The Loma Prietan
December 1999/January 2000
Is the Future of Coyote Valley More San Jose Sprawl?
by Barry Boulton
Imagine Coyote Valley, the agricultural open space separating San Jose and Morgan Hill, as it is now: the oak savannah of Santa Teresa Hills to the west, Tulare Hill separating the valley from built-up San Jose to the north, Coyote Creek and Coyote Ridge to the east, and Morgan Hill to the south. If not pristine habitat, it is open space for wildlife to roam and for us to enjoy, and its agricultural lands provide food for our tables.
Now picture Coyote Valley as a research park with 120-foot-tall commercial buildings filled with 50,000 bustling workers. Adjacent to that would be 25,000 houses for 70,000 new residents. Then there's the traffic: workers arriving mostly in autos (some percentage on CalTrain) and parents in the residential areas taking their children to and from school, all amounting to bottle-neck traffic on already congested and overpolluted freeways.
If the new image seems like a disaster scenario to you, then you can thank the City of San Jose, which has this development written into its General Plan. It is now in imminent danger of becoming reality.
The scale and intensity of potential developments in Coyote Valley, triggered by Cisco Systems' proposal, is immense. The research park is zoned to generate up to 50,000 jobs in a campus-style atmosphere. Once Cisco moves in, creating the necessary infrastructure, there is every reason to assume, if the current economy holds, that a full build-out will occur. That would make North Coyote the eighth largest job center in Santa Clara County, equal in size to Cupertino, and the central part of Coyote Valley the fourth largest population in the County-all concentrated in 1700 acre location.
The General Plan acknowledges that. "The Coyote Valley is relatively isolated from the rest of San Jose, therefore any future development will need to be in the form of an independent community with jobs, housing, commercial facilities, schools, parks and other residential services, and public transit - in effect a new town." Yet, this whole development is moving forward without the interlinked planning that would be necessary for a new town. In the current scenario, jobs will come first, and so workers will live anywhere but locally. Many workers will live south of Coyote Valley, exporting more urban sprawl, and creating deadlock on Highway 101.
The impact on the human community in terms of highway congestion, air pollution, loss of open space, and loss of productive agricultural land is very significant. But, what about natural communities-the wildlife, the plants, the pollinators, and their interdependencies with each other?
While agriculture in Coyote Valley necessarily constrains its ecological merits because of chemical use (fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides), monocrops and constant working, it still provides a wildlife corridor and buffer zone such that the Santa Teresa Hills are not isolated or fragmented. Healthy ecosystems require viable populations of diverse species, and many of the larger species require large ranges for survival, using the corridors and buffer zones to extend their range and contribute to overall ecosystem health. Coyote Valley buffers the Santa Teresa Hills and provides corridors for wildlife to visit Coyote Creek, Coyote Ridge (see the California Native Plant Society web page at www.stanford.edu/~rawlings/coyote/index.htm); the Mount Hamilton range. These buffer zones, linked via Coyote Valley, considerably extend the Santa Teresa Hills' effective ecological range, and in so doing, increase the health and resilience of those interlinked ecosystems.
The Chapter's position is that the General Plan concept of industrial and residential developments in Coyote Valley is a relic of the days of sprawl, and we strongly oppose it. The General Plan should be amended to protect the open space and greenbelt, and the agricultural lands. Cisco's proposed growth could be accommodated within the built-up area of San Jose (or a neighboring city), along or near transit corridors to facilitate the use of public transportation. We have determined several such locations, and are undertaking further analysis to confirm these possibilities. Building within the already built-up areas may mean that the sprawled campus style atmosphere is not possible, but we regard that as one of the issues of tension that must be accommodated if growth is to continue without sprawl. As part of the legally mandated Notice of Preparation process, we have requested that alternative locations be considered, probably as the environmentally preferred alternative (a legal mandate).
We have not taken a position on Cisco's 20,000 additional jobs that constitute absolute growth in a region already overcrowded with tremendous pressures on both natural and human communities. Those additional jobs will cause population and housing growth through some level of worker in-migration, resulting in further loss of wildlife habitats and aesthetic open space, and increased highway congestion with its air pollution.
We would like to get your feedback on job-induced growth and whether the Chapter should begin to address it directly. You can send either a regular letter to the Chapter office or an email to barryboulton@earthlink.net with your comments.