Housing, pace of development top priorities in council race
With the Mountain View City Council on track to make land-use decisions that will affect the pace and the amount of development in the city for years to come, the candidates vying to represent residents all consider housing a top priority.
Mountain View already outpaces other cities in Santa Clara County in home construction and could see upward of 15,000 new rental and ownership units built in the near future. The council is exploring redeveloping three large portions of the city: North Bayshore, which includes the Google campus; East Whisman, which includes the Middlefield light rail station; and Terra Bella, bordered by Highway 101 and State Route 85. Excluding Terra Bella, which is still in the planning stage, these areas could also have nearly 6 million square feet of new office space.
The six candidates in the council race — incumbents Lenny Siegel and Pat Showalter and challengers Lucas Ramirez, Alison Hicks, Ellen Kamei and John Inks — differ on how quickly units should be built, how many should be geared for lowincome renters and how much commercial development should occur. They are competing for three seats.
Hicks, who has a background in urban planning throughout the Bay Area and helped form slow-growth group Livable Mountain View, favors building more housing at all levels of affordability while controlling the pace of office development.
“If we’re building a lot of housing while building a lot of offices, we’re just growing bigger and bigger but not bigger and better,
which is what our intention was,” Hicks said.
Inks, who served on the council from 2009 to 2016, identifies as a pro-business libertarian and said he would provide a perspective missing on the current council. He prefers streamlining the planning process to speed up development and keep costs down and is against increasing city subsidies or other protections for service workers and other low-income renters.
“You have to improve your economic conditions so you can afford housing in this area,” Inks said. “I don’t know how you can make the city affordable for everyone.”
Ramirez, who serves on the city’s planning commission and ran unsuccessfully for the council in 2016, considers himself a fierce advocate for renters.
Like Hicks, he prefers building as many housing units while slowing office growth, particularly in the East Whisman area. He wants to increase fees on developers to pay for transportation improvements, additional parks and impacts on schools. He supports rent control, favors increasing protections for renters and would like to see up to 20 percent of units in new market-rate developments go toward lower-income renters.
“I’m a renter and many folks I grew up with have left because they were also renters,” Ramirez said. “We need to know our neighbors to have a sense of community in Mountain View and they are being displaced, how can we get to know them? That is a key underlining motivation for me.”
Siegel said the best way to build more affordable units is to approve marketrate developments because of the citywide 15 percent below-market requirement. He said the city should subsidize as much housing as possible and that it should be near job centers and public transit to reduce the impact on the climate.
“The best thing we can do to reduce greenhouse gases in Mountain View is to locate housing near centers of employment,” Siegel said.
Kamei, another planning commission member, wants to help create housing for the “missing middle” — residents who make too much to qualify for low-income housing and too little to afford to purchase market-rate homes.
“I work in the public sector but (my partner and I) don’t make enough to afford the down payment it costs to live in Mountain View,” Kamei said. “I’ve seen on the (Environmental) Planning Commission that we’ve created zero middleincome housing in the six years I’ve served . ... I’d like
to tackle that on day one.”
Showalter said she fought in her first term for the city to add 9,850 new housing units in North Bayshore and she wants to make sure they are built in a second term. She also wants to continue working with school districts to help create teacher housing.
Inks is the only candidate opposed to the city’s rent control policy enacted by voters in 2016. He opposes providing parking spaces or services for vehicle dwellers and plans to vote against the employer ‘head tax” ballot measure.
“They say (the tax is) for transportation but they can use it for anything,” Inks said. “The measure should be specific on what the money will be used for.”
Hicks said she wants to use her planning background to create a more vibrant downtown because “it’s the part of the city that defines us.” She wants to boost communication between the city and residents, particular regarding a planned pedestrian tunnel under Central Expressway.
“There’s an incredible amount of development proposed for our downtown now and I don’t think people know about it ... such
as office development that could change the face of our downtown, probably not for the better,” Hicks said.
Siegel, who has championed closing off three blocks of Castro to cars, said if he retains his seat he wants to try closing off the blocks on Saturday evenings next summer. He thinks the closures are necessary because with more properties being developed there are fewer outdoor gathering spaces along the historic street.
“What we see in general from developers downtown is they want to provide outdoor spaces, but it’s difficult because of the small parcel sizes,” Siegel said. “I want to convince the downtown businesses that (street closures) will help them, not hurt them.”
Kamei and Ramirez both support getting vehicle dwellers off the street and rehoused. Kamei said she would like vehicle dwellers to register with the city so that officials know who is living in the vehicles and can begin working with them, as well as have employers find space for unhoused employees to safety park overnight. Ramirez supports expanding the “Lots of Love” experiment at two churches to public land and Shoreline Amphitheater parking lots with basic services and a path to permanent housing.