What about housing?

Sunday's Mercury News published a thoughtful and thought-provoking article. The author, John Conover, writes about the continuing and desperate need for more affordable housing in the Silicon Valley. No surprise there. What is of interest is that he writes from a business perspective -- he's a bank CEO. His argument is that more affordable housing is just plain good business:

In a global economy, business must be able to attract and retain top talent to be competitive. Yet with the median home costing $794,000 in Santa Clara County and $840,000 in San Mateo County, many middle-class workers are priced out of our market. Or they make a grueling commute for a few years, and then find jobs closer to where they can afford to live. Call it the "revolving door" of hiring. We've seen the quality of life in our communities erode as teachers, firefighters, police officers, and even our own adult children move away.

Given this obvious need, perhaps housing would be a better use of the land that many on our beloved council want to donate to the indigent York family. Talking just pure dollars and cents, would that benefit the city more than a massive multi-million dollar gift to a private corporation?

Increasingly, various communities have latched onto the idea of "smart growth," which according to Smart Growth Online "has a greater mix of housing, commercial and retail uses" than the sprawl that typifies much of the development of the past half century. By comparison, smart growth development is less costly to maintain, especially when the costs incurred by environmental and social problems are also considered. Some smart growth developments take the form of "infill" development, using underutilized land already serviced by many city services and thereby maximizing the investment of those services.

What would be the long and short term benefits of providing housing in an area surrounded by shopping, entertainment, employment and mass transit? I would think that such benefits could be quantified, especially in relation to our strapped city budget. I'd hope that when the city staff comes out with their recommendations on this plan, that housing was at least considered as an alternative.

Doing City Council's homework

Since City Council is not doing much comparison shopping, everyone should help them out by examining other alternatives.

On June 1, Stadium Facts highlighted a successful development that was built entirely with private financing, Santana Row.

On June 5, the KMA report pointed out that a hypothetical Class A office project can generate up to 5 times the fiscal benefits, with zero public subsidy.

Here's another possibility.

Have you ever wondered where all the 1's and 0's of the Internet hang out? Those YouTube videos, the latest movie trailers, the satellite maps at Google Earth, your vacation pictures on Flickr -- they all add up to a lot more 1's and 0's than simple emails. All this data is driving up the need for more and more data centers to store the bits and bytes, and to handle the traffic when grandma wants to see the one that got away in Idaho.

According to the SJ Mercury News, data centers are

... a lucrative place to be. While prime office space in downtown San Jose costs about $2 a square foot per month, David Dunn, senior vice president of Los Angeles-based CRG West, said space in a data center rents from $15 to $30 a square foot per month. Even at that price, it took just nine months last year for CRG to fully lease its newly opened 16th-floor data center at Market Post Tower in downtown San Jose.

And the forecast is for more of the same:

"Do we think this is a gamble? Absolutely not. The forecast for the next 24 months shows demand is rising," [CRG vice president Jameson] Agraz said. "Every TV show you watch will be stored on hard drives so you can have video on demand."

Of course, your mileage may vary. But the point is, there is more than one way to invest $297 million. We would be fools if we didn't check out at least some of them.

"Imagination and a bit of daring"

Yesterday the San Jose Mercury News published an interesting article by Alan Hess about "Why Santana Row succeeds."

Why is this article relevant to a website about the proposed stadium?

Well, at least one City Council Member has emphasized the desire to create an entertainment district in the area of Santa Clara where the stadium is planned. It is useful, therefore, to think about what makes an entertainment area successful.

Santana Row is clearly an example of such a district.

As Hess notes,

Residents of the townhomes on the upper levels of Santana Row's blocks can look from their windows and balconies and see something pretty much like real life on the streets below: fitness freaks on their way to the health club at dawn, mothers with strollers sitting in the parks in the mid-morning sun, business people business-lunching at sidewalk cafes at noon, shoppers cruising in and out of stores all day long, and San Jose residents of different sorts arriving to dine, drink, shop, buy a book, watch movies or dance until late at night.

Have you tried to go there on a Friday or Saturday night? It may be hard to find a parking spot, but once you get there, there's lively street life. On other days, there are free concerts, a farmers' market, open-air movies, and other events and activities.

It may have its origins in mall development, but as Hess writes

Santana Row realizes that we want to be with our fellow humans for reasons other than selling or being sold to. We dine at sidewalk cafes to enjoy good food and good friends, not to increase the stock price of an agribusiness corporation. We want to be near the action. We want to see what other people are doing - and we want other people to know what we are doing, wearing and saying.

A stadium used less than 30 days a year, on the other hand, would not enable the kind of daily interaction needed to create a vibrant social scene.

And one more important point — Santana Row was built through private financing. As Hess explains,

Ironically it's everything that the publicly funded San Jose Redevelopment Agency has been trying to achieve in downtown San Jose for 20 years. The privately financed Santana Row made it happen first.

True, Santana Row is much smaller than downtown San Jose. The real difference, though, is the design.

So, "with imagination and a bit of daring" what could Santa Clara do to create an entertainment district that would succeed like Santana Row has?