Affordable Housing Strategy

The Affordable Housing Committee of the League of Women Voters of the Los Altos-Mountain View Area sent the following letter, dated February 26, 2006, to the Mountain View City Council:

February 26, 2006

Mountain View City Council City Hall, 500 Castro Street P.O. Box 7540 Mountain View, CA 94039-7540

Re: Affordable Housing Strategy

Honorable Mayor Nick Galiotto and Members of the City Council:

The Los Altos-Mountain View Area League of Women Voters has been focusing on affordable housing issues in the two cities for the last two years. We commend the efforts of staff and the Environmental Planning Commission for their careful and logical proposals for spending the valuable resource of affordable housing funds expected to be available to the City in the next five years.

We especially applaud the EPC recommendation that landbanking be the primary and most immediate use of these housing monies. Little land is available where affordable housing could potentially be built and land is constantly escalating in value. Therefore, a large percentage of the available funds should be spent to acquire feasible sites for affordable housing.

In order to facilitate landbanking, and, in addition, in order to facilitate the development of affordable housing in the City, we also recommend the hiring of an additional staff person who could spend time on landbanking and working with nonprofit developers and others to administer new housing projects and programs. We understand that the present staff does not have enough time to spend on new and time-consuming projects. As a result, we are afraid that housing projects will be delayed because of insufficient staff time to manage them.

Although we strongly believe that landbanking is a better use of the in-lieu fees than just banking the fees, we also want to see projects actually built on any sites the City purchases, as well as the City-owned Evelyn Avenue site. Our highest priority for development projects continues to be a rental project targeted to very low income large families, as we see this as the greatest unmet need in the City.

Smaller sites, not feasible for large rental projects, could perhaps be built on by groups such as Habitat for Humanity, which is able to deliver home ownership to low income families.

We would urge the Council to move slowly before trying other new home ownership initiatives, including those targeted to teachers and public employees. Although we recognize that the home ownership program for teachers has been successful in San Jose, the average cost of a home/condo in San Jose is significantly lower than that in Mountain View. We would hope that the City would not allocate a lot of money initially to the home ownership programs discussed in the staff report, but would first do more research into how such programs are working in surrounding communities and then allocate minimal funds until it is clear that any program will be successful in Mountain View. For the City to have the ability to do this research, we believe that additional staff is an appropriate use of the housing funds.

We appreciate the opportunity to comment on the City's Affordable Housing Strategy.

Sincerely yours,

Donna Yobs 1157 Karen Way Mountain View 94040 Co-Chair, Housing Committee League of Women Voters of the Los Altos-Mountain View Area

Cc: Kevin Duggan, City Manager

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