Published Thursday, October 12, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News

A startling vision of downtown S.J.
Extensive development would be needed to make numbers work

By Barry Witt
Mercury News


When promoters of bringing BART to San Jose say the $3.8 billion
extension would remove 78,000 commuters from the roads, they're
relying on a startling vision of downtown, one that not only fills
virtually every inch of land in the existing city center but also
tears through adjacent residential neighborhoods to make room for more
high-rise growth.

It's a vision that would add 176,000 workers to today's modest
downtown of 30,000 employees. Workers filling hundreds of new
high-rises would be forced to take public transit, since public
parking structures would be eliminated, and future office buildings
would be constructed without garages.


It's a vision of a downtown residential population 30 times bigger
than it is today.


It's also a vision, according to critics and downtown neighbors, that
will never become reality but which has been invented to justify
approval of the BART line. The more riders expected to buy BART
tickets, the less public subsidy needed to keep the trains running.

``It creates a Manhattan in downtown San Jose where it takes an hour
to go a mile and a half,'' said Santa Clara County Supervisor Jim
Beall, a leading opponent of Measure A, the November half-cent sales
tax proposal that would pay part of the BART construction cost.

``I don't think that's the community that I want to live in and it's
totally against what the majority of people in San Jose want,'' Beall
said, arguing BART proponents invented the development scenario ``to
jack up the numbers and make the project look good.''

Mayor Ron Gonzales, BART's biggest booster, said he is ``very
convinced the 78,000 new daily riders is a good number.'' But even if
it's significantly less than that, Gonzales said, ``the bottom line is
you're getting cars off the roadway. BART has proven to be over a long
period of time the most cost-effective way of moving people through
the Bay Area.''


Valley Transportation Authority and San Jose Redevelopment Agency
officials produced the ridership projections in a frenzy last June,
spurred by the need to finish a report in advance of key decisions by
the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and the Silicon Valley
Manufacturing Group.

While a BART study had been in the works for several months, it was
only in early June that Gonzales decided the issue needed to go on
this November's ballot, and the county board would have to take its
first vote on the subject by month's end. Redevelopment Agency
officials said they were given two days to come up with a vision of
downtown San Jose in 2020 that would become the basis for the VTA's
ridership projections.

Downtown extension

Vision takes city center `as far as it will go'

What city visionaries came up with takes downtown ``as far as it will
go,'' said Colin Mosher, the redevelopment official primarily
responsible for the analysis. ``It takes the extreme. It says there's
not going to be any parking downtown.'' It also assumes smaller
buildings would be knocked down and rebuilt much larger.

It also stretches the boundaries of downtown well beyond Fourth
Street, its traditional eastern boundary. The new City Hall project
already will do that for two blocks along East Santa Clara Street, but
this vision assumes downtown will stretch all the way to 10th Street
both north and south of San Jose State University. It assumes more
than 33 million square feet of construction -- the equivalent of 96
structures the size of one of downtown's most prominent landmarks, the
17-story Knight Ridder Building -- would occur in the 18-square block
South Campus residential neighborhood.

``The only way to do that would be to completely destroy the
neighborhood,'' said Lisa Jensen, a neighborhood activist who lives in
a 96-year-old home on South Ninth Street. South Campus is filled with
a mix of historic single-family residences, older homes that have been
divided into apartments, and post-World War II two- and three-story
poorly constructed apartment buildings that both city officials and
homeowners alike in the area would like to see replaced eventually.

But Jensen and others see those apartments being replaced with
similar-scaled buildings, not 20-plus story high-rises. ``San Jose has
indicated it wanted to preserve neighborhoods,'' Jensen said. ``I hope
San Jose stands by that.''

Asked whether his vision of South Campus matched that suggested by the
Redevelopment Agency, Gonzales responded, ``I'm not going to comment
on any particular areas.''

The BART ridership projections are based on an assumption that 144
million square feet of new construction would occur over the next 20
years. That's the equivalent of 423 structures the size of the Knight
Ridder Building, enough to accommodate 180,000 new residents in 69,000
new apartments and condominiums, and another 176,000 office and retail
workers.

The numbers are astounding, given the history.

Agency officials estimate that today, there are about 6,000 residents
and 30,000 daytime workers downtown. While demand for office space and
housing has begun to accelerate in the past two years, actual
construction activity has been achingly slow: Since 1992, just 800 new
housing units and 3.2 million square feet of office buildings have
either been built, are under construction or are close to
groundbreaking.


In a separate examination of downtown, agency planners last month
projected construction activity over the next 10 years, based on a
no-BART scenario, at 10.5 million square feet of office space, 2.3
million square feet of retail space and 10,000 housing units.  Those
figures, ambitious in and of themselves, however, pale in comparison
to the post-BART scenario.

To get anywhere close to the agency's post-BART figures, several
radical assumptions have to be made about what would happen between
2010 and 2020:

Demand for office space downtown would be 75 percent greater than what
demographers say will happen across the entire city. Downtown's
population growth would be 40 percent greater than what is projected
for the entire city.

South Bay commuters would be willing to give up cars for transit,
including those who don't live on the BART line but would rely on the
remainder of the region's light rail, Caltrain and bus systems to get
downtown.


San Jose would be willing to make the political decisions to expand
downtown's boundaries, allowing high-rise development in areas that
historically developed at one and two stories.

Needed decision

Downtown must expand, not simply grow taller

Such a political decision is necessary because downtown can't simply
grow taller. While there are numerous gaps in the existing downtown
core ripe for development, every building is limited in height by the
flight path of San Jose International Airport. So San Jose can't meet
the space projections simply by building upward; it would have to
build outward.

Whether that means South Campus or elsewhere, eventually the city
would run into the residential neighborhoods that abut its historic,
geographically limited downtown.


``Downtown is looking for a place to expand beyond Fourth Street and
the freeway'' on the west, said Bill Ekern, director of special
projects for the redevelopment agency.

On the parking issue, the city, developers and commuters would have to
make a 180-degree reversal from current practice.

``There's a real battleground over the future of parking,'' Ekern
said.  Parking and transit ``are on a very rapid collision course.''
While commuters in major cities elsewhere in the country are used to
taking the train, ``transit in the West is probably the hardest
sell,'' Ekern said, ``It's like selling refrigerators to Eskimos.''

Just this summer, the city council approved several high-rises with
huge parking structures next to or incorporated into the buildings. A
380,000-square-foot Sobrato Development Company development that broke
ground south of the San Jose Convention Center in August includes a
1,108-car garage, about one space for every worker that could fit in
the building.

And at the same time the BART study assumes city-owned garages on
Market, Second and Third streets would be knocked down and replaced
with garage-less high-rises, the city is pursuing several new parking
garage developments.


``We have no alternative at this time,'' Gonzales said of the
contradiction between what he approved this year and a
transit-oriented downtown. ``Once we have an alternative that's
reasonable and predictable, we're going to have to look at that public
policy. .  . .  It's reflective of other urban centers in the country,
whether it's San Francisco, New York or others, the idea of huge
parking lots has given way to supporting mass transit.''

What downtown San Jose might become is more than just an academic
exercise, when it comes to considering Measure A.

Beall notes that the BART study says the extension will need a $24
million annual subsidy under the high-density assumptions, but $39
million under a more traditional development pattern. The high-density
assumption translates to riders paying 65 percent of the costs --
consistent with 62 percent for the current BART system -- but only 37
percent under the traditional scenario.


Lisa Ives, the VTA's project manager, said the report was conservative
in its estimate of 78,000 riders under the high-density vision,
compared with 45,000 riders under the less-aggressive
alternative. That means that even if the number of people living and
working downtown is less than projected, ridership still would be
strong.

Gonzales -- who included the 78,000 ridership figure in the ballot
argument that he signed on behalf of Measure A --  said he's not
concerned that the report might overstate downtown's future.

``As we try to provide for growth in San Jose, and not be in a
position where we're saying no to jobs, which no one wants to do, and
I think it's not good for the economy, we've got to find some system
to manage that growth,'' Gonzales said. ``You've still got to move
people around this region, you've still got to move people in and out
of downtown San Jose. BART is the best way to do that, even at 38 or
40 percent fare box recovery, which I don't believe is going to happen
because I believe we'll get to 67 percent and how we get there, that
will be determined by future land-use decisions.''

Contact Barry Witt at bwitt@sjmercury.com or at (408) 286-0264.