Welcome to SV@Home’s Policy Rundown, your need-to-know overview of important housing policy actions and developments from the past two weeks. With city councils out on their summer breaks, it’s been quiet on the policy front. We anticipate a whole range of important housing issues on fall agendas so stay tuned!
On June 25th, the Mountain View City Council held a study session on the public draft of the East Whisman Precise Plan. The plan aims to convert the transit-accessible East Whisman area, currently an office park, into a complete, mixed-use neighborhood including 5000 homes, 1000 of them affordable. City staff have developed several policy tools to promote housing development, including an innovative jobs-housing linkage mechanism which ties permits for office space to the construction of new housing. At the meeting, the council accepted staff recommendations related to the plan, which is now scheduled for a final vote this fall. SV@Home strongly supports the draft plan’s ambitious housing goals and looks forward to continuing to work with the city, landowners, and housing developers to ensure that the proposed housing is actually built.
Also on June 25th, the San Jose City Council continued to make progress on addressing some of the remaining barriers to increased ADU production in San Jose, especially ADUs that are affordable to low and moderate income renters. The Council discussed several proposed solutions including the elimination of city impact fees (particularly the parks fee) and a proposal to establish a forgivable loan program through the Housing Trust Silicon Valley if an ADU is rented at an affordable rate for a certain period of time. SV@Home supports these proposals and also asked the City to reduce the current ADU review period from 120 to 60 days and to specifically waive all impact fees for ADUs that are less than 750 square feet. SV@Home will be there when the City Council takes up these issues again in the Fall and makes final decisions on which proposals to implement.