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Anyone living in one of Mountain View’s rent-controlled apartments can expect to see as much as a 3.5% increase on their monthly bills.
On May 13, the city’s Rental Housing Committee set the annual allowable rent increase for the coming year. Based on inflation data, all rent-controlled units in the city will be restricted to no more than a 3.5% increase, starting on Sept. 1.
At the same meeting, the rental committee also analyzed the annual budget, including a per-unit fee that underwrites the cost of city’s oversight of rental apartments. For the coming fiscal year, each rent-controlled apartment will be expected to pay a fee of $101 annually.
City housing officials pointed out the new fee is a significant drop from the $155 per-unit cost imposed on each apartment in 2017, when the city’s rental program was just launching and faced litigation and startup expenses.
Rent control is a stop-gap measure with the unintended consequence of driving the small housing providers to sell to developers.
The real issue is housing shortage.
Here is an article from the LA Times which provides some insight into the stalled
SB 50 bill which seeks to build high density housing near transit hubs.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-sb50-failure-single-family-homes-suburbs-20190522-story.html
Why am I posting this? 1) Highlight that housing supply shortage is the core issue 2) Counter weight to the Lenny Siegel/Job Lopez narrative of demonizing the housing provider community. As you know, Job Lopez was caught defacing campaign signs of people he disagrees with. Their actions are non-constructive. When supply of an item goes down, prices go up. Price discovery is essential to healthy markets. Pricing is a signaling message of either over/under supply and is used to attract or repel capital investment (Repel in this context is if there is too much supply,
more capital investment is not needed)
Yes, we are in a jam. SB 50 is stalled, with many different perspectives that need to be sorted out before there will be any progress on the core issue: Shortage
But let’s be clear: High density housing near transit is a good thing
And it will take us time to get there as the different perspectives are sorted out.
@city council
Higher density is needed. I would support .5 parking space per unit so long as 2 hour parking restricted signs are posted (paid by developer) within a 3 block perimeter surrounding the new TOD on city owned streets. All of these projects are sold to council without the need for parking (everybody walks, Ubers, etc. so much nonsense). Assuming the developer offers the respective tenant/owner the parking desired, then don’t expect the city of Mountain View handing out 3-4 permits per unit for residential street parking for almost free. “Yes, I don’t own a car and 3 months later I have 3 cars and now petition/require unfettered access to city street parking” The RPP program is and was a horrible idea. SB 50 needs much work, parking restrictions dissuade commuters and downtown workers and new TOD residents are put on notice prior to occupancy. “Residential parking permits should not allowed on parking restricted streets” for obvious reasons (net loss of available parking, duh!).
Everyone needs to park within their footprint and compete and abide by all parking restrictions placed on their streets.
Re-visiting SB50 without parking restrictions and the “new” RPP program will decimate available parking in and near downtown.