New eateries coming soon WEEKEND | 16
JANUARY 12, 2018 VOLUME 25, NO. 51
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MOVIES | 19
Low rents a bad bargain for cancer-stricken landlord OWNER IS FIRST TO PETITION TO RAISE RATES BEYOND WHAT’S ALLOWED BY RENT CONTROL LAW By Mark Noack
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MICHELLE LE
Amelia Orso drinks water after eating her carefully measured doses of nuts at nurse practitioner Whitney Block’s new food allergy clinic.
Patients go nuts over new allergy therapy NURSE OPENS NEW CLINIC TO HANDLE DEMAND FOR FOOD ALLERGY DESENSITIZATION By Kevin Forestieri
L
ast week marked a major milestone for 8-year-old Amelia, who flew across the country to eat a handful of nuts that, just months ago, would have sent her into
life-threatening anaphylactic shock. She knocks back small medicine cups containing a mix of cashews, peanuts, sesame seeds and hazelnuts, washes it down with water, and waits. As the moments pass in the small Redwood City clinic, so
does the anxiety. The intense food allergies that complicated Amelia’s life for years — forcing her to sit alone during lunch and bring her own food and cupcakes to parties — were See ALLERGY CLINIC, page 10
Worries swirl over future San Antonio school site PARENTS FRUSTRATED BY RUMORS THAT BULLIS WILL MOVE TO MOUNTAIN VIEW By Kevin Forestieri
T
he Los Altos School District is planning to move forward on a complicated plan to buy land next to the San Antonio Shopping Center,
INSIDE
adding a school campus to a fastgrowing neighborhood of that is hard-pressed for park space. But amid the long struggle to acquire land at a reasonable cost in a red-hot real estate market, the district’s board of trustees
has yet to make a firm commitment on whether the site would be home to a neighborhood school, or the long-awaited permanent campus for Bullis See BULLIS, page 12
VIEWPOINT 15 | GOINGS ON 20 | MARKETPLACE 21 | REAL ESTATE 23
n some ways, Jeanne Walker is a lucky woman. About a decade ago, she inherited an apartment complex on Plymouth Street, just across the highway from Google’s headquarters. Renting out the property’s apartments provides her with a steady income, and the site even had a small cottage out front for her to live in. In other ways, Walker is unlucky. For most of her adult life, the lifelong Mountain View resident has suffered from recurring bouts of cancer. The disease has inflicted a hefty toll on her well-being, and her doctors have warned her it will come back. Now bound to a wheelchair and requiring assistance, the 78-yearold said she has learned to appreciate each day she has left. Since inheriting the apartments, she has kept the rents astonishingly low, by Mountain View standards. Each of her one-bedroom units is now being rented out for about $900 a month even though they could easily go for three times that price. After seeing so many seniors priced out of town, she said she wants to keep her rents low as an act of defiance against the greed of the area. But being sympathetic to her renters also makes Walker feel foolish. Her cancer treatments aren’t cheap, and she now struggles to balance her medical bills with the cost of maintaining her apartments. If an expensive appliance, say a refrigerator, suddenly breaks, she has to buy a replacement on credit. She said she now wishes she had raised her rents a little more because now she is explicitly barred from doing so. Mountain View’s rent control law that took effect last year means that she can only
raise rents by the cost of inflation each year. In her case, that’s about $30 extra annually. All these conflicted feelings come spilling out as Walker describes her unique predicament as owner of a 10-unit apartment complex that is one of the best bargains a renter could find in Silicon Valley. Ever since she inherited the property from her father, she has tried to abide by his principles — keep the rents low, and don’t sell the property. She is now near the point where she must cave on at least one of those rules. “My dad felt people were being gouged by landlords. This place was all paid off, so we didn’t feel like we needed to raise the rent much,” Walker said. “But right now, I’ve got myself in a tight spot. I’m reaching the point how where if something bad happened, then I’d have to consider selling and getting out.” Just released from a three-week hospital stay, Walker told the Voice it is getting more difficult to resist the temptation to sell. Every single week, she said she receives a few calls from realestate agents with offers to put her property on the market, promising her up to $6 million. It’s a decision that would be lifechanging, not just for her but also her tenants, some of whom have lived there for decades. Before it comes to that, she is seeking another option. Walker’s Plymouth Street apartments are being reviewed by city officials as the first case for a special adjustment under the city’s rent control program. In November, Walker and her brother filed an exhaustive 66-page form to request an extra rent increase because her units were so far below the market See APARTMENTS, page 6