For the last two years, North Bayshore has represented Mountain View’s testing ground for creating an idyllic neighborhood for tomorrow. City leaders envisioned a diverse community where tech engineers and kitchen staff could live and work next to one another in the same high-density neighborhood. They spoke of creating European-style promenades, thousands of micro-apartments and a people-mover that would help eliminate the need for vehicles. And to fund that grand vision, the city looked largely to one company — Google — which had long expressed interest in creating a mixed-use neighborhood as part of its showpiece headquarters.
But a review of the city’s precise plan on Tuesday, Nov. 29, left some council members second-guessing this vision and wondering if they were asking too much of one of the world’s wealthiest companies. Could their ambitious road-map for North Bayshore wind up as a lovely dream without any help from private developers, asked Councilman Mike Kasperzak.
“From an economic perspective, what I’m hearing is this plan is great, but no one will do anything,” he said. “Yes, Google wants employees to live out there, but they’re not going to subsidize it. Any development has to be economically viable in a market setting.”
The Nov. 30 meeting to review the North Bayshore precise plan threw a wet blanket on some aspects of the city’s latest vision. That master plan now calls for creating three new mini-neighborhoods totaling 9,850 homes centered around Joaquin Road, Shorebird Way and Pear Avenue. During their review, council members signaled that they may need to loosen some aggressive goals for affordable housing and parking.
Google’s team was conspicuously absent from the study session meeting, but the company sent a lengthy letter just hours beforehand that fueled some frustration among council members.
John Igoe, Google’s real estate director, said in the letter that the city’s affordable housing goals for North Bayshore may not pencil out. For the maximum density bonus for offices, Mountain View planners wanted Google and other developers to dedicate one-fifth of their new apartment units as affordable housing. This bonus “may not be financially feasible” given the high land costs, Igoe warned, and he encouraged the city to drop its density requirements.
Google is the major landowner in North Bayshore.
The council was split on this issue. Kasperzak and council members John Inks and Ken Rosenberg suggested pulling back from the 20-percent affordable housing requirement for the maximum density bonus.
On the other side, Councilman Lenny Siegel said he didn’t fear demand would evaporate, given Google’s stake in adding housing and the race to build housing nearby. But he worried that the template proposed by the precise plan could exclude middle-income households and create few opportunities for families to settle in the neighborhood.
“People at Google believe North Bayshore is never-never land, in the sense that you never grow up — everyone is going to be child-free and living like a college student,” he said. “I’d like this to be an area with families and not just tech workers.”
For the first time, Google representatives also revealed they wanted some guarantee that the new housing they would build would primarily benefit the company’s own workforce. For years, Mountain View officials had resisted the idea of allowing tech companies to build worker dormitories, saying it would create a community disconnected from the rest of the city. But Igoe, in the letter, said that his company needed a priority system giving first dibs on new housing to those working in the area. He said it made sense to give North Bayshore workers priority since they would be able to walk or bike to work, reducing the amount of traffic in the area.
“To be clear, Google does not propose to prioritize North Bayshore housing for employees of any particular company,” he wrote, suggesting a system similar to what Stanford University uses for its off-campus housing.
But that may be a moot point now that Google has edged out its main competitors in North Bayshore. In July, Google agreed to a generous land swap with LinkedIn, which gave LinkenIn ownership of seven buildings near Sunnyvale in exchange for development rights and leased offices in North Bayshore. As a result, Google had acquired nearly all the allotted space for development in North Bayshore, the office park north of Highway 101.
The city’s traffic plans became one of the most difficult issues of the evening, especially a proposed “aggressive” restriction on parking that in most cases would force developers to provide fewer parking spots than the number of apartment units. The Sobrato Group, the only developer other than Google interested in developing housing, warned that the parking restrictions would be extremely difficult to implement, especially since it would be years before the city completes mass-transit connections into North Bayshore. Sobrato is currently working on plans for the neighborhood’s first major housing project, about 800 housing units near Space Park Way.
“I’ll have to tell (the residents of) two, one-bedroom units they’ll be sharing one parking space between their two cars,” said Tim Steele, a Sobrato vice president. To impose that kind of restriction on the project before any transit alternatives are in place would be “very difficult,” he said.
But city planners and traffic consultants urged city leaders to stick with the onerous parking restrictions, describing it as the most effective way to limit the number of solo drivers clogging the roads. Speaking at the meeting, Jeff Tumlin, a city consultant from the traffic firm NelsonNygaard, suggested it would be the most aggressive parking system for any suburban neighborhood in the country.
“This would be the pushing the envelope farther than anyone’s ever pushed it,” he said. “Making sure the cost of providing parking isn’t hidden in the cost of providing housing, that’s one of the critical ways we can address housing affordability and meeting our traffic goals.”
But council members were largely sympathetic to the developers’ concerns, and they agreed that parking restrictions needed to be loosened, at least for the initial wave of housing developments. In an idea embraced by her colleagues, Mayor Pat Showalter proposed a 20-year plan to gradually tighten parking standards as more transit infrastructure comes online.
Among those plans, VTA is currently studying a light-rail extension into North Bayshore. Meanwhile, the city of Mountain View is going to implement reversible, dedicated bus lanes along Shoreline Boulevard, and is also studying long-term plans for an automated-guideway transit system.
“We’re on the cusp of major changes in people’s driving and parking habits between people primarily using their own vehicles and having the sharing economy really take off,” Showalter said. “We still don’t know how that’s going to play out as far as parking management.”
For being some of the most highly sought property in Silicon Valley, tech companies in North Bayshore seem to be waiting to bring forward new developments, city staff said. Back in 2015, Google and several other firms fiercely competed for about 2.2 million square feet of bonus development. But since then, most of those companies have held back on any projects using that space. In an idea mostly supported by the council, planning staff recommended imposing a Dec. 2018 deadline for developers to either submit their projects or file for an extension.
Email Mark Noack at mnoack@mv-voice.com
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