Sunnyvale candidates talk housing issues ahead of election

The Sunnyvale City Council will make decisions on housing, transit and the city’s budget in the near future — and candidates seeking elected office are sharing their approaches to governing.

Sunnyvale voters attended a candidate forum on Sept. 18, hosted by San José Spotlight, where two mayoral candidates and five of six council candidates fielded questions about homelessness and city services. The mayor’s seat and council Districts 2, 4 and 6 will be on November’s ballot. Beverly Blau, running for District 6, was unable to attend.

The forum kicked off with Mayor Larry Klein and challenger Councilmember Russ Melton fielding questions on city services. Klein was first elected as mayor in 2020, though he first served as mayor in 2019 before the city changed to directly electing the role. Melton was elected to the council in 2016 and terms out this year.

The city put $3.5 million in a “set aside” fund to increase services to residents in the future. Klein said he wants to put some of these resources toward a citywide shuttle and added the city has applied for state grants to fund a partnership with Silicon Valley Hopper , a low-cost ride-share service that already operates in Cupertino and Santa Clara.

Melton said he wants to see more resources go toward the city’s Department of Public Safety, especially to create a burglary suppression unit. Sunnyvale has an integrated department, which means every officer is trained as a police officer, firefighter and emergency medical technician.

“We need more cops in this city for a couple of reasons,” Melton said. “Our public safety officers work tens of thousands of hours of overtime every single year that I’ve been on city council, and what you do not want are a bunch of overworked, stressed out cops.”

The discussion turned to housing, as the city has to build 11,966 new homes by 2031 to meet state housing goals . Klein has a multi-faceted approach that involves the city buying land to help facilitate developing housing and making it easier for single-family homeowners to construct accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in their backyards. He added that using multiple approaches can help spread new housing development throughout the city.

“Once the city buys that land and partners with affordable housing developers, we have affordable housing at that site for years, for generations to come,” Klein said. “It’s not just multi-family. That helps us with our housing numbers, but it’s also ADUs and looking outside the box, to make sure that we have more affordable housing here.”

Melton pointed to the city’s multiple plans for increasing housing density in certain neighborhoods, such as Moffett Park and the downtown , as ways the city can add to its housing stock. He said he wants to hire more workers in the city’s Community Development Department to increase the speed of developments moving through the city’s pipeline.

The five council candidates at the forum fielded similar questions. District 2 Incumbent Alysa Cisneros is being challenged by former Councilmember Jim Davis. District 6 Councilmember Omar Din did not file for reelection, leaving Sunnyvale School District Trustee Eileen Le, financial analyst Richard Lesher and Blau vying for his open seat. Charlsie Chang, a government affairs official for the San Mateo County Transit Authority, is running unopposed in District 4, where Melton is terming out.

Housing development has been slow for numerous reasons, such as the high cost of development. Davis said costs have skyrocketed, making it difficult for anyone to build housing.

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“The city of Sunnyvale does not build housing. We don’t build any place. We ask developers to come forward with projects and concerns and build housing,” Davis said. “Financing in the state of California right now is beyond the ability of a lot of people to be able to develop, and it’s not only here in the city of Sunnyvale.”

While there are external reasons that make it costly to build housing, Cisneros said the city needs to remove the barriers that it has control over, such as streamlining city approvals.

“The only way we’re going to be able to really make sure the housing is built (is) I think we need to focus on the applications that we’re getting now, and work with the developer to figure out what kind of fees, what kind of density bonuses, and look at those concessions so we’re looking at projects that can actually be built in the near term,” Cisneros said.

Some candidates suggested speeding up existing projects. Lesher said he wants to speed up development of Moffett Park, where the city wants to build 20,000 homes, though he didn’t offer any specific plans.

“If those 20,000 units appeared tomorrow, affordable housing wouldn’t even be a discussion,” Lesher said.
Le pointed toward the high cost of development and federal interest rates as reasons to why development has been slow. When balancing housing and retail , Le said she wants to prioritize keeping existing retail to avoid displacing smaller, family-owned businesses.

“That’s one of the things I want to advocate to be doing, is keeping these smaller businesses that would otherwise be displaced by townhome building,” Le said.

Chang also stressed the importance of balancing retail and housing, and added the city should continue prioritizing housing along transit corridors.

“We can also prioritize more housing, more transit-oriented development, like the plans we’ve approved at Lawrence Station,” Chang said. “But we really need to balance and make sure we’re not losing our retail and creating food deserts.”

Contact B. Sakura Cannestra at sakura@sanjosespotlight.com or @SakuCannestra on X, formerly known as Twitter.

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