BY EMILY MIBACH
Daily Post Staff Writer
San Mateo County’s Board of Supervisors is sending a letter to its counterparts in Santa Clara County in hopes that the two counties can share tens of millions from Stanford’s housing fund.
Right now Santa Clara County’s supervisors are going through the process of reviewing and potentially approving Stanford’s general use permit, or GUP, for campus development.
While Stanford is in unincorporated Santa Clara County, and borders Palo Alto, the university also borders Menlo Park and unincorporated San Mateo County.
Because Stanford is in Santa Clara County, the money that the university pays into a fund for low-income housing developments within a six-mile radius goes to Santa Clara County.
The six-mile radius was set up during the school’s 2000 general use permitting process.
“San Mateo County has never gotten any of the affordable housing funds from Santa Clara County,” Supervisor Warren Slocum said. “We need to have conversations to get some of that money into San Mateo County, we deserve it.”
During its 2000 general permit process Stanford contributed more than $25 million in low-income housing funds to Santa Clara County.
The university is currently proposing to pay about $56 million under the new permit.
But on May 1 Santa Clara County supervisors will discuss whether that amount is adequate.
The cost to provide affordable housing to support Stanford’s proposed 2.275 million-square-foot campus expansion through 2035 would be about $325 million, according to a study done for Santa Clara County.
The hope is if San Mateo County is roped into the six-mile radius fund it can use some of the money for an apartment project behind the county’s health clinic at 2710 Middlefield Road in North Fair Oaks, which is about three miles from Stanford.
San Mateo County Supervisor Don Horsley said in an interview with the Post on Tuesday (April 24) that it’s possible to fit up to 300 apartments at the site.
Sane immigration policies that don’t allow a flood of non-Americans into the Peninsula would do more for “affordable housing” than billions of $$$ would. Stanford and Silicon Valley shouldn’t be allowed to punish the million residents of the Peninsula because of their greed for cheap foreign labor (Stanford uses foreign grad students as cheap labor, just like Google, Apple, et al.).