Palo Alto mayor running for state office on NIMBY platform

Lydia Kou is ready to take her anti-YIMBY stance all the way to the state legislature.

The Palo Alto mayor is running for state Assembly in California, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Her campaign centers on an anti-housing push, a boisterous opposition to state laws that mandate more construction, sometimes over the wishes of local municipalities.

“What it does do is take away the ability of local government to make local planning decisions about the built environment,” Kou said during a March state-of-the-city address, nodding to state laws that force cities to build housing. “That goes against the whole meaning of democracy.”

Kou has compared the policies of the “yes in my backyard” crowd to the Soviet Union. She has said the state is “taking away local democracy by putting developers in charge of land use and silencing local communities.” She has also said that the building mandates are helping to increase the unaffordability of her city.

Kou approaches her campaign from an intriguing standpoint, as she’s a residential real estate broker. Before moving into politics, Kou backed a referendum to oppose a 60-unit senior affordable housing project, which was killed.

Of course, her community has not been immune from the controversial state housing mandate. Palo Alto needs a plan to build nearly 6,100 housing units by 2031. It has not won state approval for its housing element, which has allowed “builders remedy” projects to come in and bypass the city; two such projects have been submitted.

In March, Peninsula Land & Capital filed a builder’s remedy application in Palo Alto for a 119,000-square-foot building with 45 condo units, including nine designated as affordable. The project needs to go through city review and comply with the state environmental law, but Palo Alto can’t deny “certain qualifying housing projects” until its housing element is approved.

When the city finalized its housing element before submitting it to the state, Kou was one of several local officials who couldn’t hide her dismay. She claimed the state’s methodology for determining housing allocations was flawed.

It will be an uphill climb for Kou to upset the incumbent; Marc Berman won 73 percent of the vote in his last election.

— Holden Walter-Warner

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