Seems like a good opportunity to impose price controls...

I am so proud of how our city has grown and am excited to see where it goes next. We truly live in the best city in Northern California.

I had originally posted this into the story titled,

"Rent-control measure expected to go to voters in November"

Everyone should read the 6/17/16 Voice edition. Front page has a story titled,

"Construction boom brings revene, and problems, for city's projects"

It is a story about how several projects that went out to bid for work in the city, and bids came back far higher than the inflated budget that the city had forecast..

One particular project was to replace broken sidewalks, only 2 qualified bids came back and they both where 50% above the city's budgeted amount.

As a result, the city council postponed these projects.

This is a very important point for everyone to understand. This rent control initiative will only allow a CPI increase, which is 2% today. There is no way that any property owner or landlord can pay to have work done to their property when the inflationary index for labor and material is far-far higher than CPI. You will have no improvements done and repairs will not be done properly to keep costs down. You will have empty units that will have walls washed and not painted, carpets will not be replaced but dyed, over and over, appliances will not be replaced but repaired over and over, and on and on it will go. This will be the new world for the old rental stock in Mountain View. You have your proof here with this article. These same issues that the city council faces with contractors is the same that a property owner faces with their contractors.

You can go to East Palo Alto, Oakland, San Leandro, Berkley, Hayward, East San Jose, Mission district and other areas of San Francisco-which is the number one city in all of United States for all property crimes, and see for your self the condition of the rental housing stock and the problems that these blighted areas cause for the rest of the city.

Rent controlled city's also make it virtually impossible to evict any bad tenant you have in the building. As a result you will only get these same type of people to live in those buildings as the landlord will have no motivation to go thru the trouble of filing a petition with the rent board to ask permission to evict them. They routinely say no in all the other rent controlled city's. It will be no different here.

If you are a renter, if you had constant complaints about another tenant in your building, and we had rent control here, what do you think your landlord would do if he could not get him to cooperate? I will tell you, NOTHING. Your choice will be to live with it or move. If you have a responsible landlord with no rent control, the outcome would be different as many would evict him. He would be served a 3 day notice or a 30 day notice to leave. If you doubt that will happen here, ask your self how these other city's, like East Palo Alto got to be so bad.

Rent control affects everyone in the city, not just renters.

There is a reason why these outside groups targeted only the 3 other city's on this side of the bay. The other city's have more homeowners than renters, and in the past when this issue came before the voters those city's with more homeowners always voted it down. Mountain View has already voted this down back in 1982 when council member Lenny Siegel brought this before the voters, hopefully that will happen again.

Mountain View today is such a vibrant city where people want to come and live in. Had rent control passed in 1982, the city today would more resemble East Palo Alto.

People need to demand proof what these proponents are saying, most if not all is false.

Demand to see documents that says people where evicted just to raise rents.
Demand people to provide the property address where people say they are having 150% rent increase every 2 years.
Make them prove what they are alleging, no more scare tactics, just provide the proof. We can follow up with the property owner and verify this. Do not believe anything the Voice says on this issue.

We have ten's of thousands of renters in this city, I would like to see them produce a list of 1000 people with all these claims as to what is going on with these evil landlords.

The proponents of rent control are asking for a change to the city, they need to produce the evidence to warrant such a change.

Just so everyone knows the truth, the market rent in 2001 for a 1 bedroom was $1500, in 2003 that same unit was $850. Market rent for that same unit from 2001 is $2100 today. That is a 35% increase. Proponents like to use the recession level lows of the rent to make misleading claims as to how much rents have really increased.

We have 2 projects here as data points, which is not a lot of data.

On the bike/ped improvements outside of Graham, easier perhaps to blame macroeconomics than taking a closer look at MV's own behavior.

1. The city (including bike advocates) dragged its feet on this project. Those students were hit by cars outside their school in 2012. Four years ago. How is this an acceptable timeframe for addressing safety concerns? And why would we assume that four years later, the economy would be doing the same thing as it was when we started talking about the project?

2. This has to be the smallest green bike lane project known to man. You know, when you need the bathroom window in your house replaced and the person down the street is doing an entire kitchen remodel, during peak season as a contractor which job are you going to give priority? Not the bathroom window... A quick web search revealed the City of Pleasanton (as we drag our feet Pleasanton has become bike-friendly!) has found the political will AND the funding for larger, similar projects. In the same macroeconomic environment.

Good to see an article about planned improvements. Some deeper, more serious reporting would be a logical next step. And from the city, no more excuses please. Look around you; other communities are dealing with it better than us. Learn from them.

@Excuses,

The city wanted to get the VERBS grant money ($500K) to help fund the Castro Street "road diet" work and the only way the city was able to get enough points on the grant application to qualify for this grant money was to eliminate the "free" right turn onto Miramonte from Castro Street - which incidentally, isn't a safety problem in the first place, imho.

So, in the meantime...nothing has changed, there aren't even CROSSING GUARDS out there during the peak AM/PM school arrival/departure times. The kids jaywalk every single school day, and the worst traffic offenders - the parents picking up and dropping off their children from school - continue to speed up/down Castro Street at the highest risk times of day.