Affordable housing advocates won another battle on the local level with the passage of a housing impact fee in one of the valley’s fastest growing cities. Earlier this week the Sunnyvale City Council voted to support staff’s recommended level of $17/sf. It was a good discussion that had only one member line up against the fee at all (Jim Davis).
The others all supported, to varying levels of enthusiasm, different fee levels. Two supported as high as $26/sf (Meyering and Whittum), two supported either $21 or $17 (Larsson and Griffith), and two supported $17 (Martin-Milius, Hendricks). They tried a few different ways to land on $21/sf, but couldn’t get a solid consensus – when they finally exhausted three efforts to get to $21 they tried for $17/sf and got 5 of the 7 to support (Yes votes: Griffith, Martin-Milius, Hendricks, Larsson, Whittum, No votes: Davis; and at that point Meyering abstained because he thought it was too low).
Affordable housing supporters will be able to leverage the recent successes of three cities supporting $17/sf (San Jose, Mountain View, Sunnyvale) to get the rest of the cities in Santa Clara County to sign on to that amount and claim this as one of the regional solutions available for affordable and equitable housing.
Among affordable housing allies who provided public comment were Housing Trust SV, Sunnyvale Community Services, Greenbelt, Non-Profit Housing Association, and Mid Pen.The BIA was supporting the $17/sf staff recommendation (because they didn’t want a higher fee and read the tea leaves that something was going to pass); while still maintaining their position that nexus studies don’t provide the necessary causal linkage they (erroneously) say is necessary under the mitigation fee act.
The draft ordinance is expected at the June hearing and if all goes well the ordinance can be adopted in July.
Charisse Ma Lebron is the Director of Community Development & Health Policy for Working Partnerships USA.
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