Forced into mediation but not a resolution? Yeah, that works.

There are places where people can pay and park there RVs, like in Coyote valley, RV park there for people with RVs. Not sure why MV wants to go into the rv park business.

Anyways, people can't just park on the street and stay forever. If they need a parking place, they should park where they work.

The "measures" that this article describes are no solution at all.

Require year-long leases? Landlords will raise rents before this is implemented. After that, tenants will have a year to prepare for eviction.

RV parking? For how many RV's? For all who want space? For how long? Forever?

$420,000 for CSA? A nice idea, but it won't go far.

Mediation, but with no solution required?

For any meaningful effort to moderate rents, council would have to offend landlord/developers, and this council just won't be doing that.

Agreed

"For any meaningful effort to moderate rents, council would have to offend landlord/developers, and this council just won't be doing that."

Facts are facts

Do I understand this right?
MV City Hall wants tens of thousands of high paid educated workers in the city and their companies working and living here with families-as many as they can get.
MV City Hall wants tens of thousands of lower paid workers and their families to also live here.
There are approx. 35,000 homes in MV.
MV City Council does not like the short supply of homes.
MV City Council thinks it can keep all these workers, families, companies, and, find some easy way to mitigate rent rises for lower paid workers, find enough housing for all, reduce traffic without any alternative existing and without any substantial alternative to being provided within a year or two.

Mountain View city council eventually reflects the views of the community and especially the loudest residents that are active in local politics, and my impression is that we've got a lot of people resistant to any change here, especially the home owners. If you have residents with warped views of how to make a city affordable, then eventually these views make it into the council too, they don't work in a vacuum.

We need to convince our friends and neighbours that more housing is necessary here, even if the additional density does cause other kinds of issues. Housing is such a fundamental need, that having some other big city problems would be better than pricing out everyone but the richest residents.

Mediation solves nothing if there's no obligated resolution. Google has a rent guarantee for their employees, property owners see $$ signs. NO WONDER rents rose 53% in 4 years! Ridiculous! And crazy for the rest of you to say "if you cannot afford it, move"... Do you really expect a macd's worker earning minimum wage to commute an hour to get here just to hand you a burger? Eh, NO. We've seen so many shops and restaurants close because their rents went sky high and they couldn't pay staff. Our daughter and grandson had to move in with us a few years ago because her slumlord priced her out and she's one of the "fulltime working poor".

Mediation, by definition, assures no agreement. It is mandatory under many contracts - including on some issues under common commercial leases. It is not arbitration which can be binding. At the study session in late October, the former head of group that is hired by area cities to counsel and mediate in landlord-tenant matters said that while mediation usually does NOT produce an agreement to not raise the rent, landlords do not like the process and so may avoid taking a step that would lead to mandatory mediation. So, for example, if a tenant is given the right to require mediation if a landlord gives notice of a rent increase which, say, would bring the total increase over 10 percent in a 12-month periods, many landlords would probably decide to not increase rents so much to trigger a right to mediation. For tenants, the right to require mediation would be better than nothing - provided tenants are also legally protected from eviction motivated by the prospect that the tenant(s) might demand mediation. Without that protection, the right to require mediation could just inspire more notices to simply vacate.

This is so sad, I have lived here all my life and I am still a renter and never had the opportunity to buy a house. I work hard, as an admin, make decent money, but I can't compete with the sky rocketing rent prices. NEVER, have I seen things this bad. It truly has come down to the "have's" and "have-nots." The City makes these deals with the huge management companies like Prometheus to build huge complexes that only cater to the high income brackets. Oh wait, they will offer a few here and there for "below market value" which are still high. It's all about the greed. It's so sad.

@Rebecca F

There's a good chance Mac'd and other large restaurants will replace most of their workforce with computers and robots in the very near future. See article below.

Web Link

This could start happening as early as next year. I've heard your argument many times and on the surface it sounds reasonable, but what if in the very near future restaurants and shops don't actually require many workers? What if they only need 1-2 workers per restaurant instead of 4-6 or more? This could happen all over the bay area, not just in Mountain View.

Would we still need tons for affordable housing? Affordable housing is currently design to help supplement living costs for low-income families, not provide for the entire cost. Would that housing be able to support people with potentially no job and no income and very little prospect of getting a job? Does it make sense to build out lots of additional housing, ruin the quality of life here for people who may struggle to find jobs here very soon?

I don't necessarily have all the answers, but I think we need to consider the city's future needs in light of this advancing technology before we build Mountain View to look like Manhattan and ruin it for everyone. This potential game-changer seems to be completely left out of these city planning discussions.

Rebecca F - what do you mean "Google has a rent guarantee for their employees"?

Thanks!

I feel for the city council here. The cold hard facts are that the city council is not responsible for finding housing that everyone can afford. I know it can be a tough one to swallow for people struggling to meet monthly bills. I get this is their home and it must be very hard. However we do live in a free market economy. I would love to live in Palo Alto but I can't afford it. So I choose to live where I can afford to live. If one cannot afford Mt View there are other less expensive places to live.

@Rebecca F: "Google has a rent guarantee for their employees" -- that's simply not true, unless things have changed in the last few months. (I left Google for another opportunity recently, but I was a software engineer there.)

Google employees have a salary, like any other white-collar worker, and pay market rates for rent like anyone else. Certainly the housing shortage is affecting lower-income folks much more than the engineers, and I have a lot of sympathy for that (I like diversity in the community too and wish I could do more to help!); but misinformation won't help anyone. Everyone needs to come together to solve the problem, and villainizing subsets of residents will hinder that.

Late Tuesday night, the City Council majority of 4 (to 3) asked the city staff to bring back in January a landlord-tenant mediation ordinance that potentially leads to binding arbitration of certain disputes - including rent increases over a level not yet selected. I will be surprised if all four stick with the binding arbitration element after they are approached by landlord groups in the weeks ahead. Arbitration of a rent increase is a form of rent control, although it would only occur if and when a landlord gives notice of a large increase and a tenant insists upon the whole process. I remain concerned that any law that gives a new right to existing tenants will inspire some landlords to simply oust existing tenants with a 30 or 60-day notice. As I have stated repeatedly, any such law must protect tenants from eviction if the landlord is trying by the termination notice to avoid mediation (and binding arbitration).

"and my impression is that we've got a lot of people resistant to any change here, especially the home owners. "

Obviously you must be a renter, who has no ties to the city. Home owners are invested in this city and would like to have there quality of life and not live in some slum setting. Traffic is already bad enough, must we make it worse?

Though it rarely surfaces in comments like that above by "Another resident" (which rehashed one of the standard arguments in comment threads about housing articles lately), many of the loudest voices "resistant to any change here" are those of long-term resident renters, some of whom have been essentially elbowed out by the rent increases that the unprecedented demand allowed. They're embittered by the "change" of being forced out of their town after decades (sometimes even having grown up here).

I also read many complaints by recent arrivals about housing's scarcity and price (often proposing this or that offhand solution), but seldom do those complainers display any inkling that they are perceived as an essential part of the very problem they complain about, and sometimes even perceived that way by very tenants whose own displacement permitted the newcomers to move into their current address.

@former resident: Where I live they have special pricing to get Google employees to live here. They have had incentives for other organizations as well. The sad part is that those are the people who can afford the rent, but get the breaks. I'm glad to say that it won't be long before we leave and live somewhere that doesn't have these problems. What a nightmare! Pay doesn't go up but rent jumps at least ten percent a year. There will always be someone who can afford the rent and the market will climb until we have another crash and the working folks will get hurt again.

"They're embittered by the "change" of being forced out of their town after decades (sometimes even having grown up here)."

If one rents, then you are living in someone else property, not your property. So it matters not how long one has lived in someone else property it still doesn't make it theirs or give them any special rights. Prometheus is in the area to make money, not be a charity organization.

I made an investment to buy here, because i knew that rents do not stay the same forever and they normally go in one direction and that is up. So I put my money down and invested and I've lived here all my adult life. I've had hard times, being unemployed during the first dot come bust. Life is not easy, but one needs to make the choices that make their lives better. Or do nothing and hope things don't change, and when they do, beg the city to stop the change is not right.

The people being displaced are being displaced because of the likes of big name company's that have become mega rich, everyone in the world wants to come here. Lot of companies have moved their middle class workers out of the area, to places like austin tx, and leave there upper management people here, the ones that can afford the unheard of prices that are here now.

Note: Among things the city council, city manager and city hall are responsible for is the number of employees that work within the city limits and how much office space there is, and how employees are allowed to commute to work within the city. Are they real so desiring Google, Linkedin, Intuit, etc. be here and be as big here as they can possibly physically build that they are afraid to set limits? This is their responsibility. This would be the first step in deciding the quality of life here. Is the job of city managering and city planning to just let companies built, just add as many homes as developers will build, and then if demand a BRT (without any new routes?), a larger train station without a better train system that connect to more places with a better schedule like BART is not a method of city planning at all?

@PH: "Where I live they have special pricing to get Google employees to live here. They have had incentives for other organizations as well."

I'm guessing that's some minimal incentives that anyone willing to negotiate could garner for themselves?

Something like "application fee waived," "first month free (but annualized the rent is actually overpriced)," or "wall-mounted (costco kirkland branded) flatscreen with one-year-lease?"

If the incentives you're seeing are more substantial ("rent is 75% of market rate if you work at X, Y, or Z") I'd love to hear details.

Even something like waiving an application fee might be viewed as discriminatory when offered only to a select group.

The Seattle Office of Civil Rights is currently reviewing such corporate perks:

Web Link

The question people should ask is not what the special things are that others get, but why would it be considered fair to give corporate breaks to get more of a culture that is constantly moving on. It could be that the corporate perks or rent pricing gives the landlords a constantly high rental rate as compared to having others stay for years and not raise their rent as high as the new renter. Where I live there is constant turn over as the rents increase so often that even the tech folks can't afford it. The property and service aren't any better and the large corporation that owns and manages it decides what to offer and has a system that leaves people with only two solutions. They either take the best deal offered or leave as the new rent will be unsustainable for the tenant. When an offer without a lease is as much as $1500 more than with a lease it sounds good, but even the price with a lease is 10% or more higher than the last lease. The tenant can't win. It is true that if we can't afford to live here then we should move, but most of us can't afford to start over somewhere else. I got lucky and won't miss this mess, but I sympathize with those who are stuck here. I realize that there are good landlords who are only trying to survive, but with all the corporate rental management companies driving rent up the outcome will be left to market forces. Corporate profiteering is ruining our country and if we don't stop it soon the fallout will be a ruined economy that hurts everyone.