Council goes big on housing for Terra Bella

Mountain View City Council members agreed Tuesday night that the industrial Terra Bella region of Mountain View is ripe for redevelopment into a dense neighborhood with the potential for thousands of homes, but not without some concerns about traffic, parking and privacy.

A majority of the council at the study session backed a housing-heavy proposal for the Terra Bella Visioning and Guiding Principles Plan. The document is the city’s way of signaling to developers that the area, while not zoned for high-density uses, is a prime area for growth in the city, and that the council is prepared to consider projects that don’t fit within the region’s light industrial and office zoning footprint.

Terra Bella borders both sides of North Shoreline Boulevard as it approaches Highway 101, roughly bounded by Crittenden Middle School, Highway 85 and W. Middlefield Road. It does not include the residential neighborhoods south of Moonbeam Drive.

The option picked by the council Tuesday, which the city’s Environmental Planning Commission recommended last month, would take an area with virtually no housing — there are nine homes — and transform it into a mixed-use neighborhood with as many as 2,500 housing units. Office growth under the council’s preferred option, on the other hand, would be heavily constrained, only allowing an increase of 200,000 square feet of commercial growth over the existing 1.4 million square feet.

Based on the city’s built-in assumptions, the preferred option would boost the city’s population by anywhere from 4,000 to 5,200 residents while also supporting about 500 new jobs.

The decision, which could lead to a full-fledged precise plan with its own environmental review and traffic study, is the latest chapter in a saga where the council has sought to limit office growth while supporting a significant increase in housing. The city’s North Bayshore tech park, just north of Terra Bella, was recently rezoned to allow up to 9,850 housing units across three newly created neighborhoods as a means of balancing out the city’s lopsided ratio of jobs to homes.

“This area is, to me, an ideal area to build more housing,” said Mayor Lenny Siegel. “It’s near a center of employment that, even if we build the 10,000 units in North Bayshore, will still have an enormous deficit in terms of the jobs-housing imbalance.”

While the city’s plan for North Bayshore had to account for all the amenities future residents would need, the same problems wouldn’t necessarily face Terra Bella, said resident Joan MacDonald, who argued the area is a strong contender for housing growth including a mix of rental and ownership properties.

“We have very few places in Mountain View that could easily become a complete neighborhood,” she said. “This is an area where retail and light industrial could manage side by side … and already there is, within walking distance, some retail and a grocery store.”

The visioning process for Terra Bella comes after several years of interest among developers, with a handful of gatekeeper requests for building housing or building beyond the heights allowed today. In 2016, the city received requests from Public Storage to build two, four-story storage facilities alongside Highway 101, as well as a request to construct 254 residential units — including a 13-story high-rise — at 1025 Terra Bella Ave.

Several developers showed up at the Tuesday council meeting to show their support for developing Terra Bella, including representatives from SummerHill Homes and Irvine Company. Carlene Matchniff, representing Irvine Company, said she supports the residential conversion under consideration, and expressed interest in redeveloping the company’s three parcels along Terra Bella approaching Crittenden Middle School.

“Today we face an imbalance of housing to office, so we really need to build more higher-density housing to address that,” she said. “And we’re very willing and happy to work with the city of Mountain View on the best plan for this area.”

Traffic concerns

Although the housing-heavy proposal won the day, some council members had serious reservations about adding thousands of residents and more employees to an area already plagued with traffic problems. Similar to North Bayshore, Terra Bella only has a few streets into and out of the area, and getting onto Shoreline Boulevard is already difficult when it’s gridlocked during commute hours. Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga said the number of housing units being contemplated for the area — between 1,900 and 2,500 — is only going to add to the problem.

“How are we going to get that existing traffic off the roads?” Abe-Koga asked. “And if we add all that housing and offices there, what is that going to do to the congestion?”

Councilwoman Lisa Matichak said she was caught off guard by the “dramatic change” being considered for the area and the potential for thousands of new homes, with building heights between five and seven stories tall in some areas. She said the vision for the area calls for more housing per acre than what is being considered in the nearby East Whisman Precise Plan, which has three times the acreage of Terra Bella but only twice the number of homes.

“That’s certainly not my vision for what would happen here. It’s a very different area,” she said. “I do think we need to scale back from the alternatives that have been presented.”

Neighborhood pushes back

Residents in the nearby Stierlin Estates neighborhood certainly seemed to agree. More than 100 people signed a petition ahead of the meeting stating that the changes to Terra Bella would expand “monolith” buildings into the area that threatened to turn neighborhoods “into dark, congested and unpleasant alley ways,” reducing visibility and available parking spaces.

“Protect your home and privacy with us!” states the petition. “We are the neighbors of Stierlin Estates neighborhood and we request your support to stop developers from dividing our community.”

Albert Jeans, who spoke Tuesday night on behalf of the neighborhood group, told the Voice that he and other residents near Terra Bella aren’t opposed to redevelopment of the region, and would welcome improvements to some of the vacant lots and dingy and dirty industrial areas to the north. But the preference was something closer to two- or three-story buildings, rather than the tall, high-density development being considered by the city.

“All we see going in around the city is very massive, very dense buildings, and that we don’t want,” he said.

Part of the problem is that decades-old zoning decisions put single-family homes right up against light industrial, Jeans said. That means if the council decides to reverse course and turn Terra Bella into a dense mixed-use region, residents next door could potentially have tall buildings looming over their backyards. Council members largely favored tapering off the height of development as it approached existing residences.

Jeans said he and others living in the area were put off by the two community workshops for crafting a new vision for Terra Bella, which he said was cause for alarm. All of the options for preferred residential heights and architecture reflected structures exceeding three stories, with no alternative choice for low-density housing. The conclusion, he said, is that the more urban design was a foregone conclusion.

“These people already have their minds made up — they want to put in high-density housing,” he said. “And we’re right at ground zero for the housing they’re going to plan.”

Craig Noah, a resident on the nearby San Ardo Way, described the combined number of projected residents and employees for the area — nearly 10,000 people — as a “show-stopper” for him, telling the Environmental Planning Commission last month that he had doubts that many people could travel into and out of the small region every day — let alone find a place to park.

“Generally the residents are concerned about the degradation of life in Mountain View from what we view as over-development,” he said. “It’s hard for me to imagine any of the options are sustainable.”

Councilman John McAlister suggested the best approach might simply be to wait until planned development and construction in North Bayshore and East Whisman finish before potentially transforming another area of the city. He said the true effects of rapid housing growth may not be known yet, and he believes the latest election results, in which at least one of the two City Council incumbents lost their bids for second terms, show the council may want to revisit the pace of development.

“I still think we need to concentrate on our existing change areas and get that right,” he said. “I think the latest election showed us we needed to revise what we look at, pause and review, and see what we’re doing. I don’t want to make things worse by building when we haven’t corrected what we’ve have.”

Some council members, along with several concerned residents, said the huge changes being considered for Terra Bella warrant more than just a “visioning” document, and that a precise plan that digs into the cumulative effects on traffic, parking, heritage trees and other areas of concern would be preferable to piecemeal assessments on a project-by-project basis. Such a plan would include consistent plans for traffic mitigation, support for local schools and other community benefit requirements.

The other major concern hanging over the council was whether redeveloping large swaths of Terra Bella could displace existing businesses that rely on cheaper light industrial properties. Holly Welstein, a board member for the nonprofit FabMo, said the small organization — which saves and redistributes fabric headed for landfills — relies on the industrial space it has on Terra Bella Avenue, and that there is a dearth of similar locations between San Jose and San Francisco.

“As you consider your plan for Terra Bella, please retain some light industrial warehouse zoning,” she said. “It’s very easy to get distracted by housing and jobs.”

Council members overwhelmingly agreed to at least preserve the existing light industrial space available, describing it as a valuable asset and an important part of the city’s business diversity.

“I don’t want to see the rest of the area be more intense Google office buildings,” Mayor Siegel said. “I want to do it in a way that we have a variety in our industrial ecosystem.”