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“No housing? No plan!” is expected to be the battle cry at a rally to be held before Tuesday’s City Council study session on the North Bayshore precise plan.
The rally is being organized by the Campaign for a Balanced Mountain View, a group of residents seeking to draw attention to the area’s history of allowing job growth to outpace housing development, and how the proposed North Bayshore precise plan could make the area’s housing shortage worse.
The precise plan would allow 3.4 million square feet of new office development, expanding the headquarters of Google and LinkedIn, among others. There’s no housing slated for the 500-plus acre area north of Highway 101, despite Google’s support for building as many as 5,000 homes around its headquarters even if it caused delays in approving new office construction.
One of the group’s members who will be at the rally is Mountain View resident Betsy Collard, who has said she has seen many longtime residents being forced out of the city as skyrocketing demand for housing has steadily driven up rents for years.
“It was very disappointing to see the planning commission not even consider a study of housing in North Bayshore,” Collard said of last Wednesday’s meeting, when the commission opposed adding housing to the North Bayshore area. “Given what everybody has agreed is a very difficult housing-jobs imbalance, to just plan for more office space over there is very troubling, especially when office space — more than housing — causes traffic problems. What is the harm in waiting and letting a study happen about the feasibility of housing? This is one of the few chances we have in Mountain View to meet the city’s housing needs in a planned community. Some people say we should just add a project here and a project here, and a project here – as if that addresses housing. It doesn’t.”
The group says that, according to census data, the current job boom has already brought more jobs to Mountain View than the 2012 general plan predicted there would be by 2030, and that there are now 48,000 more jobs than employed residents in the city.
The rally will begin at 6:15 p.m. on Sept. 9 in front of City Hall at 500 Castro Street. The council meeting starts at 6:30 p.m.
According to recent Census data Mountain View has just about the same number of residents as it has Jobs. I don’t call this an imbalance. It’s a red herring issue.
Besides, we all know that the only housing that will be built will not be affordable. Let’s quit pretending.
GDM, are you comparing jobs to residents, or jobs to employed residents? “Residents” includes children, nonworking adults, retirees, and the involuntarily unemployed.
As to the argument that newly built housing will be expensive, look at what’s happened here:
1. Shortsighted city planners block almost all housing development even as employment surges.
2. The new housing units that trickle in, unsurprisingly, command a high price in the housing market.
3. Anti-housing advocates point to those prices and say, “see, we shouldn’t build any more housing, because any housing we build will not be affordable!”
I hope the fallacy is obvious. The jobs are here now, including high-paying ones, and more are expected under the General Plan. Many people want to live near where they work. If you build it, they’ll live there, and who cares if they pay a lot for it — they’re off the housing market! If you don’t build it, they’ll drive up the prices on what already exists and leave nothing affordable for middle and lower class families.
So that means I don’t count as a resident in your statistic because I am retired, even though I live in a housing unit.
More housing means more traffic, does anyone really think the new tenants will work in Mt. View or google?
@Hmm
Apparently you and far too many others are under this absurd notion, as if somehow, when new housing is built, new people are magically created to fill it.
Let’s talk about the objection that “new housing will be too expensive so it won’t help”.
Suppose XYZ Corp build 1,000 luxury apartments in Mountain View that cost more to rent than most of us can afford. Is this useless to us? No, quite the opposite. To see why, let’s play it out.
Either people who already live in Mountain View will move to the new luxury apartments. That will free up their current apartments that in all likelihood cost less in rent. People who move into those vacated units will in turn leave units of slightly lower rent. This cascade continues, until units that most us can afford become available.
What if the people who move into the new luxury apartments don’t already live in Mountain View? It will still help us. There are plenty of luxury apartments to choose from in the Bay Area, so these residents will most likely be moving to Mountain View to reduce their commute time. That means less traffic for the rest of us.
New housing is needed in Mountain View. It will help you and me, even if neither of us move into the new units.
@GDM — Did you actually READ what Jeremy Hoffman said? Here’s the exact quote: ” ‘Residents’ includes children, nonworking adults, retirees, and the involuntarily unemployed.”
Given current real estate market conditions, “affordable housing” is just an idealistic, unaffordable dream — a sad joke for economically ignorant people. Those who support it think with their emotions but not their intellects. They haven’t a clue about basic economics or real estate market dynamics. We could build large numbers of ugly, high density apartment complexes and totally ruin the quality of life in Mountain View. The painfully blunt truth is that unless they are very heavily subsidized by MV taxpayers, those shabby units never will be affordable to lower income renters. Save Mountain View. Stop useless attempts to force affordable housing upon Mountain View and its residents and taxpayers.
only hope is that City Council is flexible and WISE enough to see that times have changed
and not stick to their guns
those leaving the council do not seem to want to LOSE FACE face and admit that times have changed and a new plan is needed
it is not their fault
times have changed
mel
It’s a short walk to Google from the other side of 101 (Permanente Creek Bridge, Shoreline, Rengstorff), and it’s a quick bike ride to google along the bay from East Palo Alto. Please NO HOUSING north of 101, it’s a traffic mess there now and will only become worse with new housing. Also this area will end up in the bay with global warming. Keep the housing on the other side of 101!
I can no longer go to Shoreline for an after work walk because it takes me 45 minutes to get home on Shoreline — the after work traffic is just as bad as post concert traffic! Thank goodness I can still go to Shoreline on weekends when there isn’t a concert.
How many people showed up?
Mountain View is a great Bay Area city, but is gentrifying rapidly. It’s too late to stop the train, but we can slow it down.
Demand an immediate rent stabilization ordinance that will freeze current rents as of 9/1/2014 and allow capped annual increases based on San Francisco’s successful model. In 5-10 years (after the next housing pricing cycle), it will be significantly improved for renters and create a stable community.
It’s really the only way. Don’t let the greedy liars argue otherwise.
“Successful” ?!?
Rent control is something that appeals mightily to that small part of the economically naïve public that thinks it will benefit personally. They are willfully blind to its downsides.
You have a situation where a particular commodity (residential rental space) is expensive because it is WORTH a lot — people are willing to pay the high prices. If you artificially reduce those prices, then even more people are willing to pay them, consequently a market shortage develops. Vacancies vanish utterly, and newcomers seeking rentals are shafted. Owners of older rental property (since any construction newer than 1995 is exempted from any local rent control, by state law) first are incentivized to jack their rents way up in anticipation of the control — newly imposing today’s peak rents even on longtime renters whose landlords have not been raising them as fast as the market price, and keeping those peak rents even if there’s another rent-market bust, exactly as happened after the dot-com boom. Otherwise, owners whose income actually becomes limited by the rent control are incentivized BY IT to take units off the market and use them for something else. That’s why the number of housing units that would be covered by rent control will steadily decline, even as demand is high.
I’ve been through this, as a renter, in a couple of towns. I thought it was a good idea when first proposed. It was a disaster in practice — it does nothing about the CAUSES of rent increase (limited supply and high demand), on the contrary it makes them worse. A few lucky people benefit. The rest of the population, most especially newcomers, finds the door to Mountain-View residency slammed in its face. Think what that will do for our existing traffic problems…
I agree with “Common Sense” re rent control. In the short and long runs, it is a perverse lottery for people lucky enough to steal a controlled unit — thru the “good old boy/girl/person” network. In the long run, it is incredibly destructive and removes all incentive for landlords to maintain their rental units. Housing stock ages and degrades, and the city along with it. All you have to do is to look at the incredible problems it has created in SF and Berkeley and places like NYC where rent-controlled units are for the lucky few and trade on the black market.
@ What was the turnout for the rally?
20 People see the KTVU video .
http://www.ktvu.com/videos/news/mountain-view-rally-for-housing/vCrT7g/