Builder’s remedy filings expand in Mountain View

The builder’s remedy filings that began in Silicon Valley have caught fire in Mountain View.

A Mountain View property owner plans to use the decades-old provision in a state housing law to automatically approve a 200-unit apartment complex at 1920 Gamel Way, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Local developers Tod Spieker and Kevin DeNardi, operating as D/S Gamel Way, have submitted “preliminary information” outlining plans to expand the approved residential project, a city spokeswoman told the newspaper. They haven’t filed a formal application.

The project would build 65 percent more homes than was approved for the site.

The project is the fifth and largest builder’s remedy project the Business Times has found so far on the Peninsula and the second in Mountain View.  

What has been dubbed the builder’s remedy is a legal loophole in a 1990 state housing law that allows property owners to bypass local zoning to approve projects if a city or county fails to certify its state housing element, a plan to build more homes.

Bay Area cities that didn’t have the plans certified by Jan. 31 have few options for denying a development where at least 20 percent of the units are affordable for low-income households.

Mountain View is subject to the builder’s remedy because it, like most Bay Area jurisdictions, didn’t have its eight-year housing blueprint approved by the state by the required deadline.

The untested builder’s remedy provision, used to stake plans for thousands of homes in Southern California, was first applied in the Bay Area this month in Los Altos Hills by a homeowner frustrated by roadblocks at City Hall.

The provision is expected to be most useful for residential projects that have become “stuck,” either because they don’t pencil financially or because they face strong community opposition, according to the Business Times.

“This provides a different program that developers could apply to a project site to make it pencil,” Ryan Patterson with the land use law firm Zacks Freedman & Patterson told the newspaper last fall.  

Sasha Zbrozek filed what may be the first builder’s remedy application in the Bay Area, when he proposed replacing a single-family house in Los Altos Hills with 15 apartments and five townhomes at 11511 Summit Wood Road. Alternate plans, also filed under the remedy, call for five townhomes and leaving his home intact. 

Soon afterward, Forrest Linebarger, CEO of Inhabiture, filed plans under the provision for  approval of two 44-unit condominium developments in Los Altos Hills and an 85-unit apartment building in Mountain View.

He said he hit the same pushback from local planning officials, who he said refused for decades to approve various project applications on each site.

D/S Gamel Way, the third known applicant in the Bay Area to file for automatic approval under the remedy, secured the right to build a four-story, 121-unit condominium project on the 2.3-acre Gamel Way site in 2021, according to city records. 

Plans for the project included 29 affordable homes, enough to replace the “naturally affordable” homes that would be razed for development. It also included an enhanced benefits package for 16 displaced tenants. It’s not clear why the development stalled.

It’s also not clear whether the revised, 200-unit project would include apartments or condominiums, or how many of its homes would be set aside as affordable.

— Dana Bartholomew