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Over the past several years, our community has experienced significant change. Mountain View has been an agricultural community built around a train station, a post-WWII commuter suburb characterized by strip malls and office parks, and a burgeoning Silicon Valley city.
With new open office configurations and tremendous growth of our major employers over the past decade, Mountain View has experienced eight times more job growth than housing growth. In reaction, housing costs have escalated, our lower-income residents have been displaced and homelessness has risen. Within the past five years, the city has often had the highest rents in the Bay Area.
We’ve also seen escalating effects of the climate crisis on our city, including cycles of drought followed by heavy rain and flooding. Sea level and the accompanying storm water is projected to rise between 23 and 42 inches within the next 50 years, threatening to inundate homes and businesses. We are already seeing short-term effects that will only get worse.
The pandemic has fundamentally changed us. With a rise in hybrid work and online shopping, people in Mountain View now go out more for experiences and community, and less for work and daily errands. This new reality requires the city of Mountain View to approach land use in a different way, as lifestyles and working patterns change.
All of these big changes are making new demands on our city for how we maintain our quality of life and develop to meet future needs. We need to rise to the occasion to bring forward solutions. Fortunately, our Shoreline Community is the perfect vehicle for meeting these new demands.
Shoreline at Mountain View park is a jewel in the crown of our region and celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The park was established through state legislation creating the Shoreline Regional Park Community District. The district is a separate legal entity from the city, funded by property taxes within its borders.
In 1969, the state legislature charged the district with a bold mandate to transform what was once a landfill and hog farm into a wildlife sanctuary, an internationally significant economic hub, and a tremendous recreational amenity. It also called for new housing, which was needed then and even more badly needed today.
Over this past year, I’ve met with many other mayors in our county and see a new Silicon Valley forming. The best of the valley’s upcoming developments are green, mixed-use communities where residents can work, run errands and learn within walking and biking distance of their homes. Mountain View’s version of this new sustainable community vision is articulated in our North Bayshore Precise Plan in the Shoreline Park district.
The Plan envisions a new vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood with nearby jobs, shops and parks as well as almost 10,000 new housing units, 15% of which will be affordable to low-income residents. We will implement the Plan in large part through the recently adopted Google North Bayshore Master Plan, which includes 26 acres of publicly available open space and a 4.1-acre site for a future elementary school.
The plans for Shoreline set a new standard of eco urbanism that centers human experience and sustainability into its design. It rejects the former model of sprawling one-story offices surrounded by parking lots and replaces them with multi-story housing and offices surrounded by green space.
The Shoreline Park district is helping to make this vision a reality. It will contribute over $325 million toward $487 million in needed transportation improvements identified in a 2021 study to support mobility and active transportation. It invests in critical infrastructure projects to protect our community from sea and storm water rise, at an approximate cost of $122 million, as noted in a 2021 study. It cleans up the environment by managing the closed landfill. It offers world-class recreational opportunities through its sprawling biking and walking trails as well as a golf course and sailing lake. It generates economic opportunities that establish Mountain View as a global hub of innovation and invests in affordable housing so that opportunities are available to people of all income levels. And it protects vulnerable species and their habitat.
Mountain View has long been one of the more forward-thinking cities in the region. Shoreline will become the latest example of our community’s ingenuity and resilience. It is a special place that offers the opportunity to drive solutions to our most challenging problems.
Alison Hicks is the mayor of Mountain View.
If Mountain View residents “now go out for experiences and community”, why are there so may vacant storefronts on Castro Street?
“With new open office configurations and tremendous growth of our major employers over the past decade, Mountain View has experienced eight times more job growth than housing growth. In reaction, housing costs have escalated, our lower-income residents have been displaced and homelessness has risen.”
Do we have any information about which employers have had the most job growth? Sounds like such employers bear great responsibility for escalating housing costs and displacement of lower-income residents. I think one of them might be Google.
Mayor Hicks, are you aware that “Google has ended an agreement with a developer to build 15,000 homes in the San Francisco Bay Area, including affordable housing, as it continues a string of cost-cutting moves to reduce real estate costs”? – https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-cost-cutting-ends-deal-to-build-thousands-of-affordable-housing-units/
Google itself is now “blocking the supply” of new housing, including affordable housing.
“”The decision to end these agreements followed a comprehensive review by Google of its real estate investments, and a determination by both organizations that the existing agreements are no longer mutually beneficial given current market conditions.”
So it’s not NIMBY advocacy standing in the way of new housing; no, it’s the actions of a fantastically rich corporation who has determined that it is no longer profitable for them to create it. And that, friends, is the TRUE reason why we have a housing crisis. For-profit developers will only build if they can make sufficient profit. If they can’t the building stops. It is a fantasy to believe that developers are lemmings who will continue to build even if they lose money when they do so.
NIMBYs do exist, but no evidence has been provided that they are the PRIMARY cause of high housing costs. For-profit developers provide most housing, and they prefer to build expensive housing for one very simply reason: they make more $$$ that way.
One sad truth about Shoreline’s legally diverted property tax revenues: they will continue forever and forever Increase. This is because the City was able to get its legislative sponsors to skirt the Redevelopment Agency standard formation legislation and get a special act.
County of Santa Clara (social services), MV City (regular services), schools (MVWSD, MVLA), SCV Water District (watersheds), public Hospital District, etc. all yearly loose revenue to Shoreline!
SUNSET ON SHORELINE – limit that old albatross to no more than 20% of the general Property Tax that the multi-billions of dollars of Assessed Valuation out there produce. The State gov can give away, the State gov can take back (and redistribute fairly).
The biggest thing that is overlooked by those who have their eye on the park district tax revenue is that this diversion is the main reason development has taken place up there. Google really enjoys having its own regional park near the workplace. The building up there would not be so much without the flow of tax dollars to the park district.
The city already allocates a portion of the revenue to the school districts to help them out. The school districts area already tax rich, among the largest revenues per student for any district in the state. The main impact is to deny the county some tax revenue that would otherwise flow there. Not a big problem at all.
@steven nelson
Like your idea of capping the amount the Shoreline Tax District can divert, cap at what it is now with a modest yearly increase (2% like our Property Taxes)?
Then other time, agencies (Water District, County, Schools….)’s share will grow. Mountain View’s general fund would also grow which would also benefit most of us not living in the Shoreline Tax District.