Wealthy California town cites mountain lion habitat to deny affordable housing

At first glance, the town of Woodside may look more like a sprawl of mansions built on big-tech billions than crucial habitat for threatened California mountain lions.

But town officials might suggest looking again.

The wealthy San Francisco Bay area suburb has said it cannot approve the development of new duplexes or fourplexes to ease the statewide housing shortage because it encompasses the habitat of the elusive wildcats.

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 latter modeled his 23-acre Woodside estate on a 16th-century Japanese imperial palace. The median home price in the town is $5.5m, and the median household income is more than $250,000. The landscape is scattered with sizable mansions and estates as well as sprawling ranches.

As far as wildlife biologists know, mountain lions are not especially comfortable on land zoned for single family homes, nor are they particularly put off by two-story apartment buildings.