BY ELAINE GOODMAN
Daily Post Correspondent
The Mountain View City Council will discuss Tuesday (Sept. 9) taking the first steps toward a package of housing proposals that could eventually include a controversial opportunity-to-purchase program for renters.
A report from the city’s Housing Department recommends that the city does not develop an opportunity-to-purchase act program, also known as OPA, “at this time,” but continue to monitor conditions that might make it more feasible in the future. One issue is that city employees have too much other work to spend time developing an OPA program.
But some members of a city housing advisory committee have said it would be better to move forward with OPA now, while it has political support.
Under a typical OPA program, tenants are notified when the building they’re living in goes up for sale. They then have the first shot at buying it themselves. Nonprofit groups or the city can also make an offer.
If the seller rejects those offers, the parties would have a chance to meet an offer that the seller accepts from a third-party buyer. While the idea behind OPA is to keep renters from getting displaced, opponents say the programs would drag down property values.
Launching an OPA program is one step the city is considering as part of its Community Ownership Action Plan. The plan aims to prevent displacement of residents living in rent-controlled housing in Mountain View.
Council tomorrow will review “guiding principles” for the action plan. Council will also consider a $75,000 grant program and a loan program for community housing projects.
Over the past decade, Mountain View has lost about 1,000 housing units covered by the city’s rent-control law. Those units have been torn down, or are slated for demolition, to make way for new development.
Mountain View’s rent control law limits rent increases at apartment complexes with three or more units that were built before 1995. From September 2025 through August 2026, rent increases of up to 2.7% are allowed.
A consultant estimated it would cost $25 million to buy and preserve 50 apartments that are now rent controlled.
The city is exploring different forms of community ownership to increase housing opportunities in Mountain View. Community ownership might include community land trusts, which own the land that homes are built on and then sell or rent the housing. A group called the Mountain View Community Land Trust has formed as a nonprofit and received a $1.5 million grant from Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Alphabet.
Another possibility is resident-owned communities, in which mobile home residents own and operate their mobile home park.
The grant program that council is considering would offer up to $25,000 per recipient. It would help housing groups achieve some of the goals of an OPA program. For example, the money could be used for real estate services to monitor properties listed for sale. The funding could help groups be ready to buy when an opportunity comes up.
A separate loan program would provide up to $100,000 per unit for buying and rehabbing apartments.
A committee known as the Community Ownership Action Plan Advisory Committee met from October 2024 through June 2025 to provide input on the city’s housing plan. Its 12 members represented groups such as the Mountain View Mobile Home Alliance, Mountain View Tenants Coalition, Santa Clara County and the South Bay Community Land Trust.
Committee members had varying views on an OPA program.
Some said the city could tackle OPA in pieces. For example, council could approve an ordinance requiring tenants and nonprofits to be notified when a property is for sale and separately consider an ordinance granting a right of first refusal. Another idea was for the city to offer incentives to property owners who sell to nonprofits. Others said a “land bank” could be established to scoop up rental properties that come up for sale, and then later sell the properties to the city or nonprofits.
Mountain View’s Housing Department was aware of only one California city with an OPA program: San Francisco. San Jose considered an OPA program but decided against it.
The East Palo Alto City Council gave initial approval to an OPA program on a 3-2 vote in 2023. But when it came back for final approval, then-council member Antonio Lopez flipped from supporting to opposing the program, and OPA was rejected.
Yet another distracting bit of empty virtue-signaling from local elected government, who want to tell you they care, but don’t want to pay the cost of actual action. Cue the violins.
The root problem is: it’s expensive to live here. To make it cheaper, somebody must pay. MVCC doesn’t want to pay.
In right-of-first-refusal schemes like this, it’s theoretically the owners who pay, because the OPA supposedly deters competitive third-party offers, letting the tenants buy it cheap. Yet in practice the tenants can’t ever match anything close to a market-rate offer, and the professionals know it. So it either happens at market rate, or it doesn’t happen at all. Since neither outcome produces rent relief, the whole thing is basically a PR exercise for the city council, while the actual housing problem festers on.
It’s expensive to live here; to make it cheaper, somebody must pay. If the city council wants the owners to pay, tax them. If there isn’t enough money, the CC should decide who it can realistically help and who it can’t. But both of those require a spine. Hence …
Just another way for the real-estate shills in local government to use taxpayer money to subsidize the real-estate industrial complex. Real-estate is the most subsidized industry in the United States (not big oil). Taxpayers build the roads, parking structures, transit systems, utilities, amenities, and just about everything else this industry needs to continue to grow in an unsustainable way. Now the real-estate industrial wants taxpayers to subsidize the purchase of their overpriced products? Cha-ching!