I have very strong feelings about real estate developers, or, as I like to call them, real estate speculators. I have taken a very keen interest in a local development proposal and I’ve written several blog posts critical of the project (for the latest post regarding the development, click here). At present, my blog appears here (driven by my own email list) and in the Los Gatos Patch. There is going to be a meeting of the Los Gatos Town Council tomorrow night which will, hopefully, decide the fate of this project called Albright. In the hope of getting the broadest spectrum of information about Albright disseminated before tomorrow evening’s meeting, I have collected the comments from readers, both from this blog site and from the Patch and posted them below.
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Comments from “More on Albright/Netflix: “Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater!” posted on the Los Gatos Art Bridge blog on May 29, 20013:
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Molly Crowe Thank you for your thoughtful, well written letter. The historical references were particularly a helpful reminder of how manipulative the developers will be.
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Maria Ristow You do a great job connecting all the dots. I hope lots of people read this. Unfortunately most people in town favoring this project are responding to the rallying cry of, “Keep Netflix and Save the Schools!” They are not digging deeper to see what the opposition is all about.
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John Shepardson I appreciate your thoughts on the proposal, and your suggestions about how to go about the process of evaluating the merits of the proposal. There is a better way. At 350K square feet we can keep 63% of the school revenue under the developers’ proposal, and avoid the the risks and impacts of 550K sq. ft. of office space. With 35-feet high buildings we can keep our vistas, protect the privacy of our neighbors, and build Class A buildings that attract hi-tech companies. These buildings will allow Netflix to expand, since they only had agreed to lease 137,500 sq. ft. (assuming they haven’t already terminated). If they chose to expand more, there is another over 200K to expand into. 350K was determined by the court-ordered EIR to be the environmentally best alternative studied. At 350K the developer will make, his retained experts state, a return on investment (“ROI”) of 6.3%, less than 1% less than under the 550K build out. Moreover, the actual ROIs are probably much higher, otherwise, the Carlyle Group would not have invested–they demand high rates of return. There is an elegant solution here, and I hope for the benefit of the Town, the schools and the entire citizenry, that we advocate for, and achieve, that. JS:)
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edhawk This is the sort of reasonable and well considered thinking that I would hope drives the decision making in our town. Mr. Shenk’s intransigence on the one hand and the “knee jerk” response by newer, younger residents concerned with Netflix fleeing town with its big bags of money taken away from the schools, on the other hand, gets little done to resolve the real issues. Thank you so much for such thoughtful and constructive suggestions.
(to read the Patch responses, click here)
