The Council’s last meeting before summer ran past 10 p.m. and carried a 34-item consent calendar, but there wer two interesting housing items. Council adopted a Community Ownership Action Plan 7-0, and approved a small downtown infill project at 333 Franklin Street 6-1. The split on Franklin came down to parking, of course.
The Community Ownership Action Plan (Item 7.1)
The Community Ownership Action Plan (COAP) is the city’s implementation of the Housing Element Program 3.2, the tenant-displacement strategy. Housing Director Wayne Chen presented it after a two-year process with the consultant team at Community Planning Collaborative and a resident advisory committee. The plan’s required target is quite modest: facilitate the acquisition and preservation of at least 50 community-owned units over five years, focused on rent-stabilized (CSFRA) units and mobile-home parks, the housing most exposed to redevelopment.
This item encompassed three items. Council added $1 million to the project fund, bringing it to $5 million; staff expects the city’s money to draw roughly four outside dollars for every city dollar, toward the $25 million they estimate the 50 units will need. It added $425,000 for capacity-building, bringing that fund to $500,000. And it authorized the City Manager to approve individual community-ownership projects and funding agreements without each one returning to Council, with safeguards and a 30-day public notice after any funding decision. Staff had wanted a third-party agent to run the funding but could not find one able to do it in the county, so the process stays in-house for now.
The room was full of mobile-home-park residents. Speakers from Sunset Estates and Santiago Villa, the Mountain View Mobile Home Alliance, and the South Bay Community Land Trust all backed the plan. Joan Berdoski stated their position: residents own their homes but rent the land under them, and a park sale can erase that overnight. The plan names mobile-home community ownership as eligible for support, which is what brought them out. Councilmember Kamei, who made the motion, tied the work to the displacement the city watched happen when naturally affordable buildings were demolished. Mayor Ramos called preservation “the squishiest of the Ps” and argued Mountain View is ahead of other cities in trying to do it at all.
333 Franklin Street: a downtown infill win, over one objection (Item 8.1)
The Franklin project replaces an eight-unit apartment building that the city red-tagged in 2024 for unsafe conditions. The applicant, Silicon Valley Custom Homes, will build an 11-unit, three-story building plus two detached ADUs, for 13 units on a 7,500-square-foot lot in the downtown precise plan. Eight of the units are below-market-rate: seven at 80% of area median income and one at 50%. That is more than 60% of the building affordable, well past the city’s 15% requirement, and it qualified the project for a 50% state density bonus. The project meets SB 330’s one-for-one replacement of the eight prior rent-stabilized units. It is exempt from CEQA as a Class 32 infill project, and the Zoning Administrator had already recommended approval.
Downtown precise plan housing is not required to provide parking, and this project provides almost none: two spaces, one accessible and one EV charger, with no tenant parking. CEO Jenny Kang told the Council that basement parking would not fit the narrow lot and would not pencil at this level of affordability. Councilmember Ramirez moved approval and noted the project advances the city’s affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing goals, with a specific Housing Element call-out for downtown. Councilmember Hicks supported it but said she did not want housing “planted in concrete,” pointing at the driveway and hardscape around the building and asking for objective design standards that would do better.
Councilmember McAlister was the lone no vote. His reasoning was parking. He said the building supplies none, so tenants will park on the street and add to the squeeze when the Lot 12 garage project displaces parking downtown. He went further, speculating about who would live there: “looking at the demographics that are going to move in there, most of them will probably need cars to get to work,” and he was skeptical the affordable tenants would own the EV the project wired a charger for. The motion carried 6-1. Ramos, supporting it, flagged a real unfairness the project itself did not cause: the tenants displaced by the 2024 red-tag got no relocation assistance or right of first refusal, because the application came in after the building was vacated and the older relocation ordinance exempted displacements ordered by city enforcement. “That’s on us,” she said, “not on the applicant.”
On the consent calendar
A few consent items are worth flagging. The Council accepted an Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grant that Councilmember Showalter called the largest affordable-housing grant the city has received, with $35 million of it going to the Evelyn Avenue affordable housing project and the rest to sustainable transportation. It accepted the North Bayshore trip-cap monitoring report; Hicks used it to note that since 2015 transit use in North Bayshore has fallen by half and biking by two-thirds while solo driving is up by a third, and she asked for fresh thinking before the next report. And it modified the employee homebuyer assistance policy, which lets city staff borrow to live closer to work. The Council also adopted the Biodiversity and Urban Forest Plan (Item 6.1) unanimously after a long hearing, and it deferred a community-engagement policy (Item 4.14) to September.
Separately, we submitted a letter to the Council that evening on local single-stair implementation, asking staff to explore letting small apartment buildings use a single staircase now that the state bill the city supported, AB 2252, has stalled. It was written communication rather than an agenda item, so it was not discussed, but it is on the record for the staff referral we asked for.
Our take
333 Franklin is what downtown housing should look like. A condemned eight-unit building becomes 13 homes, more than 60% of them affordable, a block from Caltrain, and it works financially because the downtown precise plan does not force parking onto it. The applicant explained this directly: add a parking podium and the affordable units stop penciling. It’s a straightforward economic argument, and we’ve been making it for years.
Which is why McAlister’s dissent is so frustrating. Reasonable people can dislike a building with no tenant parking. But the argument he made would, as a general rule, block affordable infill like this one, and he made it by guessing at the car-ownership habits of people who do not live there yet. The right question for a project on objective standards is whether it meets them, and this one does, full stop. The good news is that it was one vote, and the council majority understood the importance of getting new homes built.
On the Community Ownership Action Plan, we are glad to see it adopted, with a caveat about scale. Preservation keeps specific existing residents in their homes, which is its real value, especially for the mobile-home-park communities most exposed to a single sale. It is also slow and expensive: 50 units over five years, at a subsidy target near $500,000 each. That makes preservation a complement to building new homes, not a substitute, and a risk is that a celebrated preservation plan becomes a reason to ease off production. Two things we liked: the funding model is honest that it needs far more money than the city has put in, and delegating project approvals to staff should cut the months a community-ownership deal would otherwise wait for a Council date. We will be watching how the promised transparency on those staff-level funding decisions actually works in practice.
Both pieces, preservation and production, point the same direction, which is also why we sent the single-stair letter the same night. The cheapest new family-sized homes the city can get are the ones it stops making artificially expensive to build.