Mountain View YIMBY

Endorsement of project at 1265 Montecito

Posted on November 2, 2022 | David Watson, Alexander Melendrez

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! [Read More]

Mountain View YIMBY's 2022 Council Endorsements

Posted on September 21, 2022 | Mountain View YIMBY Leads

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! [Read More]

R3 Zoning Update Process Concerns

Posted on September 5, 2022 | Pardis Beikzadeh

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. [Read More]

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, 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. [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]

Yes In My Back Yard