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Housing and Transportation Issues, 1999
By William Cracraft
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Transportation and housing are the yin and yang of San Mateo County. These two vital segments of living and working in San Mateo County need to be in synch to keep the county functioning as a proper live/work environment.
SAMCEDA and its Economic Vitality Partnership are working to improve both facets through their Housing and Transportation Action Teams Transportation Tony Gschwend has spent his whole life in San Mateo and has seen the traffic go from okay to unpredictable, resulting in much wasted time."Time is still money in business and everything else," he said.
Gschwend has been the Transportation Action Team chair for two years and has seen real progress over the last 18 months in mitigating the fast-approaching transportation crisis. San Mateo County has a large commercial workforce and is also a through-route for those traveling between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
"It has always been our role as the Transportation Action Team to help promote strategies that are going to improve the mobility of people and goods and services in the county," he added To that end, the action teams have encouraged several efforts to bring more efficient transportation to the county including auxiliary lanes running along Highway 101 from on-ramps to off-ramps in Redwood City, upgrades on the CalTrain line, high occupancy vehicle (carpool) lane extensions from Redwood City to San Francisco International Airport and, Gschwend's favorite, a rail line from the East Bay via the Dumbarton Rail Corridor.
"In the transportation field you can't put all your eggs in one basket," said Gschwend. Who calls Highway 101 at Redwood Shores the hourglass of the Peninsula, because of all the traffic passing through. There are about 10 million square feet of commercial development planned in the county over the next few years and "Redwood Shores is going to pick up 2.5-3 million square feet of that commercial growth," he said.
"Over the course of the last 12 months, we lent our support to getting $48 million dollars for Highway 101 auxiliary lanes and the Redwood Shores Traffic Improvement plan looks like it is going to go the voters in April 1999," he added.
The $9.5 million in internal street improvements and connections to Highway 101 should help spread out traffic from companies like Oracle and the new Electronic Arts development. Highway improvements will help, but "We have pretty much tapped out the (highway) system. We still need some new tools in our transportation kit to move people around," said Gschwend.
One of those tools is to increase ridership on CalTrain, and the CalTrain Rapid Rail Study, a 20-year plan for the route, is devoted to that end. The study addresses maintenance of rolling stock and right-of-way and possible electrification of the diesel trains. One of the County's best options is a rail line from the East Bay. "We went on record back in December before both the joint powers board and the (San Mateo) Transportation Authority with the recommendation to move up activation of the Dumbarton rail spur.
That's the key," said Gschwend."We're never going to circle the Bay with BART, not in the lifetime of anyone who is going to read this article." Because San Jose and Santa Clara both have light rail systems in place, they don't have a pressing need for intra city transportation that BART provides, Gschwend said. Instead, the action team has recommended the Dumbarton Rail Corridor (DRC) link to bring East Bay commuters to the West Bay, where they can head north or south on connecting rail lines. Cost to rehabilitate the rail line and bridge will cost about $150 million, but since the corridor already exists many bureaucratic stumbling blocks are eliminated.
On the west side of the bay existing rail lines can carry DRC passengers north to Millbrae, when that BART station is completed in 2002, and south to Santa Clara and San Jose via existing CalTrain tracks. The Ace Train, running from Stockton to San Jose and Santa Clara Valley, may expand to the Dumbarton Rail Corridor.A number of companies along the Highway 101 corridor are interested in promoting this solution to keep employee commute time down.
"When you take a look at the number of people that are directly affected by the Dumbarton Rail Corridor it is probably the single most important link that can happen for San Mateo county over the next 15-20 years. This is win-win, this is like free, it is so obvious that we ought to take advantage of it," said Gschwend.
Housing Yin to transportation's yang, housing must keep pace with job development to keep traffic down and companies in the area, said, Paul Shepherd, chair of the Housing Outreach Committee within SAMCEDA's housing action team, and a land manager and developer, active in San Mateo County for 30 years.
"Our work is aimed at all levels of housing, not any one particular price level. Of course, we'd like to see as much affordable or below market rate as possible but that isn't our only focus," he said. One challenge for the Housing Action Team to overcome is "it is very difficult for local, planning commissions and city council officials to be enthusiastic supporters of new housing when their constituents are not," said Shepherd, "particularly if they are forced to vote in front of an audience made up of people who are opposing it because they think some how its going to devalue their neighborhood.
"Our mission is to try and reach out to the public and make the connection to them that it really is important to the value of their house to have more housing in the community," he added. "If we don't provide that housing the companies are going to move away because they can't get the employees. If that start happening we get a negative economy instead of a positive economy. That's one factor," said Shepherd.
"Number two is, people are afraid if there is more housing there will be more traffic congestion. Well, actually, the opposite is true. If we can get more people living closer to their place of employment, we get less traffic," Shepherd said. "We sit between Santa Clara/Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and we have San Francisco International Airport," said Shepherd.
"All three of those are huge economic generators. That's a blessing, but so far we are employing more than we are housing and you just can't keep on doing that," he added. Through a city/county association of governments, the County of San Mateo hired developed a plan identifying housing needs based on a study of transportation requirements for the year 2010, said Shepherd.
"They came back and said the single most important thing they could do to relieve traffic congestion was to build more housing. They did a complete analysis, of all the vacant land and general plans of the cities and really showed there was room to accommodate this," said Shepherd.
In addition, cities are forcing developments that are approved to build below allowable density levels. That land is then stuck with that lower density for the foreseeable future. "It s a wasted asset," he added. Samceda's Role SAMCEDA is trying to bring the facts to the forefront with its Outreach Committee. "We have worked up a presentation being made to various groups, public agencies, service clubs and business groups, going out to the people saying it's important to your well-being and welfare," to have more housing, said Shepherd.
There have been some successes. "Foster City has been looking at taking some failing shopping centers and having some housing built," said Shepherd. Two success stories are the Port O'Call and Marlin Cove shopping centers in Foster City, which will bring about 360 new housing units into the area, said Jim Bigelow director of SAMCEDA's housing and transportation policy.
"The developers were looking at residential housing and our Housing Action Team encouraged the concept," Bigelow added. Other successes have been achieved in Redwood City, particularly downtown, and San Mateo has recently approved several housing developments. "In the housing area we have been regularly promoting individual projects in cities in San Mateo County, acting as an advocacy group with a myriad of coalition of housing interests," said Bigelow.
"We are going to planning commissions study sessions, planning commission meetings, and city council meetings supporting specific projects and encouraging their approval on projects which increase the housing supply in the county. We have also been involved in cities where redevelopment is going on and there is an opportunity to influence housing issues.
Another plan in Millbrae is tied to the new BART-SamTrans-CalTrain multimodal station area, which will include housing, office and retail space, and a hotel. It would be a development that is very transit friendly," said Bigelow. Getting these projects off the table and onto the land, "takes a certain amount of enlightenment, and we're trying to spread that enlightenment," Shepherd said.
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