TITLE: PLEASE VETO SB79
Governor Newsom,
We stand with Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and other public officials urging you to veto SB79.
Despite recent amendments, this proposed legislation is still deeply flawed. The historic protections it offers are only for buildings on a city’s local historic register. There is no provision for historic districts like Mountain View’s three-block historic retail district. SB79 would allow buildings which are seven stories or higher to be constructed immediately adjacent to buildings on our local historic register, destroying the look and feel of a unique historic retail district. Cities with historic districts near transit up and down the Bay Area Peninsula will be similarly impacted.
Mountain View is one of only two cities in Santa Clara County with a state pro-housing designation. In the last few years, our city council has upzoned large areas of our city even beyond what was required in our housing element despite being a city of only 13 square miles. Additional upzoning from SB79 will seriously challenge the limits of our infrastructure for which there will be no state funding.
And SB79 does nothing to improve the amount of AFFORDABLE housing that can be constructed near transit stations. Mountain View, like other Bay Area cities, faces a shortage of AFFORDABLE housing, not luxury housing. Almost 15% of the apartments constructed in our city since 2016 lie vacant. Destroying residential neighborhoods to build more of them will not make housing more affordable in our city.
Robert Cox, Louise Katz, Nazanin Dashtara, Muriel Sivyer-Lee, Toni Rath, Peter Spitzer, Maureen Blando, Jerry Steach, David Lewis, Carol Lewis, Hala Alshahwany, Carole Griggs, Leslie Friedman, Nancy Stuhr, Natalie Solomon, Sean O’Malley, Diane Gazzano, Lorrie Wormald, Alice De Guzman, and Julia Ha
For the Steering Commitee of Livable Mountain View
Mountain View, California
