In summary
Los Altos Hills agreed to legalize some apartment buildings. State housing regulators agreed. Nearly two years later, the town wants the state to reconsider.
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In January 2023, the town council of Los Altos Hills, a mansion-studded bedroom community perched above Silicon Valley, reluctantly voted to legalize some apartment buildings.
It was a historic vote. Incorporated in 1956 by well-to-do hill dwellers trying to keep out the encroaching urbanity of nearby cities, the town’s “country residence zoning” rules only permit the construction of one type of building: Single-family homes, and no more than one per acre.
But town officials felt they had no choice. Bowing to state mandates to plan for more residential development, they zeroed in on three sites with apartment potential. The most promising of the three was Twin Oaks Court, a cluster of lots on a dead-end street sprouting from a frontage road along the I-280 freeway. State housing regulators signed off on the plan that spring.
Now, with a project proposed at Twin Oaks that would include the town’s first-ever affordable housing units, Los Altos Hills is having second thoughts.
Earlier this summer, the town council voted to amend its state-mandated development plan, cutting the number of new homes that could be legally crammed onto the site by nearly two-thirds.
Town officials and many local residents say the proposed changes to the municipal land-use blueprint, known as a housing element, still meet the letter of the state’s planning requirements while capping would-be development at a scale better suited to the town’s rural character and consistent with the intent of the original plan.
Packing hundreds of new residences along a narrow access road out of town is “totally inappropriate,” said Michael Grady, a retired lawyer who lives near the Twin Oaks site and who created an online petition calling on the town to revise its original plan. He said development at the densities initially permitted would snarl emergency access to and from the area, turbocharge traffic and disrupt local wildlife.
Pro-development activists are characterizing the proposed change as a bait-and-switch by an affluent community trying to evade state housing law and their obligations to make space for new residents, including those with lower incomes. The typical price of a home in the town currently tops $5.5 million, according to Zillow.
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“Local agencies should not be allowed to amend their housing elements the moment that they are confronted with a real housing development project,” the California Housing Defense Fund, a legal advocacy group that regularly sues cities for violating state housing laws, wrote in a letter to the California Department of Housing and Community Development last month.