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The latest iteration of Mountain View’s housing element made it past the scrutiny of the Environmental Planning Commission Wednesday night, which gave its unanimous support to the draft after suggesting a few tweaks.
With EPC’s blessing, city staff can now bring the draft to the city council for final approval on April 11, nearly three months after the state’s Jan. 31 deadline — a target that most cities in California did not meet.
The sooner that the city adopts its housing element, the sooner it can close the door to so-called builder’s remedy. City staff say they’ve already received three builder’s remedy project applications, which collectively amount to nearly 2,500 proposed housing units. The majority of those units come from a single project proposal to redevelop the Century Cinema in Mountain View into 2,200 units of housing.
The housing element is a state-mandated, once-every-eight years process in which cities must prove how they’ll meet housing targets set by Sacramento. Mountain View’s housing target, also called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), is more than 11,000 net new units.
Every city must create a sites inventory — a list of potential properties where housing could reasonably get built in the next eight years — to prove to the state that it will meet or exceed its RHNA.
In the draft approved by EPC on March 15, city staff identified more than 16,500 units that they believe will be built in the next eight years, giving the city a healthy buffer above the 11,135 units required by the state.
In addition to creating the sites inventory, the housing element must also identify constraints a city faces that make it harder to build housing. For every constraint identified, cities have to come up with a corresponding program to mitigate the issue. The latest draft made tweaks to a number of those programs, a few of which commissioners proposed more changes to on Wednesday night.
One new idea proposed by city staff was to add a specific target for how many housing units the city hopes to purchase and preserve as affordable over the next eight years — a concept that took up a significant portion of EPC’s discussion Wednesday night.
City staff proposed a target of 50 units, which EPC ultimately supported. But commissioners Jose Gutierrez and Alex Nunez wanted the program to more explicitly identify community ownership as another option for preserving at least 50 units.
Under the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) and the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), cities can adopt community ownership policies that give tenants advance notice when a landlord intends to sell their building. Tenants also get a “right of first offer,” meaning they have the option to submit an offer before the building goes on the market.
“Properties purchased through TOPA/COPA may be subject to permanent affordability restrictions, increasing the jurisdiction’s affordable housing stock and permanently removing property from the speculative market,” a Bay Area Housing Element advocacy working group toolkit explains.
The two commissioners also wanted to prioritize developing an action plan for a community ownership model. The change received unanimous support from the EPC.
Other program changes in the latest draft included eliminating parking requirements for affordable housing developers, or for projects in transit-oriented areas; reducing park land fees to ensure they’re not constraining development in the city; and setting a target date to evaluate the efficacy of the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance by the end of 2024.
With these tweaks in mind, the EPC unanimously supported the draft housing element. City staff said the next step is one more round of informal review with the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) before bringing the final draft to council on April 11 for adoption. For the past several months, city staff have been in regular contact with HCD, which has provided multiple rounds of feedback on the city’s draft. HCD makes the final call on whether a housing element is in compliance with state law.
Advance Planning Manager Eric Anderson said that if adoption doesn’t happen on April 11, the city could be looking at some major consequences, depending on how much longer the process is drawn out. Cities that are out of compliance with state housing law are barred from applying for certain funding programs, and Anderson said there’s at least $1 million in state funding on the table that the city could lose out on if it doesn’t adopt its housing element by April.
“And if we are still without a compliant housing element,” Anderson added, “the city isn’t able to deny certain non-compliant projects. This is known as builder’s remedy projects, which we’ve received a couple already.”
Builder’s remedy is a stipulation of state law that allows developers to skirt around a city’s local zoning laws if the city is out of compliance with state housing element law.
“So that means that anybody can come in, at any density they want, in practically any location that they want,” Anderson said.
The only catch is that builder’s remedy projects must make at least 20% of their proposed units affordable.
According to the city, the builder’s remedy projects received so far include:
• 2,200 apartment units proposed at 1500 N. Shoreline Blvd., which is currently home to the Century Cinema 16 movie theater. The project also includes a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, a hotel, and 13,300 square feet of ground-floor commercial
• 200 condo units proposed at 1920 Gamel Way.
• 85 condo units proposed at 294-296 Tyrella Ave.
All three projects propose making exactly 20% of their units affordable.
Anderson said the city is not aware of any additional projects “waiting in the wings,” so he doesn’t expect more builder’s remedy projects to come forward between now and April 11.
But if the housing element is not adopted on April 11, Anderson added, “it’s possible that a longer delay could give time for people who weren’t otherwise planning to do so, to prepare an application” under builder’s remedy.
Housing element updates have a rolling schedule. The San Diego and LA areas submitted theirs last year. The Jan 31 deadline applied to the Bay Area.
It seems to me that that 2200 unit apartment project replacing the Century Theaters should just be approved flat out Builders remedy or no Builders remedy. Just my opinion. By itself it would be 1/3 of the 5,000 units of market rate housing that the city is required to build in the next cycle. By itself. In a perfect location right by where all the new jobs have been created.
Why does the Voice’s reporting on RHNA targets CONSISTENTLY leave off the part that 6,000 of the 11,000 new housing units are supposed to be created for low income and average income workers?
I don’t get it. Who needs affordable housing MORE than those at the bottom of the ladder? Why are these targets being ignored? Isn’t the dilemma of teachers, service workers, and kids who don’t code supposed to be a priority for all kind and virtuous persons?
Is it because there is no possible way that these targets will be met, even if builder’s remedy is used? 6000 of 11000 units are “required” to be affordable, which means that over 50% of all new construction is “required” to be affordable. Builders remedy only requires 20%. That’s not enough.
What penalty will MV endure if these targets are not met? None. Wait, what?
Friends, the entire “affordable housing” movement is being waged to increase the production of market rate units, in order to help Big Tech hire out of area workers. MV residents must all pull together to help Google increase its profits. We need to be open to defunding schools and parks in order to help Google increase its profits.
Lower income and average income workers need to understand that no real efforts are being made to end the housing crisis FOR THEM. We primarily need to build expensive, market rate units in order to help Google meet its hiring goals.
The targets for lower income workers are really just smoke and mirrors. Let’s not shine a light on them, that will make it easier on everyone when we fail to meet them.
Just an Observation,
I am still wondering where the magical units are going to come from for the very low and low income needs.
So many thousands were proposed especially from Alphabet/Google, but none built.
And now Intel is closing a major campus in San Jose, which means thousands of tech workers are about to leave the area.
So the idea that the tech industry is being the backbone of the areas economic stability is DEAD. In effect all planning ever since 2018 should have been adjusted for this contingency.
This is not going to live up to anyone’s predictions, because Commercial and Residential Property Values are going to contract for at least the next 6 years, based on the experience of 2008.
Time to just deal with it now, no more pipe dreams