San Mateo focusing on General Plan study areas

In the last year, officials and residents have weighed in on a vision statement expected to outline a set of city values, and in recent months they have also provided feedback on parts of the city they were interested in studying for potential land use changes or preservation at community workshops and public hearings as well as an online survey open for more than four weeks in June and July, explained city planner Julia Klein at the City Council’s Monday meeting.

As the first step officials and residents have taken to scope possible land use and transportation alternatives as well as conservation, the effort to peg sections of the city for further study resulted in 11 proposed study areas up for review at the council’s meeting. Including the El Camino Real corridor, the city’s three Caltrain stations and aging office parks and shopping centers, the areas the 75 people who attended the workshops and 193 participants who weighed in online — among others who attended public hearings — were also discussed at the Planning Commission’s July 23 meeting and the General Plan subcommittee’s June 26 meeting.

In response to concerns about the implications of including the North Central neighborhood as one of the proposed study areas, the commission also recommended the City Council consider including other single-family neighborhoods throughout the city for future land use alternatives. Those concerns surfaced again at the City Council’s meeting in response to a staff recommendation not to include all single-family zoned properties among the study areas.

Klein explained city staff received input from community members both to study and preserve single-family neighborhoods, and said staff weighed how close many of the neighborhoods are to existing and future transit options before concluding they would not recommend studying all of the single-family areas in the city and instead recommend exploring ways to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units.

North Central and Central neighborhoods

As president of the Home Association of North Central San Mateo, Adam Nugent said the association supports the inclusion of the North Central neighborhood as a study area, but argued the rest of the city’s residential neighborhoods, transit-adjacent areas and transit corridors should be studied to the same extent. Because the neighborhood’s residents and businesses have already experienced displacement, Nugent emphasized the importance of ensuring vulnerable community members are protected from any future displacement that could take shape in the neighborhood.

“We believe no neighborhood should be exempt from change and no neighborhood should be subjected to radical change,” he said, according to a video of the meeting. “To do anything else shifts too much of the obligation and responsibility for change onto our most vulnerable communities and people who just don’t have the resources to participate.”

Michael Weinhauer, president of the Central Neighborhood Association, said fears he’s heard expressed by North Central residents about the effect of development on their neighborhood have been shared by residents of the Central neighborhood, which he said is affected by cut-through traffic and other issues stemming from development.

“San Mateo needs a robust mix of housing including single-family homes in various different neighborhoods,” he said. “We need to preserve existing single-family homes in Central and North Central.”

Study areas

In response to the debate about whether single-family properties should be included among the study areas, Deputy Mayor Maureen Freschet said she didn’t think it would be fair to single out any single-family neighborhoods for upzoning. She said she was comfortable with studying infrastructure, streets, circulation and traffic in specific neighborhoods, but wondered if councilmembers could take upzoning off the table for single-family neighborhoods.

“If we’re not saying tonight, ‘we’ll do these study areas but we’re taking upzoning off the table’ then to me it’s going to just breed fear for the people in those neighborhoods,” she said. “And then it becomes an equity issue and I don’t think we should leave that to a later time.”

Community Development Director Kohar Kojayan explained discussions about what land uses could be considered for specific study areas are set to follow the City Council’s discussion Monday, and noted the meeting’s discussion was aimed at determining which areas would be the first to be studied. Kojayan said in future discussions officials and residents could weigh whether to study upzoning, street improvements, circulation or no change, among other alternatives, in specific study areas.

Kojayan also said study areas can be added to or eliminated as the city’s General Plan update progresses, and the council’s decision Monday would be a starting point for those discussions.

Though the Planning Commission recommended expanded boundaries of the study areas encompassing El Camino Real and the city’s train stations, among other recommendations, councilmembers reached consensus on moving forward with an earlier version of the study areas, those proposed to the Planning Commission at their July 23 meeting. Councilman Joe Goethals was absent from the meeting.

Alongside transit-oriented areas, aging office complexes and shopping centers, much of the North Central neighborhood and portions of the North Shoreview and Shoreview neighborhoods are included in the first version of the proposed study area map.

Councilman Rick Bonilla said he favored the map with expanded study areas, noting if parts of the city are left unstudied, the city may lose opportunities to manage the change and growth that will inevitably take shape in San Mateo. He believed the best way to protect San Mateo is by studying the city’s potential, and added more input from different subsets of the city’s diverse community will be needed to ensure the General Plan update effort facilitates a more equitable future.

“What I know is that we’re not doing the whole job if we don’t study the entire city and if we don’t improve our outreach and get more meaningful input,” he said.

Though Mayor Diane Papan said she also favored the map with expanded study areas, she was amenable to the earlier version, noting the effort to shape study areas was aimed at focusing the General Plan update effort on specific areas where a range of city priorities could be achieved, including everything from street improvements to transit-oriented housing.

She said she did not look at including the future study area with the North Central neighborhood as a step toward making one neighborhood absorb the burden of the city’s high-density housing, and said if that were the case she wouldn’t support including it.

“Nobody’s getting off the hook,” she said. “You’ve got to look at the entire city, this is a holistic approach that we have been trying to take and reach a balance.”

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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