“Every house that’s built is one more acre taken away from habitat. Woodside’s mayor, Dick Brown, declined an interview request from the Guardian. “But to say that any expansion of housing, anywhere in a given city, would likely impact mountain lions is likely a bit of a stretch.” “Any development should be done with careful consideration of whether it is going to impact a nearby travel corridor, green belt or large adjacent habitat area for mountain lions,” Vickers said.
“You can see there’s a fair amount of habitat in the undeveloped areas around the city,” said Winston Vickers, director of the Mountain Lion Project at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center. Mountain lions – also called pumas, cougars and panthers – have been known to wander into suburbs and cities across California, and may occasionally traverse the town. The landscape is scattered with sizable mansions and estates as well as sprawling ranches. The median home price in the town is $5.5m, and the median household income is more than $250,000. The latter modeled his 23-acre Woodside estate on a 16th-century Japanese imperial palace. Woodside is not only a habitat for mountain lions, but also for notable tech entrepreneurs including the Intuit co-founder Scott Cook and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. “The notion that building duplexes hurts mountain lions – it’s just ridiculous.” “This is nimbyism disguised as environmentalism,” said Scott Wiener, a California senator who co-authored SB 9.
“Given that Woodside – in its entirety” is habitat for mountain lions that environmental groups are petitioning to list as threatened or endangered under the state’s Endangered Species Act, “no parcel within Woodside is currently eligible for an SB 9 project”, the town’s planning director wrote in a memo on 27 January.Ĭritics of the town council, including many housing advocates, have accused the town of cynically using environmental concerns to avoid compliance with state law. But a clause in the measure exempts areas that are considered habitat for protected species. Residents in Woodside had long bristled at SB 9 – a new California measure that makes it easier to build multi-unit housing in neighborhoods previously reserved for single-family homes.
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