Hollister sets out to update general plan, citing Gilroy’s
neglect of downtown as a bad example
By DEAN PATON
Pinnacle Staff Writer
The build-first think-later era is over.
The build-first think-later era is over.
When Hollister voters passed a growth-cap initiative last November, they not only limited the number of homes to be built; they gave themselves a unique opportunity. That, combined with a state-forced building moratorium, has given citizens time to plan what kind of town Hollister should be.
Despite a decade of sprawl, it’s still possible, some believe, to create a little bubble off the main grid of civilization, isolated not by money or class but by geography and a renewed sense of living in a community with a united vision.
But only if the lessons of the past and of neighboring communities are heeded, planners say. Seven years have passed since the city rewrote and passed the 1995 General Plan, that is the state-required blueprint for development that spells out how the city will deal with everything from housing to noise.
Community attitudes toward residential development have changed radically since 1995, and city planners say the general plan needs to reflect the slow and planned growth views of Hollister’s current citizens. Therefore the general plan should be updated as soon as possible.
“This plan, although it has a lot of policies regarding residential development, it doesn’t really quite have the handle on it that it probably should,” said Bill Card, the city’s community development director. “It doesn’t really talk as much about growth control as much as it probably should. Those policies need to be better articulated through the update.”
This time Hollister planning officials want input from the public, which has become increasingly more sophisticated about growth and planning issues, almost out of necessity during the 1990s when Hollister made San Benito County the fastest-growing in California and stretched infrastructure beyond its capacity.
“The General Plan, we have got to do it right this time. There’s a lot of concern the way the growth is all going south,” said Ray Friend, the planning commission chair who helped write the 1995 general plan. “Let’s let people know when it’s their turn to speak up. Now we’ve got time to think, there’s no pressure, there’s no developers waiting with projects.”
Card hopes there will be community hall-style meetings by March where audiences can participate in the planning process by bringing ideas, suggestions and debate.
Card plans to recommend the City Council appoint the five people already sitting on the planning commission and two members from the public at large during the second meeting of January to the update committee. In keeping with a new spirit of cooperation, Planning Commissioner Ray Pierce has suggested that one of the members at large be a representative from the county.
By the end of February there should be an update committee in place. The rewrite process will take about a year.
No plan at all
When the City Council last appointed a committee to write a new general plan in 1990, the nearly 20 appointees soon learned the city never really had any idea how it would develop on paper.
“(The previous 1976 general plan) had like 10 basic policies in it,” Card said. “I think one of the policies was ‘build enough streets to support development.”
This document guided the city’s planning commission while the population zoomed from 11,488 in 1980 to 19,212 by 1990. Throughout the 1980s, the planning department lobbied the council to create a new general plan, without luck.
Finally, the council agreed to give the financial support necessary. But the committee felt swamped by its task and did not finish for five years.
“We started from scratch, and it was the best we could do with what we had then,” Friend said.
Part of the problem was the city’s character had changed drastically. Scores of cookie-cutter subdivisions sprang up in irregular patterns next to farms and historic neighborhoods. Downtown was declining. Many of its buildings were ripped apart by the Loma Prieta Earthquake or burned down by a serial pyromaniac.
And when the new general plan was finished, the planning commission often found itself approving no-frills subdivisions because there was little in the new document to say otherwise – and there was no public opposition until late in the last economic cycle, according to Friend.
“It seemed like the only people we were getting to the planning commission were for market-rate homes,” Friend said. “The big developers, they come in with the big dollars. They’re pretty slick. I wished there would have been more people involved.”
The growth cap and moratorium
Before the state slapped the city with a building moratorium, the council used to set the number of allocations – one housing unit equals one allocation – it gave to developers every year. Card is the first person to admit the public has not, for whatever reason, had much input in the past when it comes to new projects.
The growth cap changes all that. With the exception of the roughly 300 outstanding building allocations that already exist, the city can build no more than 240 homes a year under the growth cap, and 40 of those must be low income.
Developers can’t stuff those building allocations into a vault forever, either. Time limits must be set because of the voter-passed growth cap. And Measure U, the initiative approved by 70 percent of the voters in November, requires that there be a competitive process for developers to be granted allocations.
“It provides Hollister with another tool to get better projects,” Card said of the growth cap. “It’s a lot more control than we’ve ever had.”
Historically developers have given few – if any – perks to the community such as neighborhood parks, and most often none at all.
Card thinks some kind of a point system might work. The general plan, for example, could be designed like the county – to award more points if the proposal is closer to the city’s core or it has a certain amount of landscaping, or is a certain distance from the fire department. Subdivision streets could be awarded points if their streets slow traffic with more curves.
Whatever is decided, the idea is to get away from “pig-nosed houses” so named because their most identifiable feature is the garage rather than the house or the front porch. Card wants to build communities, “rather than subdivisions with a bunch of garage doors.”
The Creekbridge’s Country Rose behind Target is a good example of the type of project Card wants to see more of in the city. There’s more landscaping, the streets are narrower, meaning traffic comes through more slowly. The developer was faced with a special requirement to build multi-family housing and he and Card arrived at the solution of building granny units on the same lots as the single-family homes.
Downtown part of the vision
Ray Pierce is a planning nut. A real estate agent by trade, he constantly thinks about how Hollister’s potential can be mined through planning. He carries around massive subdivision maps of the city folded up in his workbag.
The maps are colored with magic markers showing all sorts of trends and outlines for his vision of the future: an expanded downtown hugging the McCray Street area, a light rail system, narrow streets that slow speeding, subdivisions built toward the hilly southeast, where gravity will work in the sewer system’s favor rather than against it, the grassy lot on the 400 block of San Benito Street turned into a central gathering place for the community.
“I’ve seen some of the plans for downtown; they just don’t seem to be expansive enough,” said Pierce, the planning commission’s vice chair. “They deal with just a small section of the downtown. We have a historic downtown area, and I think we should find some way of designating that. An archway at Fourth and San Benito that just says ‘you are now entering Historic downtown Hollister.'”
But his main idea is nothing new: build downtown buildings with commercial on the first floor, office on the second floor and residential on the third and fourth floors.
“It’s like going back to the old zoning styles, where you had retail on the first floor and the shopkeeper lived above his shop,” Pierce said. “It stops the sprawl out into the vacant land areas. The other thing is you already have some infrastructure in place.”
He also wants to target the older buildings and designate them as landmarks.
“I think the Holland Hotel (AKA the Union Bank Building) is a great place to start that, because it’s already in place and the parking lot is nearby,” Pierce said.
It’s an historic landmark sitting vacant since Union Bank moved to the suburbs with the first floor ready for retail use, a second floor already remodeled for office space and two floors that have never been converted from their original use as hotel rooms. According to Pierce, there are around 40 rooms that could serve as studio apartments.
Another key to unlocking Hollister’s downtown is planning for future traffic patterns. When the Highway 25 bypass was planned 30 years ago, it was designed to be a way around Hollister east of the city limits. As the Highway 25 bypass project has inched through the approval process, the city has swallowed it up. Ultimately, however, it will get commuters out of downtown.
“That’s going to change the dynamics of the city considerably,” Friend said. “I think that’s going to have a major impact on the downtown area and we need to plan ahead for that.”
Once the bypass is complete, San Benito Street will no longer double as Highway 25 south and the state will deed it over to the city. Instead of being a highway, San Benito Street can become a two-lane road with diagonal parking, according to Pierce. Pedestrian islands with trees and benches can be built at intersections and sidewalks can be widened to accommodate restaurants and cafes.
“The wider the street is, the faster the traffic flow,” Pierce said. “The faster the traffic flow, the scarier it is for the pedestrian that’s walking on the sidewalk next to the traffic, so they’re not going to want to use the pedestrian access.”
Converting the downtown into a zone rich with residents and vibrant retail stores isn’t without its challenges, Pierce said. Chief among them is money and parking. Even though there’s hardly a parking problem downtown now, there are few residents living downtown either. So how will residents compete with customers for parking space?
The answer is they don’t, Pierce said. Any new high-density residential developments could be built with a requirement that there be parking garages underneath, Pierce said. A parking tag system could be used to make residents use designated parking areas. Either way, the zoning process should be flexible so that if someone wants to build any number of structures or combinations of structures they can.
The community must also consider how it will deal with the prospect of more sprawling shopping centers without neglecting downtown, as Gilroy seems to have done.
“I think one of my concerns is going to be large industrial expansion on the outskirts of town and how that may impact downtown,” Card said. “I think that’s something we need to discuss at the general plan level. Gilroy’s a good example. If you look in their downtown, it really is not as vital as it once was. They have a huge commercial development, in fact it’s continuing with Costco and Lowes, large commercial uses along the highway that don’t get people to go downtown.”
Instead of building on prime farmland toward Gilroy on Hollister’s northwest limits, Pierce thinks the city should continue building toward the southeast, where rocky rangeland does not support crops.
One of Pierce’s ideas is to lay the foundation now for a light-rail transit system that could be built whenever it’s needed in the future. This could be accomplished, in part, by claiming right-of-ways on certain streets. That is also part of the reason Pierce thinks the downtown commercial area should be technically expanded to include all the industrial property to the east of it: to create an area that could be used by all those rail commuters Pierce sees when he starts thinking about the future.
“Hopefully what we’re going to do is we’re going to plan ahead way out there, so if and when that happens we have the correct zoning in place and plans in place, instead of it being a reactive situation. It’s all out there five, 10,15, 20 years,” Pierce said.
Anyone wishing to become involved in planning for Hollister’s future should either call Community Development Director Bill Card at 831-636-4360 or e-mail
Wi**********@Ho*******.gov
Copies of the general plan can be purchased for $12 by calling the same number.
