Should citizens get a direct voice on citywide rezoning decisions?

As the Opportunity Housing debate heats up, and city staff manifests systemic bias in favor of vast upzoning even before the Council votes, Planning Commissioner Pierluigi Oliverio asks: shouldn't a policy change this broad, this influential, this contentious, be put in front of the voters? An exclusive Opportunity Now interview.

ON: When and how does the city council decide to put an issue to the public via a ballot measure?

PLO: Typically ballot measures have to do with tax increases, however they may also be policy-oriented, such as Mayor Hammer's ballot measure regarding hillsides and the urban growth boundary. Cities also use ballot measures as a way to gauge public opinion to give elected leaders direction or officeholders may simply feel it would be more democratic to have residents weigh in.

It's purely a City Council decision as to when and if they want to put a ballot measure before the people.

ON: What are some recent examples?

PLO: In 2018, there was a land use issue about the zoning of a single piece of property in Evergreen that the city put to a ballot measure. The property owner had paid to collect tens of thousands of signatures from registered voters and put forward a ballot measure regarding that zoning; the city's ballot measure was in opposition to the landowners'.

ON: Wait, if the City Council asked the people of San Jose to weigh in on the zoning of a single piece of property, wouldn't it make sense for them to weigh in on something as massive as a citywide upzoning proposal, known as Opportunity Housing?

PLO: Logic would support that conclusion. If you are going to go to the ballot to help decide the fate of one piece of property, of course you would go to the people to decide the fate of over one hundred fifty thousand pieces of property.

ON: What are some other recent examples?

PLO: Other examples that aren't necessarily huge items: restructuring a city commission, or changing the rules so the salary for the Mayor and City Council can be raised without a vote during a public hearing. Santa Cruz residents were recently asked to weigh in on UCSC enrollment growth via a ballot measure. There are many examples in the Bay Area of advisory votes.

ON: Sounds like the citywide upzoning concept is certainly of a sort with the types of ballot measures the city has initiated before. What about the Opportunity Housing issue makes you think this should be a citywide vote?

PLO: We have never seen a land issue in the city's history that would have a greater impact across the entire city and to all single family homeowners. Opportunity Housing is a euphemism for eliminating single family house neighborhoods as we know them today. There are approximately one hundred fifty thousand single family homeowners in the city, and that doesn't include their spouses, children, family, etc. Single family houses shelter approximately 61% of the population, no matter how you look at it is a huge impact. It is also an irreversible path because state law does not allow downzoning. This dramatic rezoning influences people's living conditions, their net worth, planning for their children and retirement. It is self-evident that it should be up to the people to decide, and not only six councilmembers.

ON: What would be the argument for why the council should just decide? What do you think of their reasoning?

PLO: The reasoning would be that the elected officials are provided the authority to make decisions and that's why we have elections. However few, if any officeholders serving at this point in time, have been asked their opinion on this topic while they were running for office. It's not like people elected a city council to have an opinion on this specific issue. Interest groups will prefer the council to make the decision because they only need to convince six councilmembers as opposed to the greater population of San Jose.

ON: You can see that play out a lot in the city: the nexus of city staff/non profits/local media work together to advocate certain policies directly to City Hall, bypassing the will of the people. Who are the non profits that would benefit from Opportunity Housing? Who are the interest groups?

PLO: The coalition of groups supporting this in San Jose are various non-profits that often receive government funding. Apparently, they would also like to see a dramatic restructuring of San Jose, changing it from home ownership society to a rental community. What I find personally interesting is when you look at some of the executive board members of pro upzoning organizations, they live in some of the wealthiest and heavily restricted enclaves, and would never propose this where they actually live.

ON; It sounds like this resembles the crew you find in the Housing Department's much-criticized and partisan podcast series, "Dwellings."

PLO: Yes. I do find it odd to have such policy advocacy happen on the taxpayer's dime prior to the city council providing direction with their upcoming vote.

ON: Mass-upzoning proponents suggest that people who oppose them are--surprise, surprise--racists. A councilmember recently suggested that people who want to get a simple historic designation for their 120-year old homes are racists, too. What do you think of the charges?

PLO: Historic neighborhoods have always been great sources of pride for cities. However, apparently based on the current hysteria, it appears historic neighborhoods may now be canceled simply because their old growth wood timbers withstood a hundred years of history. San Jose is an incredibly diverse city. The Berryessa Neighborhood Association, for example, strongly opposes this extreme reznong. The Berryessa neighborhood is less than 20% white with 60% of their population tracing their heritage back to Asia. Many of these homowners are immigrants themselves and they were the target of previous discrimination such as the Chinese Exclustion Act. Shaming current homeowners, especially first generation immigrant homeowners, for policies that have been struck down legally over 50 and 70 years is ahistorical and ludicrous.

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