There are no housing related items in the agenda

- Which city(s) are you monitoring, and which chapter(s) if any are you coordinating with?

    - Mountain View and Los Altos 

- Do you know if your city committed to a rezoning?

    - Los Altos Yes

    -  MV no - said they have enough in compliance zoning 

    - What is the deadline for this rezoning?

Jan 31 2024 

- What policies did your city commit to enacting? (If no, ask if any city-owned sites are on the site inventory.)

    -  Which ones are you most excited about?

        - Link

The city council met to decide whether to adopt and submit the new draft of the housing element. They adopted!

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This new draft:

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Upzones widely in all commercial and multifamily districts

Commits to an affordable housing project on one of the city's parking plazas

Removes numerous constraints, including 

getting rid of Council approval of multifamily housing, 

getting rid of the Design Review Committee which approves SFHs, 

staff approval of small multifamily housing projects,

getting rid of the story pole requirement,

having pre-approved ADUs,

instituting parking management downtown to make it feasible to build small infill units over commercial in our walkable downtown,

doing a parking study citywide and adjusting parking minimums accordingly,

and more I'm forgetting.

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This is a huge win,

Council was reviewing the second draft of the HE, planning to adopt at the next meeting on Jan 24. They considered various minor changes to the (quite good) draft. The League of Women Voters had proposed a re-write of a program to produce housing on one or two of Los Altos' city-owned parking plazas; the rewrite put more emphasis on trying to put a 100% affordable project there. (I was involved in this rewrite.) The Council accepted the rewrite, with minor changes!

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NIMBY public commenters complained. They got nowhere. YIMBYs proposed some minor changes other than the rewrite that were not accepted, but who cares? There is plenty of up-zoning in this draft, and some great programs. This is a huge win.

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The council directed staff to make the indicated changes. They will review the document at the next meeting, and with about 100% certainty they will adopt it. There will be no public comment at that meeting. This is a done deal. 

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I expect that HCD will approve the Housing Element. 

The agenda item was to send the revised draft housing element to HCD. 

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Los Altos Hills' Site Inventory has three sites: Foothill College, the Twin Oaks properties on Arastradero Road (all with the same owner), and the St. Nicholas School. Foothill College had already sent a blistering letter to the town, saying that they were not going to build, that the town was misrepresenting the discussions that they'd had, and that they wanted to be removed from the site inventory. The owner of Twin Oaks had already told a YIMBY watchdog (and probably already told the city) that he was not going to build. But these sites remained on the site inventory.

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During the meeting, a lawyer for the Diocese of San Jose, which owns St. Nicholas School, gave public comment, stating that the school was not going to build housing and wanted to be removed from the site inventory.

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So the town is three for three. Instead of their site inventory being a list of properties where housing will be built, it's a list of properties where housing won't be built. 

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No one on the Planning Commission (this was a joint meeting) or the Town Council seemed even slightly fazed by the inadequacy of their site inventory, or the general awfulness of the entire draft. They congratulated each other and staff on a job well done, and the Town Council voted unanimously to float this garbage scow to HCD. 

- Town thinks Foothill College is still a viable site via some mysterious letter that hasn't been shared.

- Town wants to claim more ADUs and JADUs to goose numbers.

- Very little discussion of AFFH or majority of constraints.

- Town has offered to reduce the grading constraint.

Yesterday Lisa Wise Consultants, the consultants for the Housing Element, presented pretty much the same information as their last two meetings, and asked the City Council for guidance they didn’t get last time. The one new piece of information was their claim that with NO zoning changes, and without counting ADUs and projects in construction or in approval, Los Altos could produce 110 new homes each year. Interestingly, that’s the total number of homes we’ve produced in all of the last seven years, if we don’t count ADUs. 

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It was clear that the City Council has repeatedly asked for more details on the proposed sites, and the consultants have repeatedly refused to supply it.

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The consultants asked for authorization for four zoning changes:

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- Removing the maximum density of 38 du/acre for CT (San Antonio); the density would then be controlled by height limits and setbacks.

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- Zoning Los Altos Methodist Church, Bridges Community Church next door, and the city-owned parcel at Fremont and Grant, for housing

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- Allowing housing in the OA zone, which is San Antonio across from downtown, Altos Oaks Street (the curvy street of dentists), and a few other scattered parcels.

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- Removing the hard density cap of 20 more homes for Loyola Corners

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Predictably, neighbors didn’t want the upzoning for San Antonio and Loyola Corners, with Teresa Morris going so far as comparing new residents to cat feces—she doesn’t want her neighborhood to be the “litter box” of the city, she said.

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The owner of the clock tower building (1000 Fremont) spoke up and said they want their building to remain on the site inventory for low income housing. Reminder: the low income building the city is endorsing there is a two story building with commercial on the ground floor and 48 apartments on the second floor.

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The results:

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- Consensus for removing the max density on El Camino, but not increasing the height limit

- Consensus for rezoning the two churches, but not the parcel at Fremont and Grant. This isn’t going to make any difference because these churches aren’t going to building housing

- Consensus for allowing low density housing on San Antonio. Townhouses, basically. 

- Consensus for lifting density cap at Loyola Corners

There was also a consensus for a downtown parking solution of some kind. Some commissioners and council members talked about a parking garage; they need to price that before they get too excited about it.

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The consultants will come back in June with a draft housing element. It’s not going to have enough capacity. It’s not going to have nearly enough capacity. And the City Council will have had no input on programs.

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The consultants still claim the city can hit 80% of the housing target without rezoning. This is an insane claim in a city where 97% of residential land is R1.

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Consultants still have not released a site inventory as a spreadsheet. They have not contacted businesses. Anne Paulson's public comment gave a rundown of like ten different sites that literally have 0% likelihood of development.

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The consultants showed no work to justify their claims about that the city only needs minor tweaks to some commercial areas to hit the RHNA. Mayor Enander (NIMBY) even pointed out a glaring math error in how the consultants calculate the No Net Loss buffer, and the upshot of the error is that more upzoning is needed to get a sensible buffer.

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The entire city council unanimously said they need more work shown from the consultants. City council wants the site inventory with each site listed, that they need the breakdown of how are RHNA is going to be hit, and they said definitively they could not support or reject the consultant's methodology without that work shown.

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This is the correct decision from city council. But it remains to be seen what will come of this housing element update. We have terrible consultants, only a few meetings more to go, and no political will to go above and beyond. The only good news, imo, is that the NIMBYs (Enander & Lee Eng) are scared of SB 35 and other hammers if we don't get a good plan.

This meeting was run by the consultants. They first described how the created their "preliminary site inventory": it's all the properties zoned for residential, but not R-1, where the structures were built before 1980 or where the structures are of low value (like parking lots). Then they said that this site inventory—which contains many, many bogus sites—would provide 80% of RHNA, so they just need to upzone for the rest, plus a 20% buffer.

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Then they listed five or so upzoning strategies: upzone along El Camino, allow residential in areas zoned for offices, upzone downtown, upzone a few churches, upzone the Loyola Corners area, and I think another one.

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They presented maps of the "site inventory," where all the sites <20 du/acre were labeled Above Moderate, all the sites 20-29 du/acre were labeled Moderate, and all the sites 30+ du/acre were labeled Low Income.

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Then we went to breakout rooms, to discuss the various upzoning strategies. My group was pro-housing, and for all the strategies except there was mixed opinion on Loyola Corners. My group was run by Laura Simpson, the interim planning director, who said that the city had reached out to owners but hadn't heard back, and would remove properties if the owners nixed them.

The consultants claim we're 80% of the way to our housing targets without even raising a finger. And they claimed this was "conservative." I felt gaslit, ngl. We were failing at our old targets even before they were quadrupled.

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They gave us five options for rezoning - none of the options touched R1, which is 97% of the residential land. Many of the comments at this meeting were abhorrent. Our most active busybodies were livid about the possibility of rezoning and Roberta Phillips, a top-5 nimby in town, exclaimed "hell no! hell no! hell no!" at the idea of rezoning near where she lived. The NIMBYs were throwing tantrums

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(After the meeting, I told the city that community opposition to housing is a non-governmental constraint to housing production and has to be reported in the housing element.)

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Genuinely, I felt unwelcome at this meeting, and this is my hometown. NIMBYs were rude to me and to others who supported housing. The demographics of the meeting were old, white, and retired - even by Los Altos standards. The city collected this data, and I think it should be referenced in a letter to HCD.

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I couldn't tell you what the final consensus on the five rezoning proposals was. I tuned out to join a Mountain View call at that point.

Pretty fluffy meeting; basically just another introduction to RHNA and the HE process. Couldn't answer a whole lot about how they were going to do the sites inventory. Claimed they would need a 15-20% buffer, which sounds comically low.

The planning commissioners were supposed to give their ideas about what the constraints on building were. They didn't really present any ideas, except Mehruss Ahi said we should lean on SB 9 projects. The good part was that three different YIMBY letters were sent in, including my own, with long lists of suggestions, and these will be passed on to the consultant who apparently is doing everything. 

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Commissioner Steinle, hilariously, said that the city never denies any housing applications. Half an hour before, at the very same meeting, the commission, including and especially Steinle, told an applicant that they hated his preliminary proposal and would deny it if it came up before them as an official application. 

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My public comment letter gave data on our extremely weak housing production this cycle, in addition to making suggestions about constraints on housing and how to remove them. Several of the commissioners appreciated the data. 

Council and planning commission had no idea what their RHNA was. They also seemed surprised that their usual tricks were inadmissible. They then proceeded to try and concoct ways to gin up the numbers or to weasel out of their responsibility. They ignored my public comments and my letter signed by 13 residents.

After the information stuff, we broke up into three groups to discuss.  

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Los Altos' consultants (Lisa Wise and Plan to Place) think they can get away with only rezoning for 550-650. Interesting strategy, since they've only permitted ~250 AMI units this cycle and they need 823 AMI for the 6th cycle. I pointed this out, but the guy from Plan to Place said they don't need to build the homes, just show the capacity for them. Salim pointed out that they obviously DON'T have the capacity, or building would already have happened or be happening.

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In my group, pro-housers were dominant. In the other two groups, they were also dominant. Each group had one notorious (at least to me) NIMBY. The NIMBY in my group mansplained that the city was allowed to use CEQA for SB 9 projects.

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We had a good turnout of my watchdogs; I'd estimate 6 or 7, maybe more. 61 people total, but that included most of the City Council, most of the Planning Commission, and the people from Lisa Wise Consultants, Plan to Place and I think the website company too.

The city had a barely-publicized "pop-up" at the community center (less than 24 hours notice, publicized on the Housing Element website and nowhere else). I was the only person who attended. This was just me and Laura Simpson, the interim Community Development director, so I got a good long time to talk to her.

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She said that she believed the city would have no trouble getting enough sites, with no or minimal rezoning. (I do not believe this.) She further said that some implausible sites would be/have been removed from the inventory. She said that the city planned to count sites at their nominal zoned capacity, rather than the density normally achieved at the site; this is good-ish, because projects typically use the density bonus and get more density than the zoning allows.

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She said when their site list is finalized, they'll look at it, and see how much capacity they still lack in each income level. I do not understand why this inventory is still unfinished. I made one, and I do not have the resources they have. 

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She said the city was looking at a buffer of 10% or more for the sites. That's useless when ridiculous, never-will-be-developed sites are on the inventory.

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We need to see their site list as soon as possible. They have to be including bogus sites to get the numbers they say they have. We'll compare their numbers with my numbers, and see what is going on here. 

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We talked about removing constraints. I mentioned the almost $50K PER UNIT park in-lieu fee (which is not used to buy parks), and she agreed it was very high. She indicated that she'd be receptive to putting in a program to reduce or eliminate impact fees for affordable units, as is done in previous jurisdictions where she worked. 

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She asked that we bring her ideas for building more affordable sites. Oh, believe me, we will do that! 

- After months of waiting, we finally learned that the Lisa Wise Consulting rep for the update is Jen Murillo. Because of high-level staff turnover in the city, she will be especially important to how this update goes

- The consultant seems to want to run a tight ship. For example, when asked about how far SB 9 can get us to our targets, Jen said she wants to be "conservative" & exclude SB 9 from the city's expected zoning capacity, until the state releases guidance

- The Planning Commission on the whole is quite pro-housing, and city council seemed amenable to the solid recommendations made by former chair 

Ahi. If council directs the consultant to work closely with PC, that's a leading indicator of success

- Previously, we were told by (incompetent? negligent?) city staff that they weren't sure if upzoning would be needed to hit our housing targets. I asked the consultant about this, and she disagrees; she says she anticipates upzoning.

Lisa Wise Consulting gave an intro to the Housing Element process.  Planning Commissioner Mehruss Ahi gave excellent suggestions of how we could make changes to meet our RHNA, mostly upzoning various areas. Commissioner Ronit Bodner won my heart by saying the city is too often prioritizing parking over people and should stop doing that. Council asked questions of staff and the consultant.

This was billed as "Join city staff to learn about the Housing Element Update process at the Tree Lighting/First Friday event taking place in Downtown Los Altos." And indeed Senior Planner Sean Gallegos was there, as was Planner Jia Liu, at a little booth on the street that anyone could walk up to.

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I walked up, with my list of questions, and lo and behold who should show up but Salim Damerdji. We had plenty of time to ask questions. However, neither of the planners could or would answer any questions about the Housing Element. Where is the city planning to put the new housing? They didn't know. Does the city plan to upzone? They didn't know. (Spoiler alert: they will have to.) What is the city's plan for outreach to low-income workers? They didn't know. They claimed that the decisions would be made by the city council, and Lisa Wise Consultants. They said that we should direct our questions to the consultants, claiming (falsely) that the consultant had made their email available. 

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Gallegos said, more or less, that the city solicits input, and then tries to make it fit in to their existing plans. Salim said, in the nicest possible way, that their existing plans suck and that is why no housing is being built.

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Gallegos also said that the city has no control over whether housing gets built.  I treated that statement with the contempt it deserves, pointing out several places that are not zoned for enough housing.

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I don't know why the city of Los Altos made two planners stand outside in the dark for two hours to not answer questions. Jia Liu brought her little daughter, who is cute. She should have been able to stay home with her childreni instead of being dragged out to fob people off.

The first agenda item concerned discussion of outreach and engagement strategies to groups such as residents and workers who don't live in Los Altos. The second agenda item concerned the creation of "objective standards" for maintaining the rural/suburban character of Los Altos in light of the SB9 requirements.

City staff gave an anemic and vague report about what their plans for housing element outreach. 

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They plan to do some meetings, yay. For some reason, even though they are starting so late, they want to get their Draft Housing Element in by July, even though it's not due until Oct 15.

Main Discussion: 84 participants (Milpitas, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara)

-Led by Paul Peninger, Baird & Driskell

-Basic overview of Housing Element process, timeline, goals, etc.

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Mountain View Breakout Room:

-21 participants

-Led by Ellen Yau, Senior Planner & Brandi Campbell Wood (Baird & Driskell)

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MV 2023-2031 Housing Element Goals:

-Accommodate MV’s RHNA of ~11,000 units

-Development capacity from recent Precise Plans, ongoing R3 zoning update

-Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH)

-Provide access to opportunity

-Address fair housing issues and constraints

-Coordinate with other key City housing initiatives

-Displacement strategy, R3 zoning update, federal assessment of fair housing

-Address local goals and needs

-Use data on local conditions

-Requires input from the public

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Discussion Questions:

*What’s working in our city/town?

     -new row houses and mixed use developments       

     -Mountain View is very supportive of affordable housing 

     -The city has been getting better about funding and approving non-profit affordable housing

*What are some of our key housing needs or challenges?

     -All the recent developments have been too short and had too much parking. 

     -Restrictive Zoning and community opposition to increased density

*What ideas, policies, programs, suggestions do you have to meet our housing needs?

     -1) Follow the Los Angeles model and have data driven calculations for the likelihood of development on inventory sites. 2) Upzone Old MV to AFFH

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Timeline:

March 2021 – March 2022: Community Outreach

March-Spring 2022: Work on Studies and Draft update

Spring 2022: Draft for Review

Fall 2022: Public Hearings with EPC and City Council

January 2023: Housing Element Adoption

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NIMBY comments:

“Neighborhoods are being forced to accept developments on the basis of .5 mile distance to transit. But transit is really barely existent or effective. Is the East Whisman precise plan no longer in effect?”

“We are running out of open space in Mtn. View. Seeing more and more exceptions were super high condos are in planning stage. These high rise condos are invading our modest neighborhood. I'm afraid with open spaces being developed, does the city looking at using eminent domain to buy up needed land to development?”

“The city has already taken away the Hetch Hetchy trail for development. I do not see how you can create 8209 new housing units unless you build higher. Mtn View has always been a modest town. Business giants like Google have destroyed our modest town. Google transport their own employees with private buses. Our public transportation is expensive and ineffective. Addtionally, people whom live outside the area are "penalized" havinf to drive into the valley with more and more toll roads. The government tricked the voters into thinking the increased tax for infrastructure was to build and fix roads. Instead, they built more toll roads!”`

This is the "Let's Talk Housing" series that the county is doing. Including staff from Campbell, Los Gatos, and Los Altos Hills, there were 46 participants before the three breakout rooms opened. I noticed that Mike Krey from the Campbell Planning Commission and the Mayor of Campbell, Liz Gibbons, were both there. In the Q&A, someone asked a question about "Critical Race Theory", and the hosts thankfully dodged it.

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When asked what happens if a city doesn't have enough zoned capacity, the hosts said some very handwavey things about repurposing commercial space, and danced around the idea that a city would have to make more capacity. Disappointing. It's like they don't believe that HCD will actually bring the hammer down.

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We're also told that the county has built enough market-rate housing, but the lack of affordable housing has driven up rents. (This is not how housing works, aargh.) There is no mention of why market-rate housing isn't affordable to most people. Jobs don't pay enough to "let them compete in the housing market".

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When asked for one word to describe our vision of the future of our city, most people wrote "affordable", "inclusive", or "diverse", but two people wrote "non-dense" and "ban on parcel splitting", and Liz Gibbons wrote "non-political", which is a pleasant aspiration. We then went into our breakout rooms, by city. (I'm in the Campbell room.)

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The Campbell room had 11 people, of whom two were city staff (Rob Eastwood and Stephen Rose), three were city officials (myself, Mike Krey, and Liz Gibbons), and one a facilitator (Joshua Abrams), leaving five regular civilians. The City touted its updated ADU standards, the (incomplete) objective standards work, a program to educate homebuyers and getting REAP/LEAP grants. Not impressive. They point out that we should be at 75% of our RHNA 5 numbers, but we're at 4%/3%/11% for VLI/LI/MI. But 391 market-rate units is 118% of our allocation!

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Staff points out that our allocation is larger, will require larger densities, and will make site reuse harder. Showed us some visualizations of densities from 3.5 du/ac up to 28+, which is currently illegal in Campbell. By the time they finished presenting, it was 7.

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Things that people appreciate about housing the way it is: walkable, "family-friendly"/"safe", walkable, diverse. Gibbons: "a collection of diverse neighborhoods" with diverse housing types. Things that people don't like: expensive, hard to develop--long, arduous process to work with the city (Scott Cooley), not enough affordable housing, difficulty selling SFH homeowners on affordable housing. I actually heard someone saying that self-driving cars need less parking, so we should plan for less parking.

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I focused on removing discretionary rules which people have to beg around, like parking. The rules that make missing middle housing illegal. When someone complained about parking shortages, I suggested residential parking permits, since we already have those in at least one neighborhood, and they're popular. People are concerned about parking, and I don't know if they think that can be solved without keeping density low.

The consultants and respective city staff members participating in this "Let's Talk Housing" primarily provided an overview of the RHNA process, housing needs and issues specific to Santa Clara County (with particular focus on the scarcity of moderate to low (and lower) income housing options, as well as the impacts of this on the community).

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Breakout sessions were then done by city, with a surprisingly large amount of participants for Cupertino (~31 vs. what appeared to be 10 or less for some others).

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Breakout sessions gave contextual information, had lively and active ongoing chat in the background, and the opportunity for 3-5 spoken comments to raise specific issues or challenges speakers felt that the community faces. The main concerns raised seemed to be: lack of senior housing options, student housing options (esp. DeAnza students, particularly those currently commuting from neighboring areas like San Jose), the need for cars as a part of daily life (made by an older resident with a very specific need to commute to and from Santa Cruz for senior care-giving), and potential traffic concerns associated with more development (ironically this comment was made by someone who did not have a car and was very interested with the Via private shuttle service provided by the City pre-Covid).

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Word-cloud takeaways from answers to the initial meeting question (what does housing in your community look like today; and then, what word describes your vision for housing in 2030) were interesting: the top word for the former was "unaffordable", which some runner-ups being "scare", and "unavailable". For the latter, the top was "sustainable", accompanied by words like "affordable", "inclusive" and "diverse".  Following this, there were some chat comments suggesting that this meeting did not represent "both sides" of this issue and was "very pro-housing". 

General Meeting led by: Paul Peninger, Consultant of Baird & Driskell; 81 participants; Staff from Cupertino, Monte Sereno, Saratoga, Los Altos;

Los Altos Breakout Room led by: David Driskell, Baird & Driskell; 13 participants;

Guido Persicone (Planning Manager, Los Altos)

The council was to vote on whether to hire Lisa Wise Consulting as our housing element consultants. The proposed contract had very little in the way of gathering public opinion before the Draft Element was produced.

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The council debated at length about the issue of public outreach. For example, the contract proposed a survey of residents before any public education. The council said, correctly in my view, that a lot of people would respond that they didn't want any growth, and this is a useless response for the situation, and helps nothing. 

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Several members of the public, including me, had brought to the attention of the council the excellent public outreach of our neighbors in Saratoga (why did this happen? oh yeah, because I told people about Saratoga's good work). City staff presented a slide comparing the Lisa Wise proposal to what Saratoga is doing.  The council talked about Saratoga, and whether we should emulate what they're doing. 

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I spoke at public comment, as did four other Los Altos Watchdogs. One Watchdog submitted a written comment. There was one written comment opposing any growth, and one neutral, rambling spoken comment.

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The council voted 4-1 to hire the consultant (Lee Eng opposing), and 5-0 to revisit the public outreach part of the contract. 

Los Altos City Council Meeting, 3/23

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They were supposed to discuss the 2020 Annual Progress Report, which is due to HCD by April 1, but the item was continued. The Annual Progress Report they were supposed to discuss had errors; in particular, the number of Above Moderate Income housing reported as being permitted in previous years was vastly inflated. I had written in to suggest they fix the errors, since the city needs accurate data in order to plan for Above Moderate Income housing in the new Housing Element.

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Apparently there is a 60 day grace period for the report to be submitted. The item will come up on April 17.

Los Altos City Council Meeting 3/9/21

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"Boardinghouse" ordinance: The city wanted to ban/regulate single family homes with tenants in them. People had been concerned about Hubhaus-style homes with 10-12 tenants. Two proposed ordinances were presented, one to ban renting to more than two different unrelated people, and the second to regulate renting to more than two different people. After a long discussion, the Council decided against the ban, and sent the ordinance to regulate back to staff, with confusing and somewhat contradictory instructions.

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SB9 letter to legislature: The Council was deciding whether to Oppose SB9 outright (Enander proposal), or Oppose Unless Amended (Weinberg proposal). They decided to Oppose Unless Amended. This is a great victory, because the proposed amendments are mostly tiny, the only one of consequence being "Allow local governments to continue to determine reasonable parking standards in accord with the spirit of the bill." While I don't love that proposed amendment, if that is the biggest objection from *the City of Los Altos*, this bill is in great shape, and Becker and Berman can vote for it with enthusiasm.

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I spoke up on both issues. For the boardinghouse, there were about 10 speakers, 5 in favor and 5 opposed. (Estimate)

For SB9, there were exactly 5 speakers, 4 for (!!!) and 1 against.

Los Altos will hire a consultant, and they want to do their Housing Element early (in part to appeal their RHNA). CM Enander and Lee Eng are explicitly fatalistic about meeting the RHNA.