On Tuesday June 25th, the Mountain View City Council is set to once again consider the East Whisman Precise Plan. The plan calls for 5000 new homes, 1000 of them affordable, in northern Mountain View. At the previous study session, SV@Home commended the council and city staff for their work so far, especially the following elements:
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A Plan-wide goal of 5,000 new homes with a mixture of housing types and sizes, including rental and ownership opportunities at a range of income levels.
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A Plan-wide goal of 1,000 total affordable homes (20% of all new homes) for families with low and very low incomes, who make less than $103,900 and $73,150 per year, respectively.
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An innovative Jobs-Housing Linkage program, which incentivizes developers to leverage the profits of new office development to finance housing by, among other policies, tying bonus office FAR directly to commitments to build or provide resources for residential development.
SV@Home also recommended that the staff address a concerns related to the following elements:
- The mechanics of the Jobs-Housing linkage program, which could be made more flexible to allow for easier transfers of development rights between developers, including through modifications to the required timelines for linking office and housing development deals.
- The structuring of the proposed Character Areas, which could also be made more flexible to allow developers to partner more easily across geographic areas to link housing development with office and commercial development.
- The restrictions on heights and FAR, which could be revised upwards to better target high density developments near transit that maximize the land available for housing and affordable housing production.
- The community benefits fee structure, which could be centralized and streamlined to ensure that the school district is able to better plan around their needed revenues and developers can operate on a level playing field related to their fee requirements