Even before burdensome and complex regulations plunged a prominent Japantown business owner and his family into near financial ruin, the unintended consequences from San Jose’s historic preservation rules had already bubbled to the surface.
While Japantown has a large number of buildings steeped in historical significance, it’s also become representative of the ambiguous, lengthy and costly bureaucracy involving these structures. It’s a cumbersome system, business owners say, that creates the opposite of the desired effect: neglect or abandonment instead of investment and preservation.
Japantown Business Association President Tamiko Rast, along with her family, has spent decades navigating the complex regulations and has experienced the frustrations firsthand. Along a two-block stretch, Rast noted nine condemned buildings. She even helped board some of them up, chased away arsonists, and was assaulted by trespassers coming out of the buildings. Their state of disrepair was not because property owners did not want to fix them, she asserts, but because the city has made it nearly impossible to do so.
“These city and county processes are so overwrought, so complicated, so far removed from the middle- and working-class people in Japantown that you either bankrupt yourself trying to keep up with regulation or you have to sell everything you have just to fight it,” Rast said.
But after years of complaints, a group of elected officials is proposing that the city reevaluate historic designations and their related processes to make them more straightforward, faster and cost-effective.
“We’ve heard a lot from residents and business owners in Japantown in particular recently around some of the business closures and some of the ways that the current historic preservation ordinance may be adding more friction to the process than may be necessary,” District 3 Councilmember Anthony Tordillos told The Mercury News before presenting the proposal at Wednesday’s Rules Committee meeting. “I think a particular problem that we’ve seen in Japantown is just some of these older properties get passed down to newer or younger generations. (We need to make) sure that they can afford to continue to invest in and keep them up to date. But it’s a problem that extends far beyond the reaches of Japantown, as I’ve heard even in my own neighborhood and in other parts of District 3 about some of the barriers to maintaining some of these historic properties.”
The need to reevaluate the regulations involving historic buildings took on new meaning recently, after Jordan Trigg and his family were forced to close some of their Japantown businesses. They previously told The Mercury News they were unaware that some of the properties they purchased were on the historic resources inventory, which made permitting and remodeling significantly more costly and complicated.
There is no legal requirement in real estate disclosures to note when properties are historic, so Rast said many people in Japantown, including legacy families, are unaware of the more cumbersome regulations.
“People often find out when they pull permits for their buildings and most of the time, because of the fact that Japanese-Americans were interned and had less inclination to deal with any government entity post-World War II, there’s a lot of unpermitted building here,” Rast said. “They find out that not only do they have to meet historic regulations, but they have to correct the former owners’ unpermitted building on top of that.”
Rast also added that there is no handbook or strict framework to follow, which she thinks gives the planning department too much leeway to dictate what property owners can and cannot do.
The proposal — submitted by Tordillos and co-signed by Mayor Matt Mahan, Vice Mayor Pam Foley, and District 4 and District 6 Councilmembers David Cohen and Michael Mulcahy — aims to improve outreach while taking a multi-pronged approach to reforming aspects of the existing policy that business and homeowners maintain have held back progress.
Part of the policy reforms includes exploring the creation of an amnesty program for unpermitted structures on the historic inventory that do not cause health or safety hazards. They also include creating a framework for demolishing or removing structures from the historic inventory when they are in substandard condition or when the historic features are no longer evident.
Tordillos said the proposal also seeks to modernize some of the requirements for features, such as windows, to align with the city’s climate and safety goals.
Mahan said that the city was committed to striking a responsible balance between investment in jobs and housing and protecting and leveraging historic assets, calling the situation “not an either-or.”
The city needs to make the process significantly easier because if not, “you just get worse outcomes,” regardless of where the project is in the city, he said.
“We hear over and over again from people in the community who own and want to invest in historic properties that the process is too slow, too expensive and often not clear enough,” Mahan said. “It has become in some parts of town, particularly around downtown and Japantown, a major impediment to the very investment we desperately want to see, the investments people want to make in refurbishing old spaces or, when appropriate, redeveloping underutilized, abandoned or vacant buildings and lots into uses that are vibrant and community-serving.”
The proposal is currently undergoing a workload analysis by the city to determine whether it is manageable and what resources will be required to implement it. Tordillos said he hoped to bring back more options and analysis by March to shape the final ordinance.
“We’re certainly trying to move quickly here because we understand that this has been a problem that has existed for many years,” Tordillos said. “The longer that it goes on, the bigger the scale of the problems.”
Although the problem has long been a sore spot, Rast credited Tordillos and Mahan for pushing the reforms forward.
“It has completely hamstrung our development and it’s demoralizing,” Rast said. “Why would you invest in this community when you cannot even take care of the buildings next door. It doesn’t make sense.”