Mountain View YIMBY is thrilled to endorse Emily Ramos for the open seat on the Mountain View City Council. As a dedicated leader of our organization for many years, Emily has a deep understanding of the city’s housing crisis and a proven track record of working towards creating more affordable housing options for Mountain View residents.

As a member of the Rental Housing Commision and the current vice-chair, Emily has been instrumental in implementing a law that protects 15 thousand families from significant rent increases and evictions. She also has experience as Preservation and Protection Associate at SV@Home, where she gained deep knowledge and experience with anti-displacement policies and as a board member of the Community Services Agency, where she helped connect residents to receive assistance to prevent them from losing their homes during the pandemic. Along with her work with YIMBY, she’s also a long-time member of the League of Women Voters housing committee. Furthermore, her engagement with many different groups, including community organizations, and her understanding of the city’s government and current issues, positions her to be able to collaborate and work effectively with her fellow council members from day one.

Recommended site inventory changes:

1. Add two additional city-owned lots downtown to the site inventory.
2. Add all sites from the “back pocket” into the site inventory. 
3. Add R2 sites in high opportunity areas South of El Camino with density assumptions derived based on SB 10’s allowance for 30’ heights and ten-plexes.

Recommended programmatic changes

1.2 Eliminate Parking Minimums Standards for Affordable Housing Developments

1.3 Review and Update Ordinance and Precise Plan Residential Standards

Executive Summary

On July 14th, 2022, Mountain View YIMBY provided the City with a data-driven analysis of site capacity assumptions in Draft 1. The letter in front of you replicates our previous methodology to update our findings for Draft 2, which likewise fails to justify its capacity assumptions. Our main results are presented in Table 1, and the key takeaways are:

1. Despite HCD’s review letter¹ reminding the City that it “must demonstrate [pending] units are expected to be constructed during the planning period,” Draft 2 shares Draft 1’s unjustified assumption that 100% of pipeline projects will be built by 2031, when data shows a third of pending units fail to be built in 8 years.

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Re: Item 6.1 Revised 2023-2031 Draft Housing Element

To City Council:

MV YIMBY appreciates the work of staff and Council in working to create a compliant Housing Element. However, we are concerned that the revised draft still does not meet the bar of being compliant and, more fundamentally, does not sufficiently address the housing crisis.

We believe there is still time available to make changes, even if it may lead to delays with the EIR. It is better to take time and carefully prepare than to submit a less-than-compliant document requiring future revision.

We continue to believe that this housing element draft is a continuation of the existing policies that have resulted in a shortage of housing.

Site Inventory

We maintain that the general points of our earlier Site Capacity Addendum still apply to this revised draft.

Pipeline Projects

**Already-completed projects: **950 West El Camino Real had its public grand opening ceremony on May 6, 2022. In a Planning Commission meeting on Nov 14, staff stated that the project was opening and occupied under a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy for months. We are concerned that there could be other projects counted in under the 6th despite having long TCOs pre-June 2022.

Regarding Item 5.1 of the Environmental Planning Commission December 7th 2022:

We’re writing to bring to your attention that SB330 bans any change that would reduce a site’s residential development capacity from what it was on January 1st, 2018. It seems like this may apply to the village center designation, which previously was only vaguely defined in the general plan. While it’s good to have specificity in the zoning, it appears that these new more objective plan standards may actually reduce the residential capacity of these sites. To avoid this, the new open space requirements should be paired with higher FAR and/or higher height limits for these sites.

Mountain View YIMBY is excited for the new affordable housing development at 1265 Montecito!

Mountain View needs more affordable homes!

1265 Montecito Ave will be a new ground up 100% affordable 5-story 85-homes housing development with 45 on-grade parking stalls and 85 indoor, secured bike parking spaces on the 1.04 acre lot. That’s more bike parking than car parking (For those curious that’s a density of 83.18 units an acre, which is a pretty good use of space!)

Mountain View YIMBY is excited to share our full set of endorsements for this year’s City Council elections.

Ramirez

Mayor Lucas Ramirez got our early endorsement back in July. As we wrote back then, Lucas has been a strong advocate for adding more homes in Mountain View. He championed efforts to tackle the missing middle housing problem, supported a local SB 330 ordinance to prevent displacement, rent stabilization of Mountain View’s mobile home parks, and more! During his time on the council he voted for many housing projects. Check out our early endorsement post for all the details!

Re: Concerns on the R3 Zoning Update Process

To Advanced Planning Manager Anderson:

Mountain View YIMBY strongly supports ensuring that R3 zoning is reformed to allow for more homes to be built. However, we would like to share with the Council some concerns about the ongoing process, specifically concerning two items: the structure of the recent workshops and the revised plan presented therein.

The structure of the community workshops failed to honor the city’s statutory responsibility¹ to affirmatively further fair housing. We participated in all six of the recent neighborhood workshops and noted that attendance at these workshops (see Appendix) was not representative of the city. The demographic surveys conducted in the meetings all show renters being a clear minority, despite being a majority in Mountain View. Additionally, while staff did provide Spanish and Chinese translation services, they were little used, indicating a lack of meaningful feedback from these populations. We recommend that the city rectify the deficiency of public input by conducting proactive outreach to tenant and ethnic minority groups.

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, so the city could study and solve the problem of missing middle housing not penciling out in the city.

A steadfast and studied advocate for protecting renters, Lucas has supported a local SB 330 ordinance to prevent displacement, 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.