By Kate Talerico : mercurynews – excerpt (includes audio)

After missing deadline, city provides blueprint to build 62,200 homes in next decade

One year late and three drafts in, San Jose has finally earned state regulators’ approval of its housing plan, a blueprint for how the city plans to add 62,200 homes over the next decade.

The state’s certification brings an end to the threat of penalties San Jose faced from falling out of compliance — including the “builder’s remedy” provision that allowed developers to ignore local zoning codes if they proposed low- or middle-income housing. The city is also eligible once more for millions in state grants for affordable housing and transit.

“We’re going to go party hard because this is a huge milestone,” said San Jose Deputy Planning Director Michael Brilliot. “It’s never been this challenging.”…

Of the Bay Area’s 109 cities, just 14 met the state’s cutoff for submitting a housing element, after many of them confused the deadline, which was Jan. 31, 2023. San Jose is the last of the three major Bay Area cities to earn the state’s blessings, after the state OK’d San Francisco’s plan in December, and Oakland’s in February…

During the time it was out of compliance, several developers used the “builder’s remedy” in an unexpected way — not to propose taller, denser towers than might otherwise be allowed, but to scale back housing proposals. A third of the 29 builder’s remedy projects submitted to the city amend a previously proposed project to decrease the number of units. The developer of the much-vaunted Berryessa BART Urban Village at the San Jose Flea Market site plans to reduce the project to 940 housing units from the 3,500 previously approved by the city.

Whether these builder’s remedy projects will move forward now that the city is in compliance remains to be seen. Chris Burton, who heads San Jose’s planning department, told this news organization in November that the city would process each of the builder’s-remedy applications “on an individual basis.”… (more)