Yes In My Back Yard

We are Mountain View YIMBY, advocating for more housing in our city and beyond. We are pro-housing activists fighting for more inclusive housing policies and a future of abundant housing in Mountain View. We drive policy change to increase the supply of housing at all levels and bring down the cost of living in our thriving city.

The San Francisco Bay Area is not “full” of too many people. It is full of opportunity to create a dynamic economy and housing market that work for everyone. The housing shortage is a political problem: Zoning and other restrictions have prevented construction of enough places for people to live. We want to fix this and make our community more welcoming and inclusive. Let’s legalize housing.

Mountain View YIMBY Endorses Lucas Ramirez for City Council

 Posted on July 21, 2022  |  Mountain View YIMBY Leads

Mountain View YIMBY, is proud to endorse Lucas Ramirez for City Council! Lucas has been a strong advocate for adding more housing in Mountain View, including affordable housing. He Championed the R3 zoning update in which Lucas pushed the city to study why missing middle housing types don’t pencil out in the city and possible form-based zoning solutions to remedy that problem Lucas has also supported rent stabilization of Mountain View’s mobile home parks and even pushed for rolling back the base rents to 2019 He has also supported closing the first three blocks of Castro Street into a pedestrian only zone, which has been very successful. [Read More]

Site Capacity Addendum

 Posted on July 13, 2022  |  Salim Damerdji

Executive Summary The City claims it can accommodate 14,783 units, but a more realistic estimate is 9,941, and the primary drivers of this discrepancy are: The City’s false assumption that 100% of pending projects will be built out by 2031 when historical data shows a third of pending units fail to be built in eight years. The City assumes, without evidence, that development rates will double in the El Camino Precise Plan and triple in the East Whisman Precise Plan. [Read More]

Regarding Mountain View Draft 2023-2031 Housing Element

 Posted on June 14, 2022  |  Pardis Beikzadeh, David Watson, Salim Damerdji, James Kuszmaul

Executive Summary Community outreach, while performed, did not shape the writing of the draft and failed to affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH). The city does not make AFFH a focal component of its site inventory. We find glaring omissions of analysis with respect to school segregation and environmental justice, and the few gestures towards AFFH in the site inventory are insufficient to overcome patterns of segregation. The city seeks to justify rather than address governmental constraints to housing production. [Read More]

Letter to Council regarding Governmental Constraints to housing production

 Posted on June 10, 2022  |  Michael Abramson, Pardis Beikzadeh, Ilya Gurin

To Mayor Ramirez and the members of City Council: Mountain View YIMBY respectfully proposes a set of reforms that we believe are necessary for the Housing Element to comply with state law. The RHNA target1 requires approximately doubling our current pace of homebuilding. We believe that the city cannot meet the target without reforming its processes (“removing constraints”, in Housing Element terminology). The draft Housing Element sidesteps this topic by calling for further study, which can neither bear fruit quickly enough to help Mountain View meet its numerical targets by 2031, nor satisfy the legal requirement to remove constraints to homebuilding2. [Read More]

Vote by June 7th

 Posted on June 5, 2022  |  David Watson

Don’t forget to vote in the election this week. We’re proud of our lead Pardis who voted for the first time today!

pardis

Letter to EPC regarding 555 West Middlefield Road Residential Project

 Posted on January 5, 2022  |  Raiza Singh

Re: Item 5.2 555 West Middlefield Road Residential Project To the Environmental Planning Commission: Mountain View YIMBY, a local volunteer advocacy group, expresses enthusiastic support for the proposed project at 555 West Middlefield. We like this project because: It is a no-displacement project that adds 323 new homes in place of surface parking! It includes 15% on-site below market rate homes! Walking distance to downtown, Caltrain, a grocery store, and Stevens Creek trail. [Read More]

Letter to council RE North Bayshore Circulation Study

 Posted on December 7, 2021  |  Kevin Ma

To Mayor Kamei and members of the City Council, MV YIMBY writes in support of the staff recommendations on the North Bayshore Circulation Study. We believe in Fixing Incentives to create the groundwork for more housing. As such, we support prioritizing transit and active transportation over cars in order to increase the number of homes in our community by addressing traffic concerns upfront for the whole project, in addition to the quality of life and environmental benefits. [Read More]

Letter to the Editor on Homekey projects

 Posted on November 23, 2021  |  Pablo Hernandez

This letter was originally published in the Mercury News I walk daily through our city of Mountain View, and daily I look into the eyes of a less fortunate human being who’s homeless. My mind gets foggy thinking about the time I had depleted my bank account at the height of the pandemic. Not a single cent was left on the day I signed a job offer that allowed me to pay for rent and stay in Mountain View. [Read More]

Comment on Mountain View City Council Item 3.1 Housing Element

 Posted on November 16, 2021  |  Salim Damerdji

Dear Mayor Kamei and Members of the City Council, Mountain View YIMBY would like to provide comments for Item 3.1 Housing Element. Planning the next decade of our city’s growth is no small undertaking, and staff deserves a huge ‘thank you’ for their conscientious work. While we know the city is still early in this process, we’d like to be proactive in identifying areas of opportunity, including addressing: Our over-reliance on the North Bayshore and East Whisman plan areas, which we do not believe will be built quickly enough to satisfy our housing targets. [Read More]

Comment on Mountain View City Council Item 3.1 Castro Pedestrian Mall

 Posted on October 12, 2021  |  Ilya Gurin

To Mayor Kamei and the members of the City Council: MV YIMBY writes in support of the proposed Castro pedestrian mall, specifically options B or C presented in the feasibility study, in accordance with staff recommendations. The closure of Castro to vehicles that was implemented as an ad hoc response to COVID has been overwhelmingly popular, and allayed many of the concerns heard when pedestrianization was first discussed in 2019. We note that car access will remain on Bryant and Villa streets, and (one-way) Blossom and Wild Cherry lanes, whereas Castro alone will be reserved for pedestrians and bicyclists, who have always constituted the large majority of traffic on Castro during the evening peak hours. [Read More]