Mountain View Art & Wine Festival event program INSIDE SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 VOLUME 24, NO. 32
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Watchdog group finds neo-Nazi activity in MV SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER SAYS THE DAILY STORMER HELD MEETINGS IN MOUNTAIN VIEW By Kevin Forestieri
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COURTESY OF 129TH RESCUE WING
Guardsmen from the 129th Air Rescue Wing board a plane at Moffett Field on Monday, Aug. 28. A total of 90 team members headed to Texas to assist in search-and-rescue efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
Hurricane Harvey: local Rescue Wing heads to Texas Rescuers from the Bay Area headed to Texas Monday to help with relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, officials with the Silicon Valley Air National Guard said. California Air National Guardsmen from the 129th
Rescue Wing left Moffett Field with a team of about 90 members on Monday afternoon and will provide search and rescue support, spokesman Lt. Roderick Bersamina said. Two other water rescue teams from the Bay Area left for
Texas to help with the federal response to the hurricane, which made landfall late last Friday in the Houston area as a Category 4 storm, fire officials said. See HURRICANE, page 9
ountain View residents and elected officials gave a strong rebuke to white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, with two well-attended protests condemning hate groups, racism and prejudice. But with all the attention on hate group activity 2,800 miles away, what about extremist groups here in the Bay Area? A map of hate group activity developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that the neo-Nazi group the Daily Stormer has a presence in just one city in the nine-county Bay Area, and it’s right here in Mountain View. The map itself labels the city with a symbol of a swastika, with the nearest one farther south in Santa Cruz. The law center’s “hate map” doesn’t explain much about the methodology, but Mountain View’s label hardly means that the Daily Stormer has some type of headquarters or membership stronghold in the city. A spokeswoman for the law center told the Voice that the map compiles information on hate groups and their whereabouts in 2016, including
“criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.” The Daily Stormer made headlines in August when web service companies including GoDaddy and CloudFlare announced they were dumping the hate group’s website. The neo-Nazi site was briefly hosted on Google’s servers on Aug. 14, but was rejected by the company within hours. The Daily Stormer has since receded to the “dark web,” available only through the anonymous Tor network. Cached webpages of the group’s now-defunct message board show that Daily Stormer members convened somewhere in Mountain View on Aug. 17 and Sept. 4 last year, with one member recalling the first of the meetings as a “great meetup” that shows the group has “critical mass for a strong book club” in the Bay Area. “Great to see repeat attendees and a couple new brothers,” said one user. “We’ve got representation from the East Bay, South Bay, Peninsula and Santa Cruz.” Subsequent posts from October detail that most of the See NEO-NAZI, page 11
Rental committee sets system for super-cheap housing VEGA ADJUSTMENTS WOULD ADDRESS RARE CASES OF SEVERELY UNDERPRICED HOUSING By Mark Noack
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ountain View’s Rental Housing Committee on Monday approved a program for landlords to adjust rents on severely underpriced apartments, one of the final decisions needed to implement the city’s new rent-control law. Committee members tried to keep things simple by picking a
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program based on federal housing data, similar to that of other California cities with rent-control programs. Even so, the Monday, Aug. 28, meeting was possibly the committee’s most complicated session so far. Committee members as well as public speakers repeatedly expressed bafflement over a series of complex options and how each one would affect the local rental market.
The big topic of the night was setting a so-called “Vega Adjustment,” a mandatory program for any city with rent control in California. The name derives from a 1990 state appellate case, Vega v. City of West Hollywood, that revolved around an elderly landlord who hadn’t raised rents for about 20 years and was later blocked from increasing them by her city’s rent-control law.
It was exactly the kind of cautionary tale that rent-control opponents in Mountain View have long been warning about — the considerate landlords who kept rents low would end up being hurt the most by the government’s attempt to fiddle with the housing market. But the silver lining for landlords is that, thanks to the Vega case, rent-control cities in
VIEWPOINT 13 | A + E 14 | WEEKEND 15 | GOINGS ON 19 | MARKETPLACE 20 | REAL ESTATE 21
California now have to establish a system to resolve these rare situations. For Mountain View, that meant the committee on Monday was tasked with defining what “disproportionately low” actually meant. To set this baseline, most other rent-control cities looked to a fair-market housing price index See HOUSING, page 11