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As Stanford University prepares to apply for a major campus expansion, residents and city leaders from surrounding communities have been clamoring for the new growth plan to include plenty of affordable housing, according to the university.
The university completed last week a series of open house events that it launched in December in preparation for a new “general use permit,” a document that would allow it to expand academic space and add student beds. The document would need to be approved by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors before it takes effect.
Over the course of the six meetings, Stanford had received more than 1,600 pieces of individual feedback from community members, said Whitney McNair, Stanford’s senior associate vice president. McNair, who is also project executive for StanfordNext, the university’s long-term growth plan, said that concerns over affordable housing have dominated the listening sessions.
City leaders and community members described affordable housing as “the defining challenge and the central opportunity for this project,” McNair said in an interview.
“There’s been a lot of comments about the idea of providing additional affordable housing, both on and off campus,” McNair said. “It’s the idea that Stanford provide affordable housing to meet the needs of the growth that will be in the proposal.”
The university is planning to file its application in late summer, McNair said. Once that happens, the application would be reviewed by county’s planning staff, its Planning Commission and ultimately the Board of Supervisors.
The new planning effort comes more than six years after Stanford abandoned its prior growth plan, which called for 2.275 million square feet of new academic space, 2,600 student beds and 550 housing units for faculty and staff. After three years of reviews, the university withdrew its general use plan application in 2019 after failing to reach an agreement with the county over mitigations for its expected growth.
At that time, county officials called for more stringent measurements of traffic impacts as well as more workforce housing than Stanford had offered to provide. The county also rejected Stanford’s proposal for a development agreement that would lock in entitlements for university growth in exchange for negotiated public benefits.
Chastened by that experience, Stanford has expanded its outreach efforts for StanfordNext. In addition to the six open house events, Stanford crated a 22-member committee known as the StanfordNext Advisory Council (SNAC), which includes elected officials, nonprofit leaders and housing experts. Members include Palo Alto Council member Ed Lauing, Alta Housing CEO Randy Tsuda and former Menlo Park Mayor Rich Cline.
In addition to hearing many comments about affordable housing, Stanford was also urged to address any transportation impacts that come out of its growth plan, McNair said. The university’s existing growth permit is governed by a “no net new commute trips” policy that requires the university to provide shuttles, carpools and other incentives to limit traffic impacts.
“We’re committed to look at building upon that commute-trip record we have now and look at how we can explore the additional pedestrian, bicycle, transit and shuttle strategies in order to address traffic congestion and concerns,” McNair said.
The university is now refining its growth application to integrate the feedback that it has been receiving, McNair said. In terms of academic growth, she said she said she does not expect the new proposal to be any greater than the one that Stanford proposed in the 2016 general use permit application.
The new application is focused around two concepts, she said, supporting the university’s education and research, and “succeeding together” as a community.
“If you think about supporting education and research, it’s enabling frontier science and innovation, completing the new School of Sustainability and increasing access to Stanford education with more dorms and classrooms,” McNair said. “And if you think about succeeding together, it’s more about investing in responsible transportation, building workforce housing and looking at ways to support the community.”
