Recently I attended a Memorial Service for Roy Cook, a neighbor of mine and long time Saratoga resident and realtor beloved to many. In life Roy Cook was an amazing personality. Whenever I ran into him, he would regale me with stories of how our street once had over 90 kids running and biking around the neighborhood. To me this conjured up images of a suburban kid friendly city with tons of activity. Today we have maybe 15 kids in our street and that number is dropping every year.
This brings me to today’s Saratoga. The biggest issue in town is our Housing Element mandate, a state led top down mandate to build ~1700 homes in the city. The city frankly seems confused. On the one hand we have Restore Saratoga, a movement that imagines a quiet, peaceful city. On the other hand, we have The North Remembers, a grassroots efforts that is pro-development but concerned that everything is in their corner. In between are a variety of efforts that span the gamut of pro and anti development. The brilliant
has an excellent characterization of the various groups that complicate our housing discourse.This brings me to my opinion. At the end of the day cities like Saratoga are suburban places where people raise families. We expect high quality schools and a peaceful crime free environment. But the real anchor is our schools and they don’t do well if there aren’t enough kids.
The news here unfortunately isn’t very good.Saratoga Elementary school district is facing declining enrollments as seen below. Cupertino doesn’t fare that much better either with enrollments dropping to 80% of where they were a few years ago. Pretty much all of our high performing schools have enrollment declines.
This starts from the fact that the city isn’t growing like the rest of the Bay Area.
We really haven’t built any real housing after the 80s. More details are visible here for those interested.
The solution is extremely simple.
We need to build more housing so that more families can live here and send their kids to our schools.
The city needs to take an approve everything approach.
Re imagine our downtown.
Approve more mixed use communities.
Make Argonaut more mixed use. Like a 5-1 building.
Look at all the remaining sites we haven’t prioritized and just approve them.
Here is a partial list below list below of things we are building today. This doesn’t include any of the commercial sites like Argonaut Shopping Center or Downtown Saratoga. While this is a great start, I think the city will do well to overshoot and build more.
Our schools will thank us for it. Traffic will not go crazy. Our neighborhood will be better. I do believe the majority of Saratogans want more development.
We only want it to be inclusive and spread evenly throughout the city.
I’ll end with an appeal to the new city council to adopt a growth first agenda and then focus their efforts on improving our resources (roads, public transport, water etc) to help effectively manage the growth.