Mixed-use Trag’s plan approved

Several residents joined commissioners in supporting the project expected to provide 64 residential units, more than 60,000 square feet of office space and nearly 20,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space at a transit-oriented, downtown location across North B Street from the downtown San Mateo Caltrain station. Though the project garnered praise for boosting the city’s housing stock, Commissioner John Ebneter was not alone in voicing concern about the types of units offered, which will include 27 studios and 37 one-bedroom units, of which six are slated to be affordable at the very low-income level.

“I think the project is wonderful,” he said. “But we are getting too many of these small units and we are not addressing the dire need for families to have places to live that are affordable.”

Planned for four and five stories tall, the building’s height will be under the city’s voter-approved 55-foot height limit, which Jon Moss, executive vice president of Prometheus, said was a limiting factor in the types of residential units the developer could include in the plans. Though the developer’s preference was to include two- and three-bedroom units on the 0.93-acre site, Moss said the constraints of the lot and maximum height of the project limited the number of larger units they would have been able to build.

Moss noted the developer focused on community outreach as well as the site’s downtown location in shaping project plans, which he said reduced of the number of driveways on the site from five to one and included a gift to the city of 12 percent of the property in the form of wider sidewalks to allow ground-floor tenants to offer outdoor dining.

“We are extremely excited about relocating, moving our corporate headquarters with 150 of our employees to this location,” he said. “It’s an amazing site across from the train station in your downtown.”

To meet the project’s requirement to have a transportation demand management, or TDM, program in place, the developer has proposed building designs aimed at encouraging walking and use of public transit, providing showers and changing rooms to facilitate bicycling and walking to work and car-sharing programs and reimbursement of travel expenses for future employees at the building. But concerns about how the project might affect traffic on nearby streets persisted among some residents like Adam Loraine, a resident of the North Central neighborhood.

In voicing support for the project, Loraine also urged the developer and officials to consider how they could ensure TDM measures are having the effect they are meant to have.

“I just think it’s very important that both the city and the applicant do everything they can to make sure that in the end that after this great application and development is built, the numbers will bear out and we actually won’t have a huge traffic situation in our hands,” he said. “The rest of the city will be thankful.”

Though some residents and officials expressed concern the four-level underground parking garage included in the project plans provided too much parking for a site so close to a major transit hub, Commissioner Ellen Mallory supported the developer’s choice to provide more than 280 parking spaces on the site. Noting the developer could have provided 0.50 parking space per residential unit, Mallory appreciated the choice to include at least one parking space per unit and wondered whether officials could consider implementing a residential parking program to ensure residents of the adjacent neighborhood can park on the street.

“That neighborhood is going to have parking impacts and there’s not much that can be done about that,” she said. “I think that is going to protect the neighborhood and other parts of downtown from additional parking issues.”

Though Commissioner Ramiro Maldonado also pegged the project’s lack of two- and three-bedroom apartments as one of his reservations, he appreciated the inclusion of fabric awnings in the design for the ground-floor storefronts of the project, which he noted are consistent with the fabric awnings on North B Street storefronts.

“I encourage the applicant when he’s trying to find [tenants] for the storefronts and for the commercial areas is to find businesses that … can transition from downtown San Mateo to the North B area,” he said.

Commissioners also unanimously moved to continue a discussion on a proposal to replace an 11-acre San Mateo office campus with 190 units of for-sale housing near the interchange between Highway 101 and State Route 92. The project is expected to make a mix of two-story single-family residences as well as three- and four-story attached townhomes and flats available at 1, 2 and 3 Waters Park Drive, and the discussion slated for Tuesday was postponed to its Jan. 23 meeting to allow the developer to discuss outstanding issues with the neighborhood.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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