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The city of Mountain View announced that it’s aiming to adopt a compliant housing element by early spring 2023. The next draft will propose some new programs to ensure it meets the state’s expectations, which are more stringent this time around than past housing element cycles, the city says.
The housing element update is a once-every-eight-years process that all jurisdictions in California are required to go through. Each city receives a regional housing needs allocation (RHNA) from the state, a quota for how many new housing units a city needs to plan to build in the next eight years.
As part of the housing element, cities must create a sites inventory, which lists every property that could reasonably be developed into housing in the next eight years. Cities also have to propose programs that “increase the feasibility and density of housing,” the city said.
The housing element draft must also demonstrate how cities will “affirmatively further fair housing,” as the state calls it — in other words, how a city plans “to facilitate deliberate action to explicitly address, combat, and relieve disparities resulting from past patterns of segregation to foster more inclusive communities,” as the California Department of Housing & Community Development puts it.
“This Housing Element cycle has been different than previous cycles due to new State laws, higher expectations, additional complexity and more uncertainty from State regulators,” the city said in a Feb. 22 statement. “In addition, there are increased consequences of not adopting a Housing Element that meets these new expectations, including the loss of the City’s zoning authority over some new residential developments.”
That loss of authority is called builder’s remedy, which essentially allows developers to skirt around local zoning laws if a city is out of compliance with state housing law. Since housing element drafts were due on Jan. 31, and since the city didn’t get a draft submitted on time, the door is currently open for builder’s remedy projects to come forward. The city’s already contending with what builder’s remedy will mean for Mountain View, as is the rest of the Bay Area — most local cities did not submit a compliant housing element by the Jan. 31 deadline.
In order to submit a compliant housing element and maintain zoning authority, the city’s planning to add a few new programs to the next draft that increase density and address fair housing requirements. These include, but are not limited to:
• Conducting a future review of R2-zoned areas to increase density. R2 zoning in Mountain View generally looks like single-family dwellings, duplexes, and low-density rowhouse or townhouse developments
• Rezoning several zoning districts to allow emergency shelters
• Increasing the allowed density on Moffett Boulevard, at religious sites and at 1949 Grant Road
• Allowing new residential uses in existing commercial areas, such as at shopping centers
“Each of the proposed programs will be presented at future public hearings and are subject to final approval by the City Council,” according to the city’s Feb. 22 statement. “… The latest version of the Housing Element will be available the week before public hearings.”
For more information about the housing element update process, visit MVHousingElement.org.
Why didn’t the city get a proposal submitted on time?
Just an Observaton,
The city doesn’t have competent services regarding community develpment, they allow a apartment to operate in a designated R3.1 zone even though the apartment is an R4 proerty. But they don’t even pay attentions to their own maps, their onwn laws, and follow them properly.
It is a complete mess, the City Inspectors do not have ANY equipment to use to determine whether a building is safe of not, Here is my capture of a conversation of the city inspect claiming just by visual scanning on the surfaces of the units he can detect safety for the unit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mTPaHiMAIf2UYEGn0oXpJEkfIz6qkBMo/view?usp=share_link
Here is me just using a level to detect tilting
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jy6vMyAk6_4dzDqtmSw0xfJNCuWZ2HQd/view?usp=share_link
So you cannot depend on the city to even perform proper inspections regarding structural safety.
Please understand this city is going to undergo a major crisis, Alphavet, Amazon, Microsoft, and many other companies are laying off here, and also pausing if not going to cancel projects in the city. Google just shut down a leasing company for residential units.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/tech/tech-industry-real-estate-pullback/index.html
abd
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/tech/tech-industry-real-estate-pullback/index.html
And
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/google-san-jose-expansion/3162890/
There is as major Commercial and residential market correction underway, there are sings that the Fed will raise their rates to 6% which is above the residential cap rate of 4.5%, meaning it will kill all the residential and commercial market profits, and make it simply bad to invest in them.
The city gave “the old college try”, which turned out not to be enough. As cited in the article, the Housing Element is a very different beast this time around.
Oct 2022: “[MV’s] draft Housing Element doesn’t meet state requirements yet, Sacramento says … the city’s proposed affordable housing programs ‘do not appear to facilitate any meaningful change’” – https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2022/10/04/mountain-views-draft-housing-element-doesnt-meet-state-requirements-yet-sacramento-says “The city submitted a first draft Housing Element to the state earlier this summer, in which city staff forecasted that [MV] will not only meet its RHNA obligation, but exceed it by nearly 4,000 units.”
Alert readers know that adding 4000 additional units is playing with fire, because of State’s “no net loss” requirement. Then-Mayor Lucas Ramirez expressed concerns about overcommitting: “So while we might get away with it for a few years, down the road a different council’s going to have to make some tough decisions to address the no net loss requirement … So we can make a hard decision now, or we can make a hard decision later, but at some point I think we’re going to have to contend with the site inventory that I personally think is a bit optimistic””
But heck, city staff (who apparently are running the show) knows best, eh? Except when they don’t.
“Mayor Lucas Ramirez told the Voice that, when looking at other jurisdictions that have already gone through the Housing Element update process, receiving this level of feedback from HCD isn’t a huge shock. He said HCD has told jurisdictions to expect up to three rounds of back and forth on Housing Element drafts.”
Nothing to see here folks. Except TODAY we are now subject to builder’s remedy, a painful joke of a cure for affordable housing. Building 8 market rate units for every 2 affordable units is more of a windfall to developers than a life raft for the homeless. One might guess that the homeless don’t donate as much to state politicians, compared to developers.
What a mess.
Just an Observation,
The City has a real problem on its hands, 184 Centre Street is non conforming to zoning and yet the city issued a building permit to the building to renovate a unit on the building that surpasses the numbers of units it is allowed in this R3.1 zone.
This lot is allowed only 2 units under 2013 City of Mountain View codes. But the City Housing agency not only issued building permits, but testified that the property was being well maintained twice.
The facts is for unit 7 of this building, there is no legal building permit allowed if the building is not conforming to the land zones.
This is a demonstration of how bad the city even understands what is actually going on. And thus the city is likely not going to see any approval of the element plan. In fact given that Alphabet/Google let go 20% of the workers in Mountain View, and other news about how they are PAUSING their projects in San Jose and Mountain View, those “proposed units” cannot be accountable as planned affordable units in any way.
I suspect the City will lose this housing element and wind up being bypassed by the State, and that is going to demolish the city because it relies too much on housing permits and building permits where they do not ensure they are allowed to issue them under the zoning system we have here.
In any event the City must rezone 184 Centre Street to a R4 in order to correct the problem.