Like pretty much any post-war city, San Jose was built around the automobile. Its landscape is covered in sprawling suburbs with their cul-de-sacs and strip malls, with parking lots stretching as far as the eye can see. Recently, of course, development patterns have started to change. No longer large suburban tracts, our new developments consist of compact mid-rises located near transit. While these new land-use changes are certainly great, very little has been done to re-design our suburbs; the source of a good deal of our problems.
California's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions is automobiles. Guess what propagates car dependency? Suburbs. California, and San Jose, are also facing a crushing housing shortage. Wonder why new homes can't get built? Because 94% of San Jose is zoned for single family suburbs. Let's not forget that suburbs were built upon the rock of inequality, with minorities denied the resources granted to suburban residents.
We know that mixed use development alleviates traffic. We know that mixed use communities are safer for us. And we also know that we need housing. So the question is, how do we make the suburbs denser, and more inclusive.
Your humble blogger has two ideas: The restoration of the corner store, and lot splitting.
The Corner Store
When we think mixed-use, we think mid-rise apartments, or glassy office towers. But it doesn't have to be this way. Small convenience stores in suburban neighborhoods can turn suburban store-deserts into areas with viable retail within walking distance.
Allowing for partial conversions of single-family homes into stores (with protections to prevent the infiltration of large chains) can provide amenities to suburban neighborhoods that would otherwise be reliant on vehicles for even the smallest of needs.
Lot Splitting Near Transit
Here's a picture of the area surrounding Alum Rock transit center. What do you see? I see cul-de-sacs, single family homes and absolutely no semblance of the mixed-use moderate density needed to make transit viable. It is no wonder, therefore, that VTA ridership has remained abysmal. However, the failure of several density bills in the state legislature have shown how resistant suburbs are to up-zoning. However, thanks to new ADU laws, pretty much all of California is now zoned for duplexes. But boosting transit-oriented communities is going to take a lot more than duplexes. Which is where lot-splitting comes in.
Lot-splitting could be done by allowing single-family parcels located 1/2 mile from regional rail, 1/4 mile from light rail, and 1/8 mile from a high-frequency bus line to be split into 2 lots with a minimum area of 600 square feet. A reduction in parking requirements to 1 space per unit from the present 2-3 found in the suburbs can further decrease car dependency, in addition to the car dependency decreases caused by the density increases and mixed use lots. By limiting this upzoning to transit-rich areas, we also ensure that transit deserts aren't left with more cars and traffic than they already have. This gentle upzoning would serve to preserve the character of suburbs while still increasing their density around transit. Upzoning would make suburbs more inclusive by increasing the amount of smaller, affordable properties available to purchase, while still being small-scale enough to prevent buying sprees by large developers.
In Conclusion
The suburbs, once the gem of the American dream, are causing problems. They're a major source of traffic congestion, climate change, and bulwarks on inequality. This post aimed to answer the question of how we can go about densifying the suburbs, while also perserving their small-town character. I determined that encouraging the proliferation of corner stores and encouraging lot-splitting near transit.
I hope you enjoyed, and maybe learned something, from this post. Be sure to follow me on twitter at @personopolis.
Signing off,
AG
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