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.

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:

1. 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.
2. The City assumes, without evidence, that development rates will double in the El Camino Precise Plan and triple in the East Whisman Precise Plan.

To maintain the commendable 33% No Net Loss buffer that the City Council and Planning Commission approved, the City should rezone for an additional 4,842 units.

Executive Summary

1. Community outreach, while performed, did not shape the writing of the draft and failed to affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH).

2. 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.

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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. Mountain View needs more reform, now, with direct support from the City Council.

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

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. This site provides a great location to lead a car-free lifestyle to the residents.
• New pedestrian and bike path connection from Cypress Point Drive to W Middlefield makes Stevens Creek trail more easily accessible to the neighbors living south of Cypress Point Drive. Further bike and pedestrian improvements along Moffett Boulevard to the north and west of this project would be most welcome!
• The 1.34 acres of land dedicated for a new park will be a welcome addition to the neighborhood, creating a space for socializing.
• The developer has listened to community feedback and made an effort to line up the residential frontage facing Cypress Point Drive with existing trees or parking lots to the south of Cypress Point Drive in order to minimize the impact to privacy of neighbors to the south of that street.
• The developer has made an effort to preserve as many heritage trees as possible, transplanting many and planting additional trees to make up for the ones they are requesting to remove.

We hope that you recommend a speedy approval of this project to the council!

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.

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.

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:

1. 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.

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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. Eliminating cars on Castro will maintain the improved safety and overall visitor experience that exist now under the temporary closure.