The battle over smart growth The battle over smart growth (August 12, 2005)

Mountain View's many projects pit neighbors against would-be neighbors

PART TWO OF TWO Editor's Note: As city leaders move toward approving more housing on industrial sites, neighbors often feel left out of the process. The council will discuss a conversion at 274-300 Ferguson Drive at its next meeting this Tuesday, Aug. 16, 7 p.m. at City Hall.

By Jon Wiener

Beth Ericson was on her way to City Hall for an environmental planning commission meeting on a Wednesday evening in mid-July, figuring she might try at least one more time to influence the city officials in charge of rewriting the zoning rules at Mayfield Mall.

Before she left, she asked her husband if he was coming.

His response speaks volumes about the way many residents of the Monta Loma neighborhood have felt about city leaders ever since Toll Brothers proposed building 630 homes on the site of vacant HP offices.

"They're not going to listen to us," Ericson recalled her husband saying. "We're not developers."

As reported in last week's Voice , record profits are luring residential developers to Mountain View at a stunning pace. Owners of vacant industrial property have flooded the city with so many applications to convert their land to residential use that the pro-housing city council had to establish guidelines limiting where such projects could be built. Some areas, like the North Bayshore and Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman industrial parks, were put off-limits altogether.

The irony is that the places favored by housing advocates as the best candidates for "smart growth" developments -- dense housing projects built near job centers and transit lines -- tend be least popular with the people who already live here. And while the emotional battle over the future of Mayfield Mall has cooled down considerably, the larger conflict has not been resolved.
A numbers war

A year ago, crowds of Monta Loma residents were packing community meetings, accusing city staff members of corruption and mounting a campaign to stop the Toll Brothers project dead in its tracks. Traffic, park space and the impact on local schools were chief among residents' concerns. One particularly loud meeting was almost derailed by a heckler before then-Mayor Matt Pear shouted down the crowd.

But now many of those same neighbors are staying away from meetings, and it sounds unlikely they will ever forgive the city if the project is built as planned. Scott Rafferty, the heckler and the man behind the Mountain View Zoning Accountability Project, which essentially involved him accusing the city of various illegal activities on his Web site, has left town. Gloria Jackson, who led a petition drive, designed lawn signs against the project and passed out stickers reading "Stop the EIR," says she has given up.

"I'm out," she says. "I'm not going down there anymore."

If developers are finding a willing ear at City Hall, it's because leaders there are convinced that Mountain View suffers from a severe housing shortage.

According to the state Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mountain View is home to about 15,000 more jobs than employable residents. In the short term, that means more revenue for city services and more jobs for the people who live here. It also means high housing prices, something that has officials worried, and not just because corporate executives continually cite it as the main impediment to doing business in the area.

"All those cars stuck in traffic on the bridge waiting to get to Mountain View jobs are polluting Mountain View air," said Greg Perry, the city council's biggest proponent of adding density.

On the other end of the spectrum are people like Beth Ericson's husband and Gloria Jackson, who believe Mountain View has already done more than its share to address the Bay Area's housing needs. They have an advocate in council member Laura Macias, who questions the numbers and whether they signify an imbalance. A report released last week by the city of Palo Alto cited Mountain View's ratio of jobs to housing units as ideal, and called for more proactive efforts in Palo Alto.
In with the neighbors

Far from being unique to Mayfield, fights over in-fill housing projects are breaking out all over Mountain View and the Bay Area as a whole. Next week, the city council will decide whether to give the go-ahead to a controversial project to convert industrial land to 106 units of rowhouses at 274-300 Ferguson Drive, which borders a townhouse development at Whisman Station. And, in another Peninsula city, a group calling itself Concerned Citizens of Cupertino has qualified several measures for the November ballot that would set limits on building heights, densities and setbacks.

"Wherever you build, there's going to be a neighbor," said Mayor Matt Neely.

If there is a trick, say developers, it's to try to get neighbors on your side early in the process.

John Baer, vice president of development for Redwood City developer Matteson Real Estate, recently saw a six-acre project in Vallejo derailed by neighborhood opposition. His company is making an effort to be more sensitive to neighborhood concerns, but there is some inherent conflict between developer interests and neighborhood interests.

"You talk about traffic, you talk about shadow lines, you talk about all this other stuff," said Baer. "But what you're really talking about is that smart growth is driven by height and density."

"I don't blame them. I wouldn't want someone building a big, tall, dense building next to me either."

Baer says that tapered building heights -- designed to be lower the closer they are to existing single-family homes -- can be useful in lessening the visual impact of high-density development. Though Toll Brothers' 25-units-per-acre proposal counts as medium-density by most standards, it does feature single-story homes along the border with the existing neighborhood, something the company and city hope will make it more palatable.

"I think they can do it the right way, I really do," said Beth Ericson, on her way back home after the planning commission meeting, where officials debated things like the type of park space and number of below-market-rate units required of the development. "I just want them to build something that they'd want to live next to."

E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener@mv-voice.com

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