![]() The council indicated it would prefer to see residential buildings capped at two stories and commercial buildings at four stories.īut the lower heights would translate into a loss of nearly 4,000 housing units and 700,000 square feet of commercial space over the next 20 to 30 years. Some council members and many residents felt the six-story commercial buildings and four-story housing complexes proposed were just too tall.Īs a result, the city will go back to the drawing board next year to revise the plan - a move that could cost $1 million. After four years and a $910,000 grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the City Council opted in October not to approve the plan. Santa Clara was the latest city to hit a roadblock when it tried to implement its El Camino Real Specific Plan. Complicating matters is the road’s status as a state highway, meaning cities can’t dictate what changes or improvements are made to it without going through Caltrans. Whenever cities talk of raising building heights - a touchy issue that has consistently plagued development in much of the Bay Area - they often encounter fierce backlash from residents of neighborhoods near El Camino Real who don’t want tall buildings casting shadows their way. Others either didn’t bother or gave up after public outcry. Some, including South San Francisco, San Mateo, Redwood City and Mountain View, came up with their own vision plans to help guide El Camino Real’s redevelopment. The simple answer, Hancock and others say, is that not all the cities along the north-south corridor bought into the grand boulevard vision or entered any formal agreement to coordinate planning. “It’s really urban and it already has a certain amount of density to it,” Hancock said about El Camino Real’s potential and prime location near the downtowns of most of the 19 cities along its way. Instead of being a place where jobs and housing complement each other in a region that notoriously struggles to balance both, he laments that El Camino Real remains a “mish-mash” of businesses and buildings whose varying heights and architecture often clash. And that’s frustrating to Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, the group that has overseen the Grand Boulevard Initiative and still meets to this day. What’s considered California’s oldest highway - its history traces back to 1769 - El Camino Real was a hodgepodge of stores, gas stations, strip malls, fast-food eateries and appliance centers interspersed among occasional apartment complexes.įifteen years later, not much has changed. ![]() Their vision was to turn El Camino Real into Silicon Valley’s grand boulevard - a landscaped, 43-mile stretch from Daly City to San Jose that seamlessly flows from one city to the next, with wide lighted sidewalks, pocket parks, historic buildings, shops and multistory housing all interwoven.īut the group of South Bay and Peninsula residents that first convened in 2006 to guide such a transformation had its work cut out. ![]()
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