By Winona Rajamohan and Mauricio La Plante
On Tuesday, protesters chained themselves to their seats and delayed San Jose City Council’s meeting. The councils met to approve Google’s offer to buy public land downtown near the Diridon Station for an extensive development project between the city and the tech giant.
As of 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Council members voted unanimously in Google’s favor.
Speakers against Google’s development showed a mixture of fear and contempt at the podium.
San Jose police arrested multiple people for disrupting the public meeting and ordered the public to leave the city council’s chambers. City leaders reconvened around 10 p.m. to move forward with their decision, as other protesters rallied outside of the chambers.
“This is a little awkward,” said Councilman Raul Peralez. “I’m just pitching to an empty chamber.”
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo called the issue “a tale of two valleys.” The public opinion played out like a tug of war between the ideas of two different parties, one that welcomed Google’s proposals and another that sought to reject them.
“Practically speaking, because I live in a duplex, my landlord can increase my rent to as much as he wants whenever, he wants,” said Tori Truscheit, a tenant who lives near the Diridon Station. “He’s pretty nice, he might not do that, but with Google coming across the street, I can’t imagine he wouldn’t want to profit off that in some way.”
The city council’s meeting with Google’s public policy and government affairs manager, Javier Gonzalez, centered around the proposed Purchase and Sale Agreements the city developed in partnership with Google.
“Google remains committed to working with the city and community to address the aspirations and concerns surrounding future development that have been raised this evening and over the last year of public engagement,” Gonzalez said in a statement from Google.
The Purchase and Sale Agreements outline Google’s proposed spending of about $110 million on several parcels of land, including some sites previously owned by the San Jose Redevelopment Agency and 15 acres held by the city of San Jose.
Much of the land included parking lots that were frequented by transit users and SAP Center patrons, as well as the San Jose Fire Department Training Center.
“After eight months of extensive and transparent public engagement, we look forward to continuing this process with Google to bring transit-connected jobs and vibrancy to downtown San Jose,” Liccardo said in a Nov. 16 news release.
The city initially planned to develop the area in 2014, when city
council agreed on the Diridon Station Area Plan after five years of discussions with the Diridon Station Area Good Neighbor Committee. It wanted to turn the 250-acre area into a vibrant downtown hub.
Google expressed interest in the city’s development plans and met with city staff between February and May of last year.
Because a thriving commercial area would further the goals of San Jose’s Envision 2040 Plan, which called for the creation of 48,500 jobs within the city, many local elected officials were optimistic about Google’s inquiry.
Council member Devora Davis of District 6 represented the Diridon Station area.
Prior to the meeting, Davis said she would vote yes to the project, as it would bring much needed innovation to San Jose and increase general revenue for the city’s annual fund.
“We’re not just bringing office buildings to that area, but we’ll also expand the number of housing units,” she said. “The current Diridon Station plan calls for less than half the number of units that we’re actually planning on putting there now.”
Davis claimed there is a housing shortage by hundreds of thousands of units in all nine counties in the Bay Area, so the city’s intended plan to add 9,000 units in areas closer to transit would relieve the scarcity.
However, community concern lies in whether the number of proposed housing units will accommodate the number of jobs projected to be created in order to avoid displacement.
“That’s something that we’re honestly just starting to discuss, I don’t have a plan for how that would work right now,” Davis said.
A presentation for the Google-Diridon project shared by city council during Tuesday’s meeting emphasized San Jose’s presence as a bedroom community with job growth that has not matched the pace of residential growth.
“San Jose is a city that is over 30 percent Latino but Google only hires 4 percent Latino, so that’s not going to benefit the people that live here,” said Sandy Perry, an organizer with the Silicon Valley Affordable Housing Network.
During the meeting, Peralez conceded that Google does not have a diverse enough workforce.
Perry is one of the 40 critics of the project who have fasted since the Sunday leading up to the meeting as a form of protest. He said Google’s entrance into San Jose is an immoral thing to do for the community residing there.
“I don’t trust [the city]. The city has been promising to address its affordable housing issues for 30 years,” Perry said on Tuesday morning at a vigil held in protest of the Google partnership on Fourth and Santa Clara street.
The public land being sold to the company is a public asset Perry says should not be sold off to the highest bidder, but instead be used to solve the affordable housing crisis and not make it worse.
