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A proposal to build a six-story apartment complex along Moffett Boulevard is winding its way through Mountain View’s regulatory processes. But it is facing opposition from community members who say that it doesn’t meet the affordable housing needs of the city and would tower over the single-story homes around it.
Prometheus Real Estate Group is looking to build the six-story, 175-unit apartment complex at 400 Moffett Blvd., replacing a strip mall that currently exists on the 1.67-acre site. The project includes ground-floor retail, a courtyard and an underground garage for 175 vehicles with some surface parking as well.
Plans for the building show that it is currently surrounded mostly by single-story residences, including the Moffett Mobile Home Park. But a lot of changes are coming to the area, with plans for other high-density housing projects at 555 W. Middlefield Road and 730 Central Ave., and a bit further afield at 777 W. Middlefield Road.
“The density is increasing in this district along with the scale,” said Alan Jones, the design architect who presented the project to the city’s Development Review Committee on Oct. 16. “The intent is to keep the residential character (of the neighborhood) while transitioning to a more pedestrian friendly, bike-oriented, more urban development along the street,” he said.
However, for some Mountain View residents, the proposed development is a massive eyesore that is out of step with the city’s biggest needs, like providing affordable housing.
“Why are we building a six-story project of little soulless boxes in this town when it’s not even what we need?” asked Henry Whitfield, a Moffett Mobile Home Park resident. “What we need is low-cost housing,” he said at the Oct. 16 meeting.
Other residents living near the site raised similar concerns, noting that the apartment building would overshadow surrounding homes and did not contribute to family-friendly housing. The mix of units is for studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments with the bulk going towards one-bedrooms, according to the plans.
For Mountain View resident Albert Jeans, the focus on rentals also was problematic, as it does not provide long-term security for tenants, he said. “A lot of people are trapped in this cycle of paying rent to private companies and shareholders who make nice profits off of it. But what happens to people? How are they going to retire comfortably in this kind of environment?” he asked, advocating for more home ownership opportunities.
The timing of the project also raised questions. Last year, the City Council started deliberating on a precise plan that will provide a new framework for future development along the Moffett Boulevard corridor. The council is expected to weigh in on the boundaries and vision for the precise plan next month.
The project at 400 Moffett Blvd. is “putting the cart before the horse,” said Mountain View resident Bruce Karney. “It would be good to know what’s going to come out of that precise plan before this project gets too far along,” he added.
Mountain View Deputy Zoning Administrator Rebecca Shapiro responded to community concerns with assurances that they were being heard. She also provided some background context on the review process for projects more generally. There are multiple pathways that developments take, Shapiro said, noting that projects like 400 Moffett Blvd. qualify for certain state density bonuses, waivers and reductions to facilitate housing construction.
“Staff works very hard with development teams proposing these types of projects to find ways to address as many community concerns and areas of interest as we can within the confines of the regulatory environment in which these developments occur,” she said.
Well by all means, let’s not build it and instead not have any new housing and instead just keep the strip malls.
I’m sure Ms Invented Induced Demand is going to show up in these comments with a long rant about this.
I don’t mind building, but all these unoriginal 5 stories on concrete first floor are just plain boring and homogenous. We will regret this in 20 years.
Currently, that strip mall is almost empty and a thoroughgoing eyesore. The idea of replacing it with housing is great, IMO.
But does every new project need to be a massive, cookie-cutter human warehouse? What about some set backs? Or greenery? Or affordable condos to increase the number of residents who have a stake in what gets built in Mountain View?
Is this going to be another project that city council “reluctantly approves”?
Crime is coming to Mountain View. This housing project will facilitate it.
Since 2014, I’ve attempted to open several retail businesses in Moffett Central, the long-abandoned motor car repair shop on Central, and Moffett Plaza.
Despite visible “For Lease” signage, the landlords consistently refuse to engage seriously. When pressed, they quote rates that are tens of thousands a month for spaces over 5,000 square feet that they won’t subdivide, which is an unrealistic ask given the condition of these properties and their location.
Even if we bulldoze the shopping centers and replace them with apartment towers, high-end retail, and bike lanes that make driving miserable, we’re not going to magically get a Coach store and a Draeger’s. Remember Miki’s Farm Fresh Market? Opened in October 2012, dead by April 2013. It’s now a bargain grocery where the prices are low enough that people put up with the awful parking.
JL Produce survives because it works: decent parking, easy to walk or bike to, good prices, fresh goods, and loyal customers. That’s what a functional local economy looks like.
The reason we don’t have a functional economy is simple: small community-serving businesses don’t deliver the scale of returns sought by large firms like Prometheus and their investors. In practice, the property is being allowed to decay deliberately. Blight becomes a strategic asset, justifying its eventual demolition and replacement with high-rent, thin-walled apartments targeting tech workers at $6,000/month.
The city staff I’ve encountered are bright, well-intentioned, and often academically accomplished, but utterly disconnected from the ground truth of running a business. Their proposed solutions, like opening on Castro Street, miss the point entirely. If a retail corridor is filled with vacancies, perhaps the issue isn’t a lack of entrepreneurs, but a deeper structural problem with the city’s policies, economics, and incentives.
There’s even a “Precise Plan” for the area, an unintentionally comic phrase that captures the technocratic mindset. We don’t need more paperwork. We need permission to do something real designed and operated by people who do real things. For example, if you commute by bicycle daily, rain or shine, you know that narrow, divided bike lanes with curbs or, worse, 3-foot-high reflective bollards, often pose a greater danger than the cars themselves. Read the Precise Plan and the bike lane proposals. It’s clear that neither the authors nor most of the community feedback comes from people who bike daily. However well-intentioned, they’re not the ones who should be designing systems for two-wheeled commuters.
In the end, we don’t need more plans or platitudes, we need permission to do real things for real people. Instead, we’ll get gargantuan apartment blocks that will look like hell in five years, like ruins in twenty, and be torn down once they’ve served their financial purpose. Meanwhile, the blight will remain, by design.
I’d like to call attention to 730 Central Avenue. Despite being an abandoned structure with no upgrades, it’s listed for lease at $51 per square foot triple net or roughly $72 per square foot all in, which is $30,000 a month. That makes it one of the most expensive vacant retail properties in Mountain View.
Meanwhile, the city has 49 other vacant retail spaces that have sat on the market for months without tenants. At the massive San Antonio development, there are 103 unrented apartments and 17 empty storefronts.
And yet, the strategy appears to be: keep building.
This is the predictable outcome of legislation like SB 35, which rewards new construction, particularly dense housing, with expedited approvals and state backing, regardless of whether the market is already saturated or the location makes sense. These incentives don’t promote community, walkability, or economic resilience. They promote demolition, vacancy, and disposable architecture.
We aren’t building a livable city. We’re gaming a system built on short-term metrics and long-term neglect.
Despite 1,704 vacant apartments in Mountain View, we’re still approving hundreds more. Why aren’t prices falling? Because our housing market is financialized. The market isn’t responding to local supply and demand. It’s responding to the shareholders of large developers like Prometheus.
Here’s how our financialized housing market works:
1. Form an LLC, for instance, Moffett Plaza, LLC
2. Build a gargantuan apartment block with a $100M loan
3. Finish the project, now it’s worth $140M
4. Refinance and pull out $120M
5. Pay yourself $20M, saddle the LLC with $120M in debt
The LLC now owns a brand-new building, but it’s heavily leveraged, and the original developer has walked away with a huge profit before leasing even starts.
The LLC can sell the building to an institutional investor (e.g., a pension fund) who wants a steady income stream from rents. Another option is to hold and manage the property through a management arm, collecting fees, even if the property is losing money on paper due to high debt service.
These apartment buildings aren’t homes; they’re financial assets. Developers use debt to build them, price units to meet investor return targets, and leave them empty to avoid lowering the building’s appraised value. It’s more profitable on paper to have a half-empty building than to rent at prices real people can pay.
This housing model, debt-fueled, fee-driven, and designed for hypothetical high-income tenants, has no incentive to serve the community that already lives here. When the imaginary tenants never show up, the units stay empty, the prices stay high, and the city pretends it’s solving the housing crisis by approving even more units no one wants.
Until we change the incentives and stop pretending that “more units” automatically means “more affordability,” we’re just subsidizing vacancy and calling it progress.