Mountain View · Santa Clara County
More renters than owners, by a long way.
Fifty-eight percent of households here rent, and forty percent of everybody lives in a building of five units or more. The locksmith work looks nothing like the suburb next door.
An apartment city in a county of houses
The City's own Housing Element puts occupied units at 31,469, of which 13,277 are owner occupied (42 percent) and 18,192 are rented (58 percent). Santa Clara County as a whole runs the other way at 59 percent owner.
By structure it is starker. Large multifamily, five units or more, is 45 percent of Mountain View's housing against 24 percent countywide. Detached single family is only 30 percent. Attached single family is 13, small multifamily 8, and mobile homes 3 percent.
That changes the work completely. In Mountain View the common jobs are unit doors, lobby and courtyard doors, electric strikes and entry phones, gated garages, laundry rooms and cluster mailboxes. Front paths and garden gates are the minority here, not the default.
Four of the city's own named neighborhoods are mobile home communities: Moorpark Mobile Homes, Sahara Mobile Village, Santiago Villa and Sunset Estate. Mobile home doors are thinner than stick-built doors and often sit on backsets nothing on a shop shelf is cut for, so tell us that on the phone and the right hardware comes with us.
Mountain View Housing Element, tables 4-10 and 4-11 and section 4.3.2; the City's own neighborhood GIS layers.
Rent stabilization, and the line we will not cross
Mountain View voters passed the Community Stabilization and Fair Rent Act as Measure V in November 2016. The City states that most apartments with three or more units are covered: buildings from before 1995 get both rent stabilization and eviction protection, and buildings from 1995 to 2017 get eviction protection only. Tenants can be evicted for nine stated just-cause reasons and no others, and relocation assistance is owed on certain no-fault evictions.
None of that is about locks. What it does mean is that in a city where most people rent and most rentals are covered, the question of who is allowed to ask for a lock change comes up constantly.
So here is our rule, plainly. We will rekey or change locks for an owner once possession has genuinely come back. We will not change a lock on somebody who still lives there, whatever the paperwork says, unless a sheriff has carried out a writ and you can show it to us.
That is not caution for its own sake. Civil Code 789.3 makes a landlord lockout worth $100 a day with a $250 floor, plus the tenant's legal costs, and a locksmith who helped is not a bystander.
City of Mountain View rent stabilization pages on the CSFRA; California Civil Code §789.3.
A 1960s and 1970s city
The biggest decade here is the 1970s at 24.8 percent of the stock, then the 1960s at 22.4 and the 1950s at 18.3. Roughly 74 percent of Mountain View predates 1980, and only 3.8 percent predates 1940, out of 33,039 units.
The growth was violent and brief. Mountain View had 2,235 dwelling units in 1950 and 10,281 in 1960, with population going from 6,563 to 30,889 in the same ten years. Then it slowed: units went from 29,990 in 1990 to 31,242 in 2010, a five percent rise while the county rose fifteen.
One more figure worth knowing if you manage property here. Of 584 multifamily buildings in the city, 111 are soft-story structures, about 19 percent, holding 1,129 units. Soft-story means the ground floor is mostly openings, which in practice is tuck-under parking, which in practice is a garage gate and a stair door doing the security work for the whole building.
Mountain View Housing Element section 4.3.1 and table 4-10; MTC census compilation for Mountain View.
Where we go in Mountain View
Old Mountain View and Downtown, the Central Neighborhoods, Monta Loma, Farley and Rock Street, Rex Manor, Slater, North Whisman and the Moffett and Whisman Road area, Cuesta Park, Martens-Carmelita, Varsity Park, Shoreline West, Blossom Valley, Cooper Park, Dutch Haven, Gemello Park, Springer Meadow and Springer Tree, Wagon Wheel, the Grant Road and Sylvan Park area, the Springer, Cuesta and Phyllis area, San Antonio and Rengstorff, and North Bayshore.
The transit station at Evelyn Avenue and Castro Street is a useful landmark if you are stranded downtown without an address.
In an emergency, 20 to 30 minutes.
Questions people ask here
I am locked out of my apartment at midnight. What do you need?
Photo identification and something that ties you to that unit: a lease, a bill, a bank statement with the address. We ask every time, in every building, and the reason is the person on the other side of that door.
The lobby door buzzer is broken and nobody can get in.
That is building hardware, so the owner or manager has to authorize it. If it is an electric strike rather than the intercom panel, it is usually a quick fix.
My landlord says he is changing the locks this week. Can he?
Not while you live there. Civil Code 789.3 prohibits it, and Mountain View's own just-cause rules sit on top of that. We will not take that job and nor should anyone else.
Do you do mobile homes at Santiago Villa or Sahara?
Yes. Say it is a mobile home when you call so we bring hardware that fits a thinner door and a non-standard backset.
Need a locksmith in Mountain View now?
A person answers, at any hour, in English or Spanish. If it is not urgent, we will hold a day and a time for you instead.
Or leave your details and we will call you.