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.
Lucas has supported virtually every important housing project in Mountain View, covering the full gamut of housing types from supportive housing to unsubsidized housing. Some projects of note include:
- 777 West Middlefield (716 new homes, 144 offered at below market rates to teachers and city employees)
- 400 Logue (408 new homes, 62 are affordable units)
- 555 E Evelyn (471 new homes)
- 555 West Middlefield project (323 new homes replacing surface parking, 48 are affordable units). This was a contentious project that’s been delayed for over half a decade, as nearby neighbors continuously found new reasons to oppose the project even after the developer addressed previous concerns. Lucas also defended the project by voting against a motion that was meant to delay the project multiple more years.
- Two separate HomeKey projects with 148 supportive housing units to pull people out of homelessness
- The Gamel Way project builds 121 new homes while keeping all the existing low-income residents housed, demonstrating that re-development without displacement is possible! Here the City’s willingness to work with the developer to find a path forward was crucial to the project’s survival. Lucas helped shape that path. It is another great example of the kind of housing development that Lucas has been supportive of.
- The La Avenida affordable housing project, which is the City’s first 2016 County Measure A funded project. (100 affordable homes).
- The Montecito Project by Charities Housing is a fully affordable development of 84 total homes, including 21 2-bedroom and 21 3-bedroom apartments. A third of the units will be devoted to permanent supportive housing or “rapid rehousing” for those in emergency need of a place to live.
- 950 El Camino Real (70 affordable homes, 11 reserved for folks with disabilities)
- 660 Mariposa Ave (48 naturally affordable homes refurbished and preserved, along with 226 new homes on Villa Street)
- Downtown Lot 12, a City-owned parking lot that will be redeveloped with a 5-story, mixed-use building with 120 affordable rental units by Alta Housing. This is the first 2016 County Measure A funded project on City-owned property, and it is also the first SB 35 project on City-owned property! Lucas pushed for not requiring Alta Housing to provide 160 replacement public parking spaces onsite. This would have cost Alta millions of dollars and possibly jeopardized the project entirely.
- 1255 Pear Ave, a 635-unit project by Sobrato, is the first housing project approved in North Bayshore. While it was approved by the Council in 2018, several additional votes were necessary in 2019 to keep the project alive and moving forward, including critical changes in the Parkland Dedication Ordinance.
We believe that Lucas Ramirez is the best candidate for City Council and we wholeheartedly endorse him! Check out his website, follow him on Twitter, and donate to his campaign.