Seven residents of Portola Valley, all volunteers, will be studying the question of whether it’s feasible to build small houses on town-owned land that’s affordable to people who work in town but cannot afford to live there, including teachers and Town Hall staff. Older residents wanting to downsize their living spaces but stay in the community may also benefit.
The volunteers are members of the new Ad Hoc Committee for Housing on Town-owned Property created by the Town Council to deal with this problem.
Councilwoman Maryann Derwin recently spoke of a Town Hall staffer who moved to Hayward from the Peninsula after an extraordinary rent increase. Three other staff members could face a similar situation, she said, adding that she considered the situation “beyond crisis … and into disaster.”
Ms. Derwin is on the new committee, as are Councilwoman Ann Wengert and Planning Commission members Judith Hasko and Nicholas Targ.
The council on Jan. 11 interviewed five applicants for the three seats open to residents, choosing former planning commissioner Arthur “Chip” McIntosh, mediator and former councilman Steve Toben, and Carter Warr, an architect and former member of the Architectural & Site Control Commission.
The council has twice tried to build small homes in town, and faced determined resistance from residents on both occasions. In 2003, the council rezoned 3.6 acres near Alpine and Portola roads — the Nathhorst Triangle — with plans to build 15 to 20 small homes. In 2012, the town planned to build about eight homes on 1.68 acres at 900 Portola Road.
Perhaps tacitly acknowledging past opposition, council members have alluded to a harsher housing reality today on the Peninsula.
Mr. Toben said he felt cautiously optimistic about the committee and its goals. “Any right thinking citizen of this county can’t help but be concerned about the grotesque imbalance between housing generation and jobs,” he said.
He noted his roles as mediator and facilitator in past communal efforts, including chairing a 2013 committee looking at affordable housing more broadly. As a planning commissioner in 2003, he said the Nathhorst Triangle rezoning left scars, calling it “an earnest attempt if unsuccessful one to provide diversity in the housing stock.”
Mr. McIntosh cited trends in the last few years. “I think the biggest thing is the change in the attitude and the willingness of people to accept the need for affordable housing,” he said, adding that he would employ forthright person-to-person conversations about the initiative and engage opponents in the planning.
Mr. Warr said that without “broad-based community support and a broad-based discussion of the pros, the cons, the economics, the aesthetics, this doesn’t have a chance of getting off the mark.”
The town has plenty of skeptics, he said. The goal should be to leverage that skepticism and be open about strategy for gaining consensus on design and approval. “You don’t want it in the background or pre-negotiated,” he said. Conjecture should be “completely taken out of it.”
One possible strategy: sponsor a series of roundtable discussions, bringing skeptics and supporters together to address the question of why such housing is needed. “If you build a consensus around ‘why,’ even the silent majority will support you,” he said.
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