The Los Gatos Town Council’s 3-2 approval of North 40 Phase 2 represents more than a new direction for the town; it puts a definitive price tag on the administrative failures of Mayor Rob Moore, Vice Mayor Maria Ristow and Councilmember Rob Rennie.
This is the same voting bloc that, despite controlling the legislative agenda for the critical years of 2022 and 2023—with Rennie as mayor in 2022 and Ristow as Mayor in 2023—failed to produce a compliant Housing Element by the statutory deadline. In March 2022, the Los Gatos Community Alliance’s attorney sent a formal memo warning the Town of the critical importance of meeting that deadline. Rennie and Ristow did what they do best and ignored solid legal advice.
And so, this trio effectively handed developers the “Builder’s Remedy” weapon. It wasn’t until June 4, 2024, that the Council finally adopted a compliant Housing Element—and during that long year-and-a-half of exposure, Builder’s Remedy applications piled up, trading our community’s planning autonomy for developer profit.
Let’s correct Rennie’s version that Hudes is trying to stall the project. To secure State certification, the Council voting bloc orchestrated a Housing Element that relied on the North 40 as its cornerstone for affordability. They told residents of the Town we could reasonably expect 365 affordable units and only 108 above-market units on this site. Yet these three Council members peddled those inflated figures to Sacramento—and us—to save their political skin.
Last week, the mask fell. This three-member bloc approved a plan producing a pathetic 77 affordable units while exploding the market-rate count to 373. That is 265 more luxury units than the Town’s own plan promised. At an average sales price of $1.6 million, those extra units gift the developer $424 million in additional gross revenue. Even after netting out the lost affordable units, this pivot hands Grosvenor Americas a windfall of over $250 million more in total revenue than the planned project would have generated.
While Councilmember Rennie rushed for a decision, eager to bypass scrutiny, Councilmember Matthew Hudes was the adult in the room. He attempted to force the developer to comply with the Town’s own development standards and pushed to move a looming 100-foot building further back from the street to protect the neighborhood’s character. The developer said no.
Throughout this insult to residents, the Moore-Ristow-Rennie bloc sat silent, eventually accusing Hudes of “stalling” a decision that will now haunt this town for generations. Shockingly, the developer never submitted a single financial projection to substantiate their claim that any changes to their plan would make the project economically infeasible. Instead, the bloc of three approved a quarter-billion-dollar payday for the developer on trust alone.
In a final act of total surrender, this bloc gutted the safeguards previously recommended by the Planning Commission. While the Commission’s conditions would have required the development of affordable units at the same time as market-rate units, the “bloc of three” stripped this protection away. They modified the conditions to allow the developer to sell 127 market-rate units before building even a single unit of affordable housing. Based on these gutted terms, it will be years before a single affordable unit is built—if it happens at all. What is guaranteed is that the developer will extract over $200 million in revenue before the first low-income family even has a hope of moving in.
Moore, Ristow, and Rennie claim to care about “housing equity,” but when forced to choose between the public’s will and a developer’s balance sheet, they chose the developer. They are not leaders; they are a rubber stamp for a $250-million developer windfall. If these three won’t protect Los Gatos, we must elect individuals who reflect the public’s will, not the developer’s greed. The damage they have done to our community is immense. In November, this voting bloc needs to be busted.
Our town’s future is not for sale, even if this Council majority has already named their price.
Jak VanNada
Los Gatos Community Alliance
