Alta Housing’s latest project, which proposes to build 108 fully affordable housing units on Terra Bella Avenue, was enthusiastically approved by the Mountain View City Council Tuesday night.

The project represents a unique moment of cross-company collaboration: Public Storage, which owns a site that neighbors Alta Housing’s 1020 Terra Bella Ave. property, will donate half an acre of land to the affordable housing nonprofit. The land swap will allow double the number of affordable units to be built on the site, which will be fully buffered from U.S. Highway 101 by a new, multi-story Public Storage facility at 1040 Terra Bella Ave.

"It happened that Alta Housing just recently purchased the land next to us, and it opened the door to have a creative idea to give back to the city, to give back to the community, more residential units that are affordable," said Andres Friedman, head of development for Public Storage, at the March 14 meeting.

The Alta Housing project includes a new, six-story residential building and a two-level parking garage. The 108 units would include 49 one-bedroom, 29 two-bedroom and 28 three-bedroom apartments, along with two manager units. The project is funded in part by a $13.5 million loan from the city’s Housing Impact fund, which the council supported back in September 2022.

The high proportion of two- and three-bedroom apartments means more families can live here, which made the proposal especially attractive to the council. The project will serve extremely low-income households earning between 30 to 60% of the area median income.

Alta Housing CEO Randy Tsuda said that children who live at the property will attend Theuerkauf Elementary School and Crittenden Middle School in the Mountain View Whisman School District.

“I think one of the blessings about the location of this site is that it’s actually on the city’s designated safe routes to school,” Tsuda added.

The council also supported the redevelopment plans for the neighboring Public Storage site, which include replacing 18 single-story storage buildings with two, multi-story public storage buildings. One of the proposed buildings is six stories tall, and the other is four.

“I think that this land swap, essentially, that you are working on is creating a much better project for both of you,” Vice Mayor Pat Showalter said during the meeting. “And certainly that means we’re getting a much better project for the city of Mountain View.”

The only part of the project that gave some council members pause was the plan for utilities. Alta Housing’s proposal already included putting utilities along San Rafael Avenue underground, but council member Lisa Matichak said she’d like to see the utilities along the Terra Bella Avenue side of the project go underground, too.

The developer estimated that undergrounding utilities along the project’s Terra Bella Avenue frontage would cost around $1 million, and would stop the project from being financially feasible. So Matichak proposed that the city find a way to cover the cost.

“If the city wanted to pay for the undergrounding, the odds are the best approach would be for the applicant to do the undergrounding with a reimbursement agreement from the city,” said Public Works Director Dawn Cameron at the meeting.

Matichak proposed that the council consider adding the project to the city’s draft Capital Improvement Program (CIP), which the majority of council supported. Whether the project makes it onto the final CIP will be determined at the council’s March 28 meeting, during which the council is slated to decide on what projects will make the cut.