San Mateo to vote on height limits near transit areas

A city’s housing element is a state-mandated blueprint of how the city is planning and zoning property to achieve its RHNA numbers. The process, which can be long and arduous, is undertaken every eight years, and HCD has implemented stricter oversight on this 2023-31 cycle compared to previous rounds, in large part due to increasing pressure to address the statewide affordability crisis. Local jurisdictions can now risk losing some local control of their planning and development approval process, not to mention incur fines and lose millions of dollars in potential funding, if they prove resistant to housing production.

Measure T would allow higher height and density limits in 10 zones throughout the city, including near Caltrain stations and El Camino Real. Within certain parts of those areas, residential or mixed-use buildings could have height limits up to eight stories, which could increase to 10 stories, depending on whether state density bonus laws apply. Under the currently in-place Measure Y, buildings could reach up to seven to nine stories, if they offer certain community benefits or via state density bonus laws.

Measure T proponents

To comply with the higher mandates during the 2023-31 cycle and beyond, many housing advocates, as well as the City Council, have said that it needs to build higher in certain areas — and therefore amend Measure Y.

Mayor Lisa Diaz Nash, who submitted a formal argument in favor of the measure, said the measure is critical to ensuring the city complies with state law, while also planning for the city’s inevitable growth in a measured way that mitigates traffic impacts and improves cost of living.

In 2020, voters rejected Measure R, which is similar to Measure T, but was less limited in scope.

“We learned as a city that having unlimited height and densities, which was part of Measure R, was not something the community wanted. What the community wanted was a very focused area of transit-oriented development, and that they could understand what the heights and densities could be,” she said.

The alternative, Nash said, would be to spread out the required number of housing units across the entire city, including residential neighborhoods. But the first option allows the city to plan better, and for 75% of San Mateo, there would be no change at all under Measure T, she said.

San Mateo only recently got the state’s official stamp of approval on its housing element over a year into the 2023-31 cycle, but it is contingent on Measure T passing. If voters reject the measure, the city will have six months to draw up new plans on how it could plan for over 700 low-income units — which are the hardest types of units to finance and build — and it would also require upzoning virtually every single-family neighborhood for duplexes, triplexes and quadruplexes, Nash said.

If the new plan does not meet HCD’s standards, that could also open up the city to a host of challenges, both legal and financial, and it could backfire on those who are adamant about keeping San Mateo to a five-story height limit. Builder’s remedy, for example, is a state law that allows developers to skirt height and density regulations if the city doesn’t have an approved housing element in place.

Opponents of Measure T have suggested that the city push back more against the state’s housing regulations, which measure proponent Mitch Speigle said is a risky bet to take and could ultimately come at local taxpayers’ expense.

“If you feel that you, as a person, are willing to risk the funding and the local control that we have here in San Mateo, then by all means sue the state,” Speigle said. “For those of us who say, ‘we want to have control over how San Mateo develops, we want to have to have the time to study these things, and we want to have a way to move forward,’ that’s where I think folks will look at Measure T.”

Nash also said that the Measure T would allow the city to plan not just for the 2023-31 RHNA cycle but it would generate an estimated $15 million in developer impact fees, which fund critical infrastructure, social programs, as well as parks and open space needs.

Measure T opponents

Measure T opponents say the effort ignores what voters already expressed only a few years ago via Measure Y, arguing that city leaders should be more loyal to their constituents, rather than HCD, which has gradually chipped away at jurisdictions’ control over their planning and growth policies.

San Mateo residents Karen Herrel and Michael Weinhauer, who were part of Measure T’s formal opposition submitted to the county’s Elections Office, said the city could better achieve its housing goals if it didn’t allow so much commercial development in many areas that are zoned for mixed-use development.

Herrel said that, contrary to what Measure T proponents argue, the plethora of required new housing units won’t have to be embedded in long-established, single-family areas. Rather, it can go in other places, such as along El Camino Real, provided elected officials push for more housing there.

“Taking some of these development areas where there’s a fair amount of mixed use and nonresidential and intensifying the residential will also meet what we’re hearing HCD wants to require — which is to be sure that this additional housing goes into high-resource areas,” she said. “We have a picture that’s being drawn here as if the only answer will be on somebody’s doorstep in upper Baywood …but they have more opportunities than what is being discussed.”

That could mean going back to the city’s housing element and rezoning certain commercial and mixed-use areas only for residential use.

Weinhauer also said there is not enough money from the city, county or state to fund the necessary services and infrastructure needs associated with such an increase in population growth. That means the burden will fall to taxpayers to finance, ultimately negating any cost alleviation that Measure T, or HCD’s aggressive housing mandates, purport to solve.

“You are going to see these things, that were once covered by the city, are increasingly going to have to be covered by taxpayers,” Weinhauer said.

San Mateo currently has a 15% inclusionary zoning policy, meaning every market-rate multiunit residential development must include affordable units that meet that threshold.

Herrel said that developers historically opted to pay additional fees, also known as in-lieu fees, to get around offering the below-market-rate units. Those fees would go to the city, which she likened to a slush fund that depreciates almost immediately upon receipt.

“In-lieu fees are a path to nothing happening,” she said, adding that it rarely translates to the number of affordable units it claims to support.

The election will be Tuesday, Nov. 5.