We're here at @mtnviewcityhall for a study session on the East Whisman Precise Plan. Looking forward to working with city council, city staff, and landowners to get to the goal of 5000 homes, 1000 of them affordable! #Year4Housing #AHW2019

Yup, we’ve planned for 10k homes in NBS, 5K in East whisman, & 7k units are already in pipeline. So why do we need SB50?? Don’t need the State to plan for us. Just need the $ to do more affordable, & get developers to actually build.

The reason why cities like Sunnyvale and MV resist SB50 isn’t because of NIMBYism. It’s because SB50 makes no effort to distinguish bad actors from good. And the good actors are understandably upset at being punished for no reason other than legislative laziness.

How would you want good actors to be recognized and distinguished from bad actors? What is the threshold you would define that at?

This is difficult to do because while I'm sure a lot of us would probably agree that MV is a better actor than Cupertino in terms of recent actions, MV actually has a far worse jobs/housing imbalance.

I don't think per-jurisdiction jobs/housing balance is a good metric. If you want more transit commuting and less driving you don't want the jobs spread thinly over the whole metro; you want jobs to be in central places. (Am I channeling @alon_levy here?)

I'd be more amenable to this "highly concentrated jobs are good because transit" argument if a) any of these peninsula cities had real transit and b) California's tax structure didn't also make that wildly profitable for said cities.

But at some point we have to get to a metro area layout that's not an environmental disaster. Some of the path from here to there is going to involve things that make long-term sense but not short-term sense. Prop 13 repeal is a step along that path, but need not be step 1.