Priorities

1. Safe streets that children and adults can walk & bike

Getting around Mountain View shouldn’t mean that every adult owns a car, or that you have to worry about your child every time they leave for school on their own.

• Build a connected network of protected bike lanes linking neighborhoods, schools, parks, downtown, and transit.
• Deliver on Vision Zero: Redesign the most dangerous streets and intersections for people. This means updating decades-old design standards that fail to prioritize safety, whether that is providing well-designed bike lanes and crosswalks or improving safety for those driving by narrowing lanes to discourage speeding.
• Adopt more quick-build infrastructure improvements, where the city implements targeted, evidence-based improvements to improve street safety without waiting on major road resurfacings.
• Move more design work in-house, reducing reliance on contractors and consultants for regularly-scheduled infrastructure projects.
• Maintain and improve our sidewalks for everyone, ensuring that no one in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller ever has to go out into the street just to get from point A to point B.
• Make it easy to get around without a car for every trip, so that going car-light is a real, convenient choice, not a sacrifice.
• Make our transit system the best it can be. James supports the Regional Transit Measure that will help to fund bus & train service improvements in Mountain View. A good transit system works in tandem with bicycle & pedestrian infrastructure to deliver the best transportation system possible for our city.
• Ensure that street improvements incorporate new street trees and plants, to make using our streets more pleasant, reduce urban heat island effects, improve stormwater runoff, and reduce the amount of asphalt that the city has to maintain.

2. Build the homes Mountain View needs

The single biggest thing the city can do for affordability is allow more homes. Especially near jobs, transit, and downtown.

• Legalize more housing throughout the city, so that people can live near the transit, jobs, parks, schools, and services that they need.
• Modernize outdated rules, so the projects we zone for can actually break ground instead of stalling out on paper. For instance, we continue to require that new apartment buildings “break up the massing” by adding extra protrusions on exterior walls. The original intention of these requirements were to improve the aesthetics of new buildings but in practice have actually caused new buildings to all look the same because they are all trying to comply with the same design standards, while significantly increasing the cost of the new construction.
• Cut the time and cost it takes to get a permit approved so housing actually gets built. Currently, city rules force too many rounds of back-and-forth, delaying projects by months. Additionally, many rules are highly subjective, meaning that whether a permit is approved or not can depend on exactly who is reviewing it.
• Base fees on new construction on real evidence, so that projects don’t die because they can’t pay arbitrary fees that the city has never justified.
• Continue strong tenant protections while we grow, so today’s residents aren’t displaced by tomorrow’s progress. This includes maintaining existing protections for mobile home owners, who are in a unique situation of having much of their wealth tied up in a physical home while still renting their land from the landowner.
• Adopt single-stair reform so small lots can become the kind of mid-rise, family-sized apartments other cities already allow.
• As more housing is built, ensure that our parks, streets, and local businesses are set up to support our new neighbors. Embrace that more Mountain View residents means an improved quality of life for everyone, with more people to support more local businesses, more tax revenue to maintain our parks, and more people riding and funding our public transit.

Improving housing affordability is particularly urgent given the large number of people currently being priced out of their homes and into RVs and other vehicles on our streets. Without building more homes, we will not be able to solve the root cause of the ongoing housing crisis in our region and on our streets.

Furthermore, we are in a climate crisis, and allowing more homes to be built in Mountain View is critical to reducing emissions and reducing unsustainable urban sprawl into rural areas.

3. A Mountain View that protects its residents

The City of Mountain View already discontinued its contract with Flock after it discovered that data from the automated license-plate readers were being illegally shared with outside agencies. In the current national political environment, it is more important than ever to use all the tools at our disposal to protect our most vulnerable residents.

• Protect the privacy of Mountain View residents, avoiding the mass surveillance that occurs with Flock and similar Automated License Plate Readers.
• Maintain and build on Mountain View’s Community For All initiative to ensure that immigrants feel comfortable interacting with the city and its police department without worrying that they will be asked about their immigration status. Our police should be able to focus on doing their job of keeping Mountain View residents safe, and should not worry that they will be placed in conflict with the people they are sworn to protect.
• Continue to refuse to allow City land and facilities to be used for ICE activities.
• Enact an ordinance similar to that enacted by the City of San Jose to preemptively ensure that it is explicitly illegal to build or operate an ICE detention facility in Mountain View.
• Join other cities in legal actions against the Federal government, as we did when joining other local cities in a lawsuit fighting the proposed Gilroy ICE detention facility.
• Ensure that Mountain View has the space and the homes to welcome immigrants and refugees. So long as we protect our rights locally and build the housing that people need, Mountain View can serve as a refuge for those seeking access to safe abortions, gender affirming care, and basic civil rights.