San Jose Inside

City Hall Diary

Whew—just before midnight, we passed the budget! 

After many long budget hearings, staff presentations, public testimony and robbing Peter to pay Paul, we have a “balanced” budget.

After a long Monday, we could discuss the Sharks’ win over Detroit (third game winners go on to win the series 70 percent of the time) or the strange vote at the San Jose City Council on the Evergreen development—where six members gave the okay to “study” the conversion of over 200 acres of job-creating land to housing—or even the boom in downtown high-rise housing with the optimism that springs from it.  No, I will resist all these issues, although it is tempting to ask why six council members wished to give away 200 acres of tax base for more traffic. Old habits—selling out the future—apparently die hard even in the new City Hall.

When we think about our city, we often think about the big-ticket items that make a huge impact.  We are always talking about ways to enrich San Jose with more, more, and more! This includes building BART, baseball stadiums, funding large scale developments and adding retail shopping.  But it seems that when we do that—which is important—smaller projects that are also important to some citizens fall through the cracks.

Oh, this is really going to be fun. You get to name your own category and winner. What could be better than that?

Because it’s summer and heat waves make me insane, I have been spending a lot of time in our lost-in-the-60s sister town to the south, Santa Cruz.  The more time I spend in the little-beach-town-that-could, the more I realize what we’re missing in San Jose.

Where is a Single Gal to go if she wants to walk and shop?  I know we are a suburb—with malls and mini-malls galore—but where is our downtown shopping?  Where is our Union Square?  They have bums and homeless people there too, but they also have big-time shops and street performers and it all works together in one place.  Why don’t we try to create something like that now in San Jose?

So what comes first, the chicken or the egg?  Would more people want to live downtown if there were more to do?  Or will people wait to see what happens downtown before they invest their money into apartments and lofts? I believe that if there were masses of families, young people and baby-boomers living downtown, that the retail and entertainment would have to come to feed the demand.