time. That's the most profitable. So I appreciate that that got explained to the housing commissioners because it's not just them, it's a general misconception, I think, out in the general public that, oh, everybody wants to build 200 units per acre, and that is not the case. Luke also explained about how all these projects were approved prior to our housing element being certified, which is how we went to the, twenty or so units per acre when it was at a minimum zoning of fifty. One commissioner wondered how Valco was able to go below the fifteen percent BMR requirement and I believe that's because density the fifteen percent is before density bonus so once you add density bonus you don't get fifteen percent of the density bonus as well so it actually goes pretty far down. He also explained about the 57%, how we could not just say, okay, all new projects need 57% BMR. One commissioner inquired about housing on closed school sites, but that is not something the city controls. That's up to CUSD and FUHSD. In the past, they have built housing on closed school sites, but we have no control to force that. And I have to say, the highlight of the meeting for me personally was one commissioner mentioned, oh, I didn't realize that affordable housing was not a goal of the YIMBY movement, which I think we've all known that for many years. But apparently there's another misconception is that affordable they really wanna build affordable housing when they don't. They wanna build market rate housing and that's how that whole movement was formed originally was to promote real estate investors, developers to make more money. So I was thrilled that somebody finally realized that because they had been misled for many years. And that's my report.

Thank you, Vice Chair, for the report. Very comprehensive overview of the housing commission. Sorry, Commissioner Rao.

Thank you, Chair. As a commission report or a commissioner report on a topic that did come to this party, I want to say that I have met with several pickleball players this morning. I met with a friend that's a 25-year tennis friend who is now aged out of tennis and playing pickleball. And so I just want to reiterate for members of the public that may watch this video that I have multi-decade old tennis friends that are all pickleball players as they age and I recognize the community is an aging community and I think we need to find a balance and it isn't this or that I I was I WAS CERTAINLY APPRECIATIVE OF THE COUNCIL'S DECISION ON PICKLE BALL BUT I DO THINK THE COMMUNITY IS COMING BACK TO US ON THIS TOPIC AND SO I WANT TO CALL OUT THAT THERE'S A LOT OF FEEDBACK AND WE NEED TO FIND WAYS TO BALANCE THE NEEDS AND MAYBE THERE ARE SOME OPTIONS THERE. SO AS WE GO INTO FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS I'D LIKE TO BRING THIS UP AGAIN.

Okay. And now we start with another report.

I think a number of us attended the groundbreaking for the Summerhill project, which was interesting. It was amazing how fast Staples is not there. I think they must have started right after we left.

Commissioner Rao.

On future agenda items, I'd like to propose a future agenda item in the form of a subcommittee to recommend data center as a dedicated zoning in Cupertino. It has come to my attention that we have several light industrial zone sites in Cupertino. Those would be eligible for data centers today. Some of those sites are actually Tantau, north of Stevens Creek, Imperial Avenue in the Monta Vista Village, Monta Vista neighborhood, areas of Stevens Creek, west of De Anza Boulevard, So we have a number of potential exposures where either an operator in the data center space or some of our largest businesses here may come in and have the ability to proceed because of the light industrial zoning. So I'd like to propose a future agenda item for a subcommittee to look into the recommendation on a dedicated zoning for data centers so we may treat that differently from light industrial. Do I have a second? Do we not want to protect our Monta Vista neighborhood from being converted from automotive small businesses to data centers that can happen with the existing zoning?

I'll second it.

Thank you, Commissioner Lindskog. Appreciate the partnership here.

So do we need a subcommittee on this, or should it just be an agenda item?

I propose a subcommittee because that's the $0 route, because anything else requires funding and goes into a multi-year process. nothing happens on it with CWP. So at least your commissioners may do something.

Okay. Maybe this is an agenda item for City Council, but Pew mentioned that there is some discussion about modifying the way the BMR percentages are done based on the income level. So is that something for Planning Commission to discuss or does that go straight to City Council?

When we have a report from our consultant, my understanding is I think the Planning Commission is involved. I need to look at what happened the last time that the BMR manual was updated. I believe the Planning Commission did play a role in it, but I need to go back and confirm.

Okay, then I won't propose that at this time.

And, sorry, I'd like to add one more future agenda item on the... potential for bringing Pickleball back to this body for a balanced set of recommendations. I'm sure there's ways that we can do better for the community. There's a balancing of needs. People want the social aspect, and we can truly control noise with other recommendations besides panels. If this body puts its mind to it, I'm sure we can find ways to have our cake and eat it too. or have our paddle in play as well.

Haven't we already discussed pickleball extensively here?

Our last attempt did not make progress with council, so there is always hope to have a different approach this time around that is less expensive but still retains the support in the city in a balanced way. I WAS CHECKING IF I HAD A SECOND ON THE PICKLE BALL FUTURE AGENDA ITEM.

I'LL SECOND IT FOR A FUTURE FUTURE ITEM. I THINK THE ITEM IS ALREADY MAKING PROGRESS UNDER THE EITHER PUBLIC WORKS OR CITY DEPARTMENT. BUT, YOU KNOW, IF IN THE FUTURE WE MAY WANT TO REOPEN THIS TOPIC, I WOULD SECOND THAT.

AND JUST TO CLARIFY THIS AGENDA ITEM AND THE DISTINCTION, THE CURRENT AGENDA ITEM THAT IS MAKING PROGRESS IS DIRECTED TOWARDS THE STUDY. on noise. This would be other recommendations from this body on how to preserve the sport in a way that is more noise friendly to the neighborhood. So looking for other recommendations in this agenda item. Thank you.

Commissioner Linscott, I thought I heard you. Did you have something to add or no? Okay. All right. Does anyone else have any agenda items to add? Okay. Then we will adjourn the meeting. Thank you.