What Now for Stanford's Ambitious Plans for Growth?

After three years of back-and-forth with Santa Clara County, Stanford University pulled a shocker last week by dropping its bid to build another 3.5 million square feet of academic facilities and student housing over the next 15 years. What happened?

In a statement explaining their decision to pull out of applying for what’s called a general use permit, Stanford officials wrote that “feasibility” was a big issue and obliquely referenced a tug of war with county supervisors over how to mitigate the consequences of future growth.

“While we are stepping back from this permit process, we will be launching a new phase of engagement with our local communities,” the statement said. “We hope to gain deeper mutual understanding of the challenges facing our region, how Stanford can best enhance its contribution to addressing those challenges, and what the implications are for our longer-term campus development.”

At the heart of this conflict is the impact Stanford’s size has on the region. Increasingly, surrounding communities are asking whether the university should do more to address its role in Silicon Valley’s housing crisis.

As part of a multi-newsroom investigative project involving Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, The Mercury News, NBC Bay Area, Renaissance Journalism and Telemundo 48 Área de la BahíaTelemundo, KQED analyzed county assessor office records from 2018 to identify the largest landowners in Santa Clara County.

Stanford was far and away at the top of the list in terms of property value. More than that, the value of the university’s holdings was greater than those of Google, Apple and Intel combined last year. The data reflects not only Stanford’s standing as one of the world’s top universities, but also as a commercial and residential landlord and employer.

“The general use permit is a special case. It’s unique, in fact, in Santa Clara County planning,” said Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian, who led the county’s negotiations with Stanford. “It’s an opportunity for the university to plan longer term, over a 15-20 year horizon. But the challenge is always going to be the same with any developer out there. The applicant always wants what they want, and they want to give up as little as possible to get it.”

Perhaps 20 years ago, when the last general use permit was approved, 3.5 million square feet and 9,610 more faculty, staff and students would not have caused much of a stir in Santa Clara County offices. But times have changed, and the 9,610 comes on top of a  Stanford community numbering near 34,000 people, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty and staff.

That makes Stanford as big as some of the tech titans of Silicon Valley, and like those major employers, Stanford finds itself engaged now in a new public conversation about its physical footprint in the region.

In June, the county’s planning commission unanimously voted to recommend that the supervisors approve Stanford’s application, but if and only if Stanford agreed to certain changes. One of their top demands would have been a requirement that Stanford quadruple the amount of housing it was originally proposing to build.

That’s one example of the “full mitigation” county officials were demanding, insisting the university offset all of its expected impacts to local housing, traffic and schools.

So, for instance, at a recent public meeting in Palo Alto, Stanford senior Amulya Yerrapotu spoke on behalf of SCOPE 2035, a student group lobbying Stanford to house more of its own service workers and other staff. “The question here today is not whether Stanford is a good school,” Yerrapotu said. “It’s about who gets to reap the benefit of development and who has to bear the costs.”

In its press release last week — Stanford declined to comment beyond that — officials said they’d come around to delivering all of the housing the county asked for. But that followed months of back- and-forth, including a well-publicized counterproposal and at least two lawsuits brought by Stanford, one of which was thrown out.

As for traffic mitigations stipulated by the county, Stanford concluded in its press release they were simply unfeasible.