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Plans to construct a six-story housing development that would add hundreds of new apartments to a prominent intersection in downtown Mountain View are poised to move ahead with the City Council set to take a final vote on the project next month.
The developer Greystar wants to replace the Chase Bank at the corner of El Camino Real and Castro Street, as well as an adjacent surface parking lot and vacant restaurant, with 299 apartments and thousands of square feet of ground-floor retail space.
On Wednesday evening, the city’s Environmental Planning Commission unanimously signed off on the massive mixed-use development at 749 W. El Camino Real. The City Council is now expected to vote on the project at its Nov. 18 meeting.
Environmental Planning Commissioners expressed enthusiasm for the Greystar project this week, praising its potential to add a lot more housing along a major transit corridor as well as the developer’s responsiveness to community concerns, like preserving the iconic artwork and architectural style associated with the existing Chase Bank.
“There’s a willingness to work together as a team to get things done. It’s not just about profit motive, it’s about meeting the needs of the community,” Commissioner Jose Gutierrez said at the Oct. 15 meeting.
But a few commissioners also voiced concerns that Greystar missed out on an opportunity to elevate the development’s design and maximize its impact, especially with respect to its location at a key gateway to downtown Mountain View.
“Given this premium location, which I’m sure you’ll benefit from, you’re not making the most of the responsibility of what the building should be doing on that site,” Commissioner Joyce Yin said. “It’s not just a missed opportunity. I feel like it’s a role that isn’t being fulfilled.”
Transforming the gateway to downtown Mountain View
Greystar has proposed a mix of residential and commercial uses on a roughly three-acre site on the southeast corner of El Camino Real and Castro Street, with the bulk of the project dedicated to the nearly 300 apartments, including 33 below-market rate units. The development also includes close to 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, a public plaza and a new bank, as well as above-ground parking and a two-level underground garage, totalling 459 parking spots.
“I tried to make a list of things that I liked about this project, and I started running out of space on my paper,” Commissioner Hank Dempsey said.
But Greystar’s design for the new bank drew criticism from commissioners who voiced concern that the building “turned its back” on Castro Street and was not inviting to the public.
“The Chase building kind of looks cool, I admit that, but I’m not being invited anywhere and that kind of bums me out a little bit,” Dempsey said. “Kids coming home at three o’clock from Graham, they’re just going to walk past a big old wall all the way down to the corner.”
Commissioner Yin honed in on the public plaza fronting El Camino Real next to the bank as another missed opportunity. It would have worked better if it was accessible from Castro Street, in addition to El Camino Real, Yin said, emphasizing the plaza’s importance in relation to the other three corners of the intersection.
“You have a public plaza that ignores its other team members, so to speak, of the gateway,” Yin said.
Yin also noted that the plaza would funnel straight into an above-ground PG&E transformer, constraining the full potential of the project’s design. According to the city, PG&E wouldn’t budge on relocating the transformer. Yin however wasn’t convinced that the developer and city couldn’t have negotiated more with the utility company. If the project’s vision was clearer from the beginning, accommodations could have been made, she said.
Instead, a lot of attention was focused on preserving the artwork and architectural style of the bank, which Yin said she appreciated and was an important community priority. But she added that if the developer had recognized the cultural and historical significance of the site from the start, more attention could have been directed to making the project an inviting gateway to the downtown area.
“If I put myself in the developer and the owner’s shoes, I would drool over the potential,” Yin said. “I think you guys did not understand the gem that you have on this site and did not take advantage of it fully.”
We need an architectural review board like other cities. Otherwise we end up with SF’s generic SOMA architecture of 5+1s.
The YIMBYs will never allow it because they have no problem with bland.
Mountain View already has a Design Review Consultation that does this and every public process on the look of these buildings has made them look worse–cluttered messes of blaugh instead of stately buildings with clean lines. It turns out the people who show up to these meetings have bad taste that just so happens to align with developers building really cluttered looking buildings that also happen to be more expensive to build and difficult to maintain. That’s of course before getting into the fact that Mountain View’s standards on this type of construction mandate “breaking up the massing” as opposed to say adding ornamentation or using a single coherent visual style.
I don’t like the way the flavor of our once small town is changing. I am not looking forward to the changing look (6 stories) and additional traffic onto El Camino which is already packed, There is a large apt/condo complex across Castro and there is a plan for another housing complex across El Camino from the Chase Bank complex. Can that intersection handle the increased traffic not to mention the fact that there is a Graham Middle School just a block up Castro with all the kids transiting the area?
City architectural review doesn’t actually correlate with good architecture. Instead, it produces conformist design of the type identified by Ramirez. How many of the beautiful buildings that we have today were built in the era of city architectural review? How many would have been sent to the drawing board as too radical, too this or too that, if they’d had to go through it? I’m not taking a position one way or another on the new bank building. All I’m saying is that if you don’t like it, more review processes are not the solution.
Oh great! Just what we need! More of those buildings that look just like all the other ones on El Camino!
I. want. to. join. the. robot. brigade.
No matter what happens it will be very sad when this building changes. I have used this building as my bank since the 1970’s, when it was Home Savings of America, then Washington Mutual, and now Chase.
But we do need housing. I just hope that the right things take place.
“That’s a nice view of the mountains”, a visiting friend recently commented naturally, as we we crossed El Camino from Castro Street toward the Chase.
Guess what mountain view will become about 50% obstructed by this replacement of the existing Chase building?
Adding the mid-rises and building the bank closer to the corner will block the mountains quite a bit, for people coming from downtown.
Shame on all who approve this.
Has anyone noted that there are plans to remove 26 heritage trees for this development? I’m way more worried about that then the architectural design.
There are also plans to remove a huge, highly underused surface parking lot.
if there was a competition for ugly, this would win. As many have pointed out this is a complete waste of a golden opportunity to make an architectural statement for Mountain View. Hang your heads in shame, those who advise and those who decide do not deserve their overpaid jobs, My kids could design something better that this bland monstrosity. (Not that the existing building is any beauty. To call that bomb shelter or brick warehose an icon is laughable).
I think it looks pretty nice, and good on the activists working to keep the art highlighted up front. The bank lot has been underutilized for way too long, perfect opportunity to add more housing and vibrancy near downtown. 300 homes is good start, but definitely not enough.