The mountain view city council is largely controlled by homeowners. As a result, they are against anything that would impact home prices negatively, even if it would be a greater good. And they've also been trying to reduce the influence of google employees on the city, since they fear that too many google employees living in town could change the power structure of the city council itself and cause it to make decisions that don't optimize for home prices.

That means they actively fight projects that might actually be good for the city, like building high density housing on the eastern side of 101.