San Jose is the 10th-largest city in the country, but unlike many California cities, San Jose has embraced density over sprawl.

Cara Eckholm is a visiting scholar at Cornell Tech’s Urban Tech Hub and develops housing in downtown San Jose. Eckholm wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times about why San Jose’s model could be the city of the future. She explained that San Jose’s politics allows it to embrace density.

“I think the political climate is really different there,” said Eckholm. “There’s a recognition that the state of California has a 2.5 million unit housing shortage. And political parties across the board in San Jose have gotten on board with the need to build.”

With height restrictions in place because of the nearby San Jose Airport, the city has turned to smaller urban villages throughout the city. Eckholm said San Jose is modeling itself after European “15-minute cities” like Paris and Barcelona.

San Jose has also made the process of developing easier than other cities.

“The city has tried to make that development process as seamless as possible through doing things like an environmental impact assessment that covers the entirety of the downtown,” said Eckholm. “That means that if you’re a developer and you want to build housing, so long as you’re compliant with that general review that the city did at the downtown, you don’t have to do your own costly and time-consuming study.”

Eckholm works for a company called Nabr, which builds sustainable housing in San Jose. She talked about residents’ reaction to all the new construction in their city.

“I was really floored just in response to writing the piece, which reflects my personal beliefs by the amount of outreach I got from people who were born in San Jose and were excited about what was to come for downtown,” she said.

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