In early 2018, a woman named Farris opened a 138-page document that had landed in her mailbox at the Del Medio Manor Apartments. Buried in the maintenance reports and expense sheets was a single row with her unit number on it. Her landlord wanted to raise her $1,200-a-month rent by $500. Her sister's $1,650 two-bedroom, a few rows down, was targeted too.
Farris and her neighbors weren't imagining a threat. The Lindsay family, who built the 105-unit complex on Del Medio Avenue in 1974, had filed a petition seeking an extra $320,000 a year in rent across roughly two-thirds of the property, with individual increases ranging from 9 percent to 56 percent. The case dragged through a city hearing, an appeal, and a final ruling by Mountain View's Rental Housing Committee in February 2019 that rejected nearly all of it, limiting most tenants to an increase of about $20 a month.
That fight wasn't really about maintenance costs or fair returns, even though both sides argued about them at length. It was about a single date buried in the city's rent control ordinance, one that quietly decides which Mountain View buildings can raise rent freely and which ones can't, and which buildings end up sold, fought over, or torn down as a result. If you're comparing homes in this city right now, that date explains more about what you're seeing than any median price chart will.
The Date That Splits Every Apartment Building in Town
Mountain View voters passed Measure V, known as the Community Stabilization and Fair Rent Act, in November 2016, and it took effect that December. The mechanics are specific enough to matter. A multi-family building with three or more units is fully covered by the rent cap only if it had a certificate of occupancy before February 1, 1995. Buildings built between that date and December 23, 2016 get just-cause eviction protection but no cap on rent increases. Everything built after that, along with every single-family home and every condo in the city, is exempt from CSFRA entirely under the state's Costa-Hawkins law.
The Rental Housing Committee sets the allowed annual increase for covered units each year based on Bay Area inflation. For the period running from September 2025 through August 2026, that figure is 2.7 percent. It is a modest number on its own. What it does to a 50-year-old apartment building's finances over time is not modest at all, and it's exactly what pushed the Lindsay family to file that petition in the first place.
Same Street, Two Very Different Buyers
Del Medio Avenue offers an almost too-perfect illustration of what happens next. A few blocks from the Manor, Fremont residents Ann and Paul Lethers had assembled an 18-unit complex from two adjacent nine-unit buildings. In June 2017, with the rent cap freshly in place, they sold. The price, about $7.55 million, represented a loss compared to what they'd paid to acquire one of those buildings just a couple of years earlier. Public records show one of the two nine-unit properties, at 417 Del Medio Ave, changed hands that same month for $3.75 million.
The Lethers wanted out of the apartment business. A tenant at the complex, Martin Cortez, put the writing on the wall plainly at the time:
"All around us they've torn down buildings and are in the process of new developments."
Meanwhile, over at the Manor, the Lindsay family took the opposite path. Instead of selling, they fought to raise rents through the petition process, arguing that a capped return wasn't a real investment. Elizabeth Lindsay, one of about a dozen owners, said it directly to the Voice at the time:
"No investment that has a cap on it is a good investment."
Two families, two buildings on the same street, two completely different responses to the same rule. One sold at a discount rather than manage a capped asset. The other spent years and legal fees trying to escape the cap through the petition process, and lost. Neither outcome is unusual once you understand what CSFRA does to a pre-1995 apartment building's math. It caps the upside, so owners either exit or fight, and either way the building tends to sit in limbo rather than get reinvested in.
Why the Cranes Are Where They Are
If you've driven around Mountain View lately, you may have noticed that new construction seems to cluster in a handful of very specific spots rather than spreading evenly across the city. That's not a coincidence, and it lines up with the same incentive.
The city approved a seven-story condominium development on Tyrella Avenue in April 2025, a project that generated plenty of public pushback but went forward anyway. A 15-story builder's remedy project planned for 901-987 N. Rengstorff Ave drew similar opposition as it worked through the city's review process. Near downtown, a Chase Bank site redevelopment and an eight-story condominium project across the street, which was still awaiting a delayed public hearing as of the city's year-end account of 2025, could together add close to 450 new homes at one of the city's main entrances.
None of these are old rent-controlled buildings being renovated. They're new construction on sites being assembled and rebuilt from the ground up, which resets the CSFRA clock entirely once complete. Even Google has been reshaping its own footprint around the same logic in reverse: after abandoning a mega-office project in North Bayshore in 2024, the company indicated in 2025 that it was exploring the sale of its 40-acre Middlefield Park office site in East Whisman, a property it had once proposed redeveloping with 1,900 homes.
What This Means If You're Buying Here Right Now
As of July 2026, the average home value in Mountain View sits around $1.96 million, up roughly 1.8 percent over the past year. That figure covers everything from single-family homes to condos to townhomes, and none of those property types are touched by CSFRA at all. If you're shopping for a house or a condo, the rent cap is background noise, not a factor in your purchase.
Where it matters is if you're looking at a small multifamily property as an investment, or trying to understand why a particular block looks frozen while the one next to it has a construction fence around it. A building's certificate of occupancy date tells you almost everything about its future. Pre-1995 multifamily buildings carry a rent ceiling that depresses their cash flow and, as the Lethers sale showed, their sale price relative to comparable-looking newer stock. That combination is exactly why they tend to change hands as redevelopment plays or sit through prolonged landlord-tenant disputes rather than get upgraded and re-leased at market rates.
If you're weighing Mountain View against other spots on the Mid-Peninsula, this is one more piece of local knowledge worth having before you make an offer, whether you're buying a place to live or a property to hold.
A Few Common Questions
Does CSFRA affect the rent or resale value of a single-family home or condo? No. Single-family homes and condos are exempt from the rent cap under state law, regardless of when they were built.
How do I find out if an apartment building I'm considering is covered? The certificate of occupancy date is the key fact. Buildings with three or more units built before February 1, 1995 are fully covered. Those built between that date and December 23, 2016 have just-cause eviction rules but no rent cap. Anything newer is exempt from both.
Does rent control make older apartment buildings a bad investment? Not automatically, but it does cap the rent growth you can count on year to year, which is exactly what pushed both the Lethers family and the Lindsay family into very different decisions on the same street. Anyone evaluating a pre-1995 multifamily property should model returns against the current Annual General Adjustment, not against open-market comps.
Understanding a market means understanding the rules that shape it, not just the price tags attached to it. If you're weighing a purchase in Mountain View or anywhere else on the Mid-Peninsula and want a clear read on what a specific property or block is really worth, Notarianni Real Estate Group is happy to walk through it with you. Request a free home valuation to start the conversation.
