Housing Advocates Call This Big Plot of San José Land the Most Important in a Century

Whether the Bay Area’s biggest city can meet its lofty housing goals to help cool a red-hot affordability crisis in the coming years could hinge on the fate of a former golf course.

Housing advocates say the 113-acre former Pleasant Hills Golf Course in East San José, a huge plot of open land that shuttered in 2004, has the potential to become a thriving new neighborhood with several thousand homes or more.

But neighbors and some city officials are not as keen to stack the site so densely over concerns about worsening traffic congestion and maintaining the area’s character.

“San José is still way behind. It’s way behind on its housing, and it’s way behind on its thinking about what development should look like,” said Alex Shoor, the executive director of Catalyze SV, a pro-housing group in Silicon Valley.

“We either build a lot of housing on this site, and we’re actually serious about solving the housing crisis, or we have elected officials and civic leaders who continue to pay lip service to housing while doing nowhere near enough to solve the real issues,” Shoor said.

San José could make a big dent in its state-mandated housing target to create 62,200 homes between 2023 and 2031 — a goal it is presently not on pace to meet — if it takes a full swing on the former course and pushes for roughly 6,000 homes, he said.

Like much of the Bay Area, San José doesn’t have many large tracts of developable land left in its urban areas, making the golf course all the more appealing to housing advocates.

“This development should be a walkable, dense, vibrant neighborhood where shops, workplaces and housing and recreation space should all be next to each other. That is how centuries of housing and communities have been built. And it is how you create the most safe, sustainable and dynamic neighborhoods,” Shoor said.

The course opened in 1960 and closed in 2004, according to the city. The family that owns the land said it shut down due to rising costs and changing interests, San José Spotlight reported.

A proposal from Mark Lazzarini and Tony Arreola, two prominent South Bay real estate investors, initially contemplated about 1,700 homes, largely plotted out as single-family homes or townhomes, but was reworked to propose 2,000 homes in recent months, after city planning staff urged the pair to boost the density as high as 2,850 homes.

City planners have also said the project should include a significant number of affordable homes, commercial space and park or open space, and provide easier connections to the nearby Eastridge Transit Center and Lake Cunningham.

Some neighbors worry the city is being too prescriptive about what the developer should build.

Robert Reese, a leader of the District Eight Community Roundtable, which represents several neighborhood associations in the area, said the project needs to be consistent with the existing single-family home communities in the area. He pointed to city studies that show denser mid-rise projects often don’t pencil out for developers under current market conditions.

Reese said Shoor and a group of like-minded community organizations calling for very dense housing on the land are oversimplifying a complex situation. A more realistic project, in his view, should be in the realm of 1,300 or 1,700 homes, on the high end.

“It’s one thing to have capacity, but we need to have something actually get built,” he said.

“I think the [San José City] Council is going to have to be focused on whether they want a chicken in the pot or turkey in the bush,” he said.

The site, while fully bounded by the city of San José, is currently an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, and the county’s housing goals imagine the potential for up to 2,850 homes on the site.

If it were to be developed, City Planning Director Chris Burton said the property would need to be annexed into the city, and it’s not yet clear how the city and the county would divvy up the housing totals toward their respective targets.

“It’s not very often we get 110 acres,” Burton said. “Obviously, the market wants to drive to feasibility, which at this moment in time tends to be at lower densities. Certainly, the neighborhood is concerned about the impacts of more units in the area.”

But he also noted that market conditions that determine financing for housing projects can shift, and any large project on the site would take many years to build, in phases.

“From a city perspective, we really don’t see the future of building out the city around single-family homes and lower densities. We’ve got to continue to maximize opportunity to add,” he said. “But in a process like this, we have to balance all of those interests.”

Converting golf courses and sprawling private recreational spaces into havens of housing and retail is not a new idea, particularly in places where development tends to happen as infill in small pockets. But like in San José, some communities oppose the idea.

Just over the border from San José in Santa Clara, developers are planning 316 apartments on a portion of the popular nine-hole Pruneridge Golf Course, which already has older housing stock woven into it. That project doesn’t plan to replace the course, but will require a reconfiguration of three holes.

In Brentwood in the East Bay, voters overwhelmingly chose in a 2022 ballot measure to restrict potential developments across several golf course properties.

And in San Diego, a developer is working to replace the Riverwalk Golf Club with 4,300 residential units, more than 150,000 square feet of retail space and 1 million square feet of office space, plus nearly 100 acres of green space, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

In San José, the Pleasant Hills Golf Course proposal is still undergoing environmental review. A formal vote to greenlight a final version of the project isn’t likely to happen this year.

District 8 City Councilmember Domingo Candelas, who represents the area where the land sits, said there are still many questions to be answered, and declined to say how big or dense the project should be.

“I firmly believe we’re not going to solve our housing crisis with this single project,” Candelas said. “I remain fully committed to finding a thoughtful, responsible solution that addresses this crisis while protecting the quality of life of our neighborhoods and of our neighbors.”

Shoor said the housing crisis in Silicon Valley — with average homes in San José valued at roughly $1.4 million — and the Bay Area needs to be treated with more urgency by officials around the region, and compared the situation to California’s drought cycles.

“If we don’t build enough housing on Pleasant Hills, it’s like we’re in a drought, and we say, ‘One day of rain will be OK. If we just get a day of rainfall, we’ll get back to where we need to go,’” Shoor said.

“What we need is a rainstorm of housing,” he said. “We need a deluge of new housing to provide for the people who are already here, the people growing up here, the people that are trying to move back here, and the new immigrants who deserve to be here, as well.”