Mountain View YIMBY

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.