By Jon Wiener
The crush of housing developers seeking permission to redevelop vacant industrial and agricultural land has reached a level that city planners can no longer handle.
Heeding recommendations from the community development department, the city council last week denied one so-called “gatekeeper request” for a Stierlin Drive loft project and deferred for six months a single-family development at Satake Nursery. The problem was not with the projects themselves, council members said, but a lack of staff to process the applications.
Nearly 3,000 housing units are already in the pipeline, and council members have made it a top goal for the coming fiscal year to figure out a way to handle the influx of applications. Planning manager Whitney McNair gave the council a list of anticipated projects for the coming year, and said the department would need at least three more planners to process them all.
City manager Kevin Duggan said several city departments lack the resources to do everything they would like, but added that planning projects tend to be more visible than things like deferred park or street maintenance.
Duggan said gatekeeper requests are only necessary in projects that would require a change in city zoning.
“If someone wants to come in and do something, and the zoning’s consistent with it, we process it no questions asked,” he said. “We accommodate 99 percent of the people who come in the door.”
E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener
