Where the numbers about Mountain View actually live, what each
source will and will not tell you, and which of them are machine-readable. This
page names the vintage of every figure, because a number without a date is a
rumour.
The city itself
Population — the city’s own demographics page cites the
2020 decennial count of 88,533. The Census Bureau’s more recent
annual estimate is lower, around 85,400. Both are real: one is a count,
the other a modelled estimate several years later. This site names the source
rather than picking a favourite.
City demographics
Daytime population — above 120,850, per the city.
That gap is the whole story: Mountain View has far more jobs than housed
workers, which is the pressure behind almost every land-use fight on this
site.
Jobs per employed resident — about 1.69, per the
city’s demographics page. Read that page carefully: it mixes vintages,
and some of its employment figures are more than a decade old.
Area — about 11.96 square miles in Santa Clara
County, at roughly 6,900 people per square mile.
Incorporated — 1902.
Housing and cost
All the figures below are American Community Survey
2020–2024 five-year estimates for Mountain View city, as published
in Census QuickFacts, except the housing allocation. Five-year estimates smooth
across the whole window; they are not a snapshot of today.
38.6%owner-occupied housing. Mountain View is a majority-renter city, which is why rent policy is city politics here.
$3,062median gross rent.
$1,927,000median value of an owner-occupied home.
$189,917median household income, in 2024 dollars.
2.33persons per household.
11,135homes Mountain View must plan for under its regional housing allocation for the current eight-year cycle.
The Census Bureau warns against comparing the 2020–2024 estimates
directly with earlier vintages; methodology changed. If you need a trend, pull
the series yourself rather than differencing two published headline numbers.
Meetings and decisions
Everything on this site’s calendar and agenda blocks comes from the
Legistar Web API for the client mountainview. It is open,
needs no key, and returns each meeting’s date, time, location, agenda
status and document links.
Three limitations worth knowing before you rely on it:
The time field is not the time you want.EventTime
for a Council meeting is the closed session — typically 5:00,
5:15 or 5:30 p.m. The regular session starts at 6:30 p.m.
Anyone republishing the raw field without saying so is telling you to arrive
ninety minutes early to a meeting you cannot attend.
The video fields come back empty.EventVideoPath and
EventMedia are null for this tenant, so recordings have to be
found on YouTube instead.
Document URLs expire. An agenda PDF that opened last month may
error today, which is why this site mirrors the PDFs it links.
The tenant’s RSS feed is switched off at the city level, so there is
no official subscribe link. This site generates its own calendar file instead.
The city’s open data portal
Mountain View does publish machine-readable data, on an ArcGIS Hub
portal that is not linked prominently from the main city site and that most
residents have never seen.
General Plan Land Use — what every parcel is designated for.
The single most useful layer for following a rezoning argument.
Housing Element Sites Inventory — the parcels the city told
the state it could build the 11,135 homes on.
Below-market-rate inventory and a rent-stabilization layer
covering CSFRA-eligible property.
Collisions, traffic collisions, and separate
bicycle/pedestrian crash layers by year.
Street sweeping schedule, streetlights, bike racks,
scooter parking, crossing guard locations, safe routes to
school, the bicycle level of traffic stress layer, sidewalks and
curb ramps.
Municipal boundary, parcels, building footprints,
FEMA flood zones, elevation and contours.
Lead service line viewer and a North Bayshore sustainability
dashboard.
Police data — a correction
This page used to say Mountain View publishes no crime data. That was
wrong, and the error is worth stating plainly rather than quietly deleting.
The Police Department runs a public transparency dashboard carrying
arrests, reports, property crimes, crimes against persons, elder crimes, hate
crimes, calls for service and dispatch response times, traffic collisions,
RIPA stop data, internal investigations, assaults on officers, and a
counter for calls involving people living in vehicles — most with a
year-over-year comparison.
Two honest caveats. It is a dashboard, not a bulk download: the underlying
layers exist but the portal is built for looking, not for analysis. And a
dashboard is a presentation choice — what is on it was decided by the
department publishing it.
Weather
Forecasts come from the National Weather Service grid point
MTR/93,86 — the Bay Area office’s cell covering
Mountain View. It is a clean match to the city centre rather than an
approximation from a neighbouring town.
Air quality — read the label
There is no AirNow reporting area for Mountain View. The nearest one
whose boundary covers the city is Redwood City, across the county line
in San Mateo County, and it reports ozone only — not PM2.5, which
is the number people want during wildfire smoke.
So any Mountain View air-quality figure sourced from AirNow is a Redwood
City ozone reading wearing a Mountain View label. For fine-particle readings at
neighbourhood resolution, the
Bay Area
Air District’s own monitors and
PurpleAir’s sensor network are the
honest sources.
County of Santa Clara open data
— a Socrata portal with an API. Supervisorial districts, public health
indicators, demographic and budget datasets. Mountain View sits in the
county’s fifth supervisorial district.
ABAG and MTC
— regional housing allocation and transportation planning data.
What this site still does not have, and why
No permit tracker. The city’s permitting runs through
ProjectDox and an ePermits address service, and both of those layers are
marked secure on the open-data portal — visible in the catalogue,
closed to the public. There is no public permit feed to build on, and a
scraped approximation would be wrong in ways nobody could check.
No budget dashboard. Adopted budgets and audited financial
statements are published by the Finance department as PDFs and adopted
by Council resolution, so they are searchable in Legistar — but there is
no machine-readable budget dataset on the city’s open-data portal or
anywhere else. Retyping a PDF into a chart would produce a number this site
could not stand behind.
No candidate list. Filings are certified by the Registrar, not the
city, and early press lists change. See Vote.
No crime map of our own. The department publishes one; duplicating
it here would add a second version that could drift out of step with the
first.
The rule behind all four: this site would rather point at a real source
than publish a convincing-looking number it cannot defend.