http://sf.curbed.com/2016/8/23/12603188/palo-alto-mayor-hous...
The mayor recently made news about wanting to stifle job growth, as it far outpaces what he believes is acceptable housing availability:
> Burt: Palo Alto’s greatest problem right now is the Bay Area’s massive job growth. Cities are still embracing huge commercial development with millions of square feet of office space they can’t support. They’re chasing their tails. We started reining in office growth and put a cap on it. And then we began expanding housing in our downtown areas, which we’re in the process of.
What's funny is that the mayor himself is a CEO of a tech company headquartered in Palo Alto downtown. Some of the things he says are infuriating ("We don’t want to turn into Manhattan"...as if PA were anything close to Manhattan) but as I understand it, he was the more pro-housing/growth candidate in the mayor race:
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/01/04/burt-returns-t...
> The two votes mean that the council's top two leadership positions will now shift from members with the heaviest slow-growth residentialist leanings to ones with less predictable voting records. While Burt has played a leading role in the council's recent adoption of an office cap, its efforts to preserve retail and its reform to the "planned-community" zoning, he had also split from the residentialists in supporting several recent developments, including mixed-use projects at 101 Lytton and 441 Page Mill Road (Holman and Schmid had opposed both).