Just over a year after unanimously passing the visionary North Bayshore Precise Plan, the Mountain View City Council is poised to take the next steps toward bringing the plan to reality.
Housing advocates, including SV@Home and Greenbelt Alliance, rejoiced at the plan’s passage because it included a significant amount of new housing and affordable housing as its centerpiece: 9,850 new homes, with a 20 percent affordability goal. As the city looks to implement the plan, some have raised the possibility that the high cost of development will undermine these housing goals.
This is a big concern.
At a time when housing costs continue to grow further out of reach of the majority of Bay Area families, meeting the plan’s affordable housing goals must be the city’s top priority. At their Tuesday meeting, councilmembers will decide whether, and how, to reallocate pre-existing rights to construct office space in North Bayshore, which will determine the economic success of the entire plan. Mountain View should base its decision-making on how competing proposals will leverage office development to maximize the delivery of housing and affordable housing. This is not only key to addressing our shared housing affordability crisis but also the cornerstone upon which the plan’s other community benefits rest.
The award-winning plan’s vision is one of complete neighborhoods featuring new office and residential buildings, as well as transit improvements, biking and walking paths, and a major investment in the environmental well-being of the Bay’s shoreline ecosystem. The city’s extensive study of the financial feasibility of these improvements, however, found that the combination of land costs and city fees mean the best way to finance the construction of housing and other community benefits in North Bayshore is to offset these costs with the return on investment provided by office development.
The foundational, community-building role of housing means that if new homes and affordable homes are not built, the other public benefits of the plan would unravel. Fewer homes result in an inability to sustain retail in the mixed-use neighborhood the plan envisions. It also would mean fewer people walking or biking to jobs in North Bayshore and other nearby areas of Mountain View, a key consideration in meeting the plan’s transit goals, which seek to dramatically reduce the amount of single-occupancy vehicle trips in and around the new neighborhood.
As the City Council takes action Tuesday, we urge that they link the allocation of office development rights to the production of much-needed housing. This is not new — the city is considering a similar policy for another priority development area — East Whisman — and has already approved a Sobrato-led development proposal in North Bayshore that promises four new square feet of residential space for every one new square foot of office space.
Google’s Framework Plan for North Bayshore represents the most direct route to achieving the plan’s housing goals and broader vision. This proposal, which would deliver 6,000-6,600 new homes (with 20 percent affordable), includes cutting-edge environmental investments and would be the single largest contribution to the plan’s overall housing goals. Supporting Google’s proposal is not about choosing one landowner over another, but putting the success of the plan first. We urge the City Council to seize this opportunity without delay.
David Meyer is a Mountain View resident and director of strategic initiatives at SV@Home, an affordable housing advocacy organization that works across Santa Clara County. Kiyomi Honda-Yamamoto is South Bay Regional Representative at the Greenbelt Alliance.
