A land swap doubled this Mountain View affordable housing site

The corner of Terra Bella and San Rafael avenues in Mountain View is a block off Highway 101, wedged between a Public Storage yard and a row of low industrial buildings. On Thursday, Alta Housing and Santa Clara County broke ground there on La Bella, a six-story building with 108 affordable apartments at 1020 Terra Bella Avenue.

The price is $95.95 million, or $888,460 an apartment, according to the state tax credit committee's December 2025 staff report. That is about 61 percent of what a typical home in the surrounding Moffett-Whisman neighborhood was worth in August 2026, $1.45 million, according to Houseberry data.

Mountain View has permitted 16.8 percent of the 11,135 homes the state expects of it by 2031, and city staff keep naming the same bottleneck: money. La Bella is getting built on a formula worth copying. A neighbor gave land, the city and the county each wrote a check, and federal and state tax credits covered most of the rest.

How a storage yard made room for 108 homes

The original 1020 Terra Bella parcel was too small for a building this size. Public Storage, which runs the yard next door at 1040 Terra Bella, donated half an acre and the two parcels were redrawn, giving the housing a site of about 1.04 acres. The Mountain View Voice reported in March 2023 that the swap roughly doubles the number of affordable units the site can hold, and the City Council approved the project that month.

The storage company gets something too. Its 18 single-story storage buildings come down for two multi-story ones, and the new storage building on the Highway 101 side works as a noise wall for the apartments.

Mayor Emily Ann Ramos credited the land swap and donation at Thursday's ceremony. Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga, a former Mountain View council member, said she was "proud that $10.5 million came to this project."

Every unit except the two manager apartments is income-restricted. The county's release counts 27 Rapid Rehousing apartments for people leaving homelessness and 10 for low-income people with disabilities. The tax credit report lists 54 units at 30 percent of area median income, 4 at 40 percent, 21 at 50 percent and 27 at 60 percent, and 23 apartments carry federal project-based vouchers.

Here is what that means in rent. These are the 2025 maximums in the CTCAC report, utilities included.

The 28 three-bedrooms stand out. That is 26 percent of the building, and seven of the extremely low-income units are three-bedrooms, per the county. At the 30 percent level, one of those three-bedrooms rents for no more than $1,567 a month.

What $888,460 an apartment buys in Moffett-Whisman

That number is high. Construction runs $622 a square foot in the CTCAC report, and the land cost only $2.1 million because most of it was donated. The building has 92 covered parking spaces, 110 bike spaces, a 10,800-square-foot podium courtyard and rooftop solar, according to architect Van Meter Williams Pollack.

We think it is a good deal for Mountain View anyway.

The city and county together put in $24 million, about $222,000 an apartment, a quarter of the cost. Tax credit equity of $54.1 million carries more than half. The county figure is newer than the state report, which listed $5.15 million in county money in December 2025, so the final stack may have shifted.

Moffett-Whisman scores 3.4 out of 5 overall on Houseberry's Mountain View neighborhood ranking, seventh of eight. Its school score is 4.0, and 2023 coverage of the approval said students living at La Bella would be zoned for Theuerkauf Elementary and Crittenden Middle. Safety is 2.8 out of 5, tied with North Bayshore and ahead of only San Antonio - Rengstorff - del Medio on Houseberry's Mountain View safety ranking. Amenities score 3.4.

Prices tell a sharper story. Moffett-Whisman is the only one of the six Mountain View neighborhoods with their own sales data whose typical price fell over the past year, by about 4 percent from October 2025 to August 2026, by Houseberry's count. Central Mountain View rose about 5 percent over the same months. The citywide typical home on Houseberry's Mountain View city page was $2.92 million in August.

One caution on our own numbers.

Houseberry's September 2026 readings for several Mountain View neighborhoods jump 12 to 102 percent in a single month, with Moffett-Whisman up 70 percent. No market moves like that, so we use August.

The trade-off at this corner is the freeway. The site sits a block from 101, and Houseberry scores Moffett-Whisman's nearby merchants 2.9 out of 5. Alta CEO Randy Tsuda told the council in 2023 that the block is on the city's safe routes to school, which matters for a building with 57 two- and three-bedroom apartments.

Mountain View's affordable pipeline in 2026

La Bella is the second bond-funded project to break ground in Mountain View this year, after Corso, the 120-unit building on the former downtown Lot 12 that held its groundbreaking in May. Montecito, Charities Housing's 85 apartments at Montecito Avenue and North Shoreline Boulevard, was set to start move-ins in July. The city counts five affordable developments moving in 2026, worth 553 units, on top of an existing stock of 2,044 affordable units in 20 buildings. That is close to a 30 percent jump in one year.

Housing overall is moving slower. The city permitted 388 homes in 2025 and 1,867 since mid-2022, the Mountain View Voice reported in March, with 3,606 approved homes not yet under construction. The city's R3 zoning rewrite opened more land to apartments, but zoning is not a construction loan.

Measure A, the $950 million county bond voters passed in 2016, has now put about $67 million into six Mountain View developments with more than 540 units. If La Bella opens on its January 2028 estimate, 54 households earning no more than 30 percent of the area median will move into a building that cost less per apartment than the typical Moffett-Whisman home sells for. Before then, see how the blocks around Terra Bella compare with the rest of the city on our Mountain View neighborhood map and ranking.

Sources

• San Jose Inside, County and Partners Break Ground on Affordable Housing Project in Mountain View, October 9, 2026
• California Tax Credit Allocation Committee, staff report CA-25-709, La Bella, December 10, 2025
• City of Mountain View, Affordable Housing Month release, May 29, 2026
• Mountain View Voice, council approves 108-unit project on Terra Bella Avenue, March 15, 2023
• Mountain View Voice, progress on the 11,135-home plan, March 10, 2026
• Van Meter Williams Pollack, 1020 Terra Bella project page
• Houseberry Mountain View neighborhood ranking and neighborhood price histories, read October 9, 2026