There has been some focus put on how many people should be notified when a project affecting their neighborhood is proposed. There is a “legal” 300-foot minimum distance from the project site, with no “maximum” notification limit. I am told that the 300-foot distance is the distance within which the state will reimburse cities for mailing notifications; beyond that distance, the city must pay for notifications itself.

First, let’s look at what 300 feet gets you.

For the Santa Clara Square site, 300 feet doesn’t even get you across most of Lawrence Expressway. It doesn’t span the supermarket parking lot — especially not after having to cross El Camino Real. 300 feet does not even cover one residential block, in any direction.

For the Fairfield Residential project, 300 feet doesn’t include a third of Woodsborough, half of Miles Drive, a quarter of Pepper Tree Lane, any of Santa Lucia, any of Homestead, or anything adjacent to Central Park. It takes 600 feet before any houses along Live Oak Drive are included, and even then no houses along Homestead are touched. Even after 1000 feet, only half of Live Oak is touched and we still haven’t gotten across the park or the schools in the area.

Now let’s look at who gets notified within that 300 feet.

Santa Clara is only legally bound to notify land owners within their chosen radius. This means that apartment complex owners — who may be thousands of miles away in a different state — will be notified, but none of the renters. Commercial and retail store owners may be notified, but they may not even live in the city.

For Santa Clara Square, that means that fewer than a dozen homes and two dozen town home complexes were notified of the 8-story tall residential high-rises and 5- and 6-story tall commercial buildings that would be put in next door. If you draw the boundary of the 300-foot areas around the Santa Clara Square site, it includes mostly street, parking lot, apartment or condominium, and commercial properties. It excludes the great majority of residential properties that lie immediately to the south and west of the property, not to mention all of the residents the project would affect along Lawrence Expressway or just off of El Camino Real. Sunnyvale residents, who live adjacent to the project, weren’t notified by Santa Clara at all, even with a request from Sunnyvale’s principal planner to do so.

Near the Fairfield Residential complex, even at 1000 feet, no residents on the other side of Central Park — or even adjacent to it — were notified. The notifications never made it beyond the two schools in the area or past the apartment and retail complexes off of Homestead. They did finally reach residents of Live Oak, but only about half of them. The area is already so saturated with rental housing that there were few houses notified beyond Live Oak or Miles Drive. In short, increasing the notification range from 300 feet to 1000 feet had no significant impact on home owners in the area. The city in its infinite wisdom stuck to the letter of their “favor” and cut the notifications off on Live Oak at exactly 1000 feet; half of the street never received the Notice of Preparation or were told about the Scoping Meeting the city set up to get public feedback. And that’s just people on Live Oak. None of the renters in the area — who would be affected just as much, if not more, by the development — were notified. This includes people in rental houses as well as those in apartment complexes.

Renters are residents just as much as home owners are residents. There is a transitory aspect to their residence, agreed. In a recent blog post, Carolyn Schuk of the Santa Clara Weekly opines “Young people buy here with the grand plan of moving to a free-standing house in a more ‘residential’ area as soon as they can.” But they deal with the same traffic, stand in the same lines, breath the same air, enjoy the same skyline, and fight for the same parking spaces as permanent residents. They suffer the same consequences, yet are excluded from sharing our same voice.

By knowingly and actively excluding renters from project notifications that affect their living standard and quality of life, the city disfranchises the very group of people it is also trying to entice by depriving them of vital information that would allow them to participate in neighborhood discussions. To become part of the neighborhood, you may say. It is argued that renters do not have as much to lose or gain as they are not home owners affected by lowered property values and have an easier option before them to leave the area and therefore do not care as much about local events. But that is not true of all renters. And notifications are not about requirements for action. They are for notification, so that people who are so inclined and so motivated can take an active role in their community to support common causes. By adding an additional 550 apartments in a high-density development, Fairfield Residential isn’t adding a single person that Santa Clara would have to notify in the event of a future project.

So. Home owners. Areas already saturated with rental units. 95-foot tall high-rise buildings.

300 feet sounds more and more like the minimum, legal requirement that it is and not so much the “favor” the people supporting the high-density projects make it out to be. Increase the radius to 1000 feet and the story doesn’t really change.

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