Letter to Council regarding Governmental Constraints to housing production
June 9, 2022
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.
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.
Introduction
Mountain View consistently acknowledges its responsibility to help alleviate the Bay Area’s critical shortage of homes and the need to build more homes.
Although Mountain View already leads Santa Clara County and the Peninsula in terms of homebuilding relative to current population, we need to roughly double our pace to meet the RHNA target. Remarkably, despite a supportive Planning Commission and City Council, developers uniformly perceive Mountain View as a hostile place to do business. A close look at the city’s working processes reveals many procedures that are contrary to the universally stated goal of building more homes.
To that end, the city commissioned the Development Review Assessment by Matrix Consulting (“Matrix Study”). We agree with its recommendations, believe that implementing them all would make a significant improvement, and commend staff on work they have already undertaken to this end. However, we are disappointed that the draft Housing Element barely hints at the Matrix Study recommendations3, deferring most of them to further “review.”
Our analysis is also informed by informal guidance published by the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD)4. The dependence on further review corresponds to a “key area of non-compliance”: “Put[ting] off analysis to a ‘study.’” Even more broadly, we believe that the Housing Element’s constraints analysis fails to “guide solutions”, another “common overarching issue” identified by HCD.
Earlier this year, we undertook a series of interviews with local developers and arrived at our own conclusions about what reforms the city can undertake to meet our home production goals without compromising quality. Although we also advocate for zoning changes to expand housing capacity, here we present reforms that will maximize the use of existing zoning.
We believe that the core responsibility of city staff with regard to development projects is to help the applicant produce an application that complies with zoning and all other applicable codes as quickly as possible. However, our conversations with developers have revealed that working procedures at the departments of Planning, Building, and Public Works are not designed with this goal in mind. The result is unnecessary delay and even increased building cost. The already overtaxed review process must be streamlined to reduce the burden on staff, increase throughput and enable more permits to be granted each year.
