Yup. One word: Google.
Just rename the city Google View instead of Mountain View. My son knows several homeless youth. Google needs to either help the city with housing or move to Nevada. Wait until San Jose and Sunnyvale have Google move in as they are planning. Care Google. Simply care about your fellow man/woman.

Whisman Woman:

Doesn't Santa Clara County go from Palo Alto to well past Milpitas? And south past Gilroy? And almost to the San Luis Resevoir? Surely Google alone isn't responsible for an upswing in housing costs over something like 1300 square miles?

I agree that tech has caused a raise in house prices, and that it's outragous, but last I checked Google was trying to do something with the Shoreline development, which is constantly being blocked by residents of Mountain View. You can't just blame the tech companies - the NIMBYism here is pretty horrifying.

Why don't we have tiny houses and efficiency condos in this County yet? Because NIBMYism. We need more solutions because we have had generations of locals that have been displaced by the economic upswing of technology development, this is long overdue!

Jerry Brown wants to require cities statewide to build their "fair share" of housing. What if we define a city's "fair share" as "enough housing for all the jobs in that city"? Of course some people will live and work in different cities, but if we had balance overall, it would even out. We could even have a "cap and trade" sort of thing where cities could choose to build less housing than they need and pay a fine that would be distributed to cities with lots of housing, thus requiring underhoused cities to subsidize cities that support their workers instead of the other way around like we have now.

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The real "Common sense" here (the people above using throway monikers were deleted; I have no idea what they wrote).

My comment #1: The survey report (I read the whole linked document) is both inconsistent and confusing, in ways either negligent or intentional. It has already succeed in creating buzz with "44 percent of community college students reported experiencing homelessness or knowing someone who was homeless sometime in the past six months" (P. 1), but makes no effort to distinguish those very different categories. What fraction of the 44% actually are homeless (or even experienced it) rather than just "knowing someone?"

Then (P. 12), it emphatically asserts the same statistic, yet with completely different meaning: that those 44% of respondents said "they were homeless," as in currently lacking a home. Is the careful Page-1 Executive Summary (the part of the report that everyone reads) grossly wrong, or did some over-eager polemicist decide on P. 12 to redefine those who "knew someone" experiencing homelessness, or experienced it themselves earlier, within the prior six months, as being ALL now homeless people?

What OTHER data in this report are internally contradictory or spun? And WHY AREN'T JOURNALISTS SPOTTING THIS AND POINTING IT OUT???

My comment #2: Some fellow residents commenting above recognize MV's serious jobs-housing imbalance, but are badly muddled (or ideologically blindered) re causative factors.

"Marika" notes that "Google [is] trying to do something" about housing at North Bayshore (NBS). Marika neglects to add that even if 1000s of units are built there eventually, Google is already busy hiring tens of thousands in MV and nearby towns, thus far more strongly "doing something" to worsen the problem; that whatever is or isn't done about it reactively, the whole "housing shortage" resulted directly from such firms hiring en-masse; and that actual local debates about NBS housing (which Marika dismisses offhand, in the manner of those who claim to read minds, or who prefer name-calling to reasoned argument) concern the other urban-planning realities of new housing that don't go away just because you ignore them in rhetoric: traffic, schools, utilities, police and fire services, who pays for all this, how long it takes, etc. etc.

"Sharon" glibly claims that small houses and efficiency condos aren't built "because [OF] NIMBYism" (again that handy knee-jerk term). Apparently Sharon has paid no attention at all to recent history: who builds most new housing (property developers, overwhelmingly interested in high-end residences that maximize profits), and that many local residents have actively called for EXACTLY the kinds of housing Sharon did, because it offers the prospect of ownership to far more people.