Fremont Must Spend Its Resources Wisely

By L. K. Mathur

The City of Fremont has sufficient resources to address its own problems of Affordable Housing & Maintain our existing Quality of Life. I also talk about Hill Side Initiative, Maesure 'R' for retrofit of Fire Houses and why 'Smart Growth' really means 'Dumb Growth' in Fremont.

I have lived in Fremont for most of my adult life. My two children were raised here, went to UC Berkeley and then to Ivy League Schools and both are physicians, my daughter works at UCLA Hospital and my son is A Neuro-surgeon doing residency. I like Fremont the way it was 23 years ago when I moved here and I like it the way it is now, I want to keep it that way. Fremont compared to its large neighboring charter cities is rather modest, in size, financial resources, regional influence and in wealth. Fremont possess sufficient resources to address all of its own problems if expended wisely.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Fremont should First provide housing for its fine teachers, police officers, firefighters and other low to moderate income workers. Only 20 % of our police officers live n Fremont. Same is true about teachers, firefighters and others. We have been building affordable housing apartments for last 10-15 years and still we did not solve this problem for them. These people want single family houses and not apartments. They want back yard for barbecue. The present city council members and the new aspirants have never tried to understand their needs. There are about 200 police officers, probably an equal number of firefighters, a few hundred teachers and low to medium income workers for a total of 1500-2000 people. We have $80 million in our redevelopment agency reserved for affordable housing. Their housing needs can easily be solved by subsidizing their housing with this money. If our politicians wanted to solve the affordable housing problem for our people, they could have done. But they are trying to mix our housing needs with that of the whole bay area. They want to build thousands of apartments and reserve 15 % for these people, which we know from our experience that our police officers etc. will not take it.

All this new affordable housing will then go to out of towners, leaving our affordable housing problem where it was and will probably become worse. We probably need to create FREMONT HOUSING AUTHORITY to manage our scarce & valuable affordable housing inventory. At the present time it is managed by the Alameda County Housing Authority and is allotted to people from other cities and hardly to our people.

MAINTAIN OUR QUALITY OF LIFE

We live in Fremont because we have a good quality of life. We simply can not diminish it by putting a few 5-10 story high apartment buildings in each neighborhood. We will be changing the skyline of each 1 or 2 story neighborhood. Where is the additional parking, play areas for children, schools for new kids and how do we address the safety concerns with our limited resources of police and fire departments. In any event, we should think of only 3 story apartment complexes or better the single family houses, easily nestled in the existing neighborhoods.

SUPPORT HILL SIDE INITIATIVE

I strongly support Hill Side Initiative. We have the most beautiful hills and probably the only thing in Fremont for its residents and children. Some interested developers, their Real Estate Agents Dutra Realty and the like, bypassed the existing 1981 Hill Side Initiative, almost got the permit for a 480 home development in the Hills as Phase-I of God knows how many phases. The things were caught in time to stop them from start building on the hills. The new initiative will stop these loop holes and will allow developments within certain size of lots.

SUPPORT MAJOR `R' FOR RETROFIT OF FIRE HOUSES

Some of our Fire houses were built more than 50 years ago and were simply people gathering houses and were converted to fire houses when the City of Fremont was formed. These need to be retrofitted for earthquake safety and a few additional ones need to be built to meet the city's additional needs.

SMART GROWTH IS REALLY DUMB GROWTH IN FREMONT

Smart Growth is building 5-10 story apartments next to BART Tracks. Our BART is located on or very close to Hayward Fault Line. These apartments are prune to serious damage in case of an earthquake. We all have the most recent memories of 1989 earthquake when many of these apartment buildings in San Francisco were damaged and many of these burned. The City of San Francisco has 40 times the resources than ours. Their budget is $5 billion and ours is mere $120 million. They could act in time and we may not act in time. We can not risk the lives of these people, simply because most of them are low income workers or welfare recipients.