Re: Agenda Item 6.1, April 28, 2026 City Council Meeting (Mixed-Use Development at 843-903 Castro Street, 700 West El Camino Real, and 750 Fairmont Avenue)

Dear Mayor Ramos and City Council,

Mountain View YIMBY recommends that Council approve the project known as Castro Commons, including approving the vacation of a portion of Fairmont Avenue.

The project has had a long history, starting as a 16 unit project in 2015 that would have replaced Gateway Park. It has since become the 140 stacked flat condo project it is today, with a paseo to maintain neighborhood connectivity and ground-floor retail to retain commercial opportunity. This was the product of extensive outreach to many members of the community and voluntary review by Design Review Consultation, a rarity given streamlining reform in state housing law.

The Assembly Housing & Community Development Committee heard AB 2252 (Lee) this afternoon on what the chair described as a presentation-only basis. No vote was taken, and AB 2252 is done for this session with no four-story fallback version planned.

We’ve been pushing for single-stair reform for a while. I spoke in support at Council in December. We asked it be included in the 2026 legislative program, and Council adopted it as platform item C.37 in February. Most recently, we asked the City to make AB 2252 a priority at the Cities Association.

Dear Staff of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission,

Regarding the preliminary draft map of where Senate Bill 79 applies, we are in general support of the map as it relates to the transit stops within the city of Mountain View.

A potential clarification is that for stations like those on Caltrain whose platforms generally face the public realm, that the “pedestrian access points” be instead the full perimeter of the platform in order to avoid jaggedness of the Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Zone boundaries. Alternatively, additional PAPs could include any Clipper Card reader stations on the platform.

Dear Mayor Ramos and Council Members,

Mountain View YIMBY would like to offer our bill priorities to the City and the bodies the city participates in, including the Cities Association and League of California Cities.

AB 2252 (Lee) on Single-Stair Reform

AB 2252 directs the state to allow single-stair projects in buildings of up to six stories in the building code by 2028; it would also allow local governments to do so earlier.

The Environmental Planning Commission met on April 15 to consider two items we’d written to them about earlier in the week: AB 130 streamlined approval and the citywide TDM ordinance. Our letters were the only public comment submitted on either item.

Item 5.1: AB 130 Administrative Approval

EPC voted 6-0 to recommend adoption, with a minor cleanup to strike a duplicate “small animal keeping” listing from the residential use table. The administrative approval process in the ordinance is what we asked for.

Re: Agenda item 5.1

Dear Chair and Members of the Environmental Planning Commission,

Mountain View YIMBY supports Item 5.1 and urges the Commission to recommend the proposed amendments to Council.

The administrative approval process in the draft ordinance is well designed. It eliminates the public hearing requirement for projects qualifying for the AB 130 statutory CEQA exemption, which is the most urgent change: without it, qualifying projects risk being deemed approved because the City cannot act on them within the statutory timelines. At the same time, the process preserves staff’s ability to grant case-by-case flexibility where the Code or a Precise Plan allows exceptions to development standards. That flexibility benefits housing projects and we support retaining it.

Re: Agenda item 6.1

Dear Chair Nunez and Members of the Environmental Planning Commission,

Mountain View YIMBY supports work on the Citywide TDM Ordinance. A standardized framework with a parking exemption pathway for residential projects is a significant step forward from the current ad hoc approach of imposing TDM requirements project-by-project. We appreciate the exemptions for residential trip caps, travel surveys, and driveway counts, and the decision to keep TMA membership optional given the Prop 218 concerns the staff report identifies. We ask the Commission to consider the following comments.

Mountain View City Council approved two significant housing projects in the East Whisman neighborhood at its March 10th meeting, together adding over 650 new homes to an area that has long been dominated by office parks and surface parking lots.

490 East Middlefield Road: 460 Mixed-Use Units (Item 6.2)

The headline item of the evening was a proposal by Development Partners to build a 460-unit mixed-use residential building at the corner of East Middlefield Road and Ellis Street. The project would replace a two-story commercial office building on a 2.86-acre site with a contemporary, seven-story mixed-use development featuring ground-floor retail, a pool, coworking space, and over 34,000 square feet of open space.

Mountain View’s February 10th Council meeting ran nearly to midnight, but the payoff was substantial: Council gave clear direction on the long-awaited R3 zoning update, approved a 2026 legislative platform that includes several housing production reforms we’ve been pushing for, and handled a consent calendar that included the 881 Castro street vacation for the Lot 12 affordable housing project.

R3 Zoning Update (Item 7.1)

This was the main event. The R3 zoning update has been in the works since 2019, and Council finally gave staff direction to complete it this year. The goal: replace the current R3 standards with objective, form-based standards that make multifamily housing feasible and encourage stacked flats over the townhome developments that have dominated recent R3 projects.

Dear Mayor Ramos and Council Members,

Mountain View YIMBY appreciates the opportunity to comment on Mountain View’s Legislative Program. There is a consistent theme that Mountain View advocates for maximum local control, especially on land use and housing. We urge the Council to ensure its positions on these issues are unambiguous and to avoid assisting “bad actor” jurisdictions that abuse their powers to kill housing projects arbitrarily.

Supported Items

We appreciate the inclusion of items on increased funding opportunities and displacement protections, including defending our local rent control ordinance, and the items that generally support increased access to housing, jobs, and services (Items C.8, C.10. C.25). We do appreciate the addition of Item 32, and encourage the City to actively advocate whenever it finds inconsistencies or ambiguities in state law which create uncertainty for both the City and developers.