On Monday, Sunnyvale Planning Commission will consider the concept of adding housing – not just offices – to the Moffett Park office park area. The concept of transforming a single-use office park into a mixed-use neighborhood with housing and services follows on the heels of the recently approved plans in Mountain View for nearly 10,000 units of housing near Google’s headquarters, and plans in Menlo Park for nearly 5,000 units of housing near Facebook.
In 2017, Google purchased properties at North Mathilda and Caribbean Drive in Sunnyvale, with an initial proposal to build about a million square feet of offices, which could accommodate 4,500 workers.
Now, Google is interested in adding housing and retail along with offices, in support of the city’s General Plan goals to seek opportunities to add housing near jobs and services. The Planning Commission staff report doesn’t describe a specific proposal for housing and retail. Instead, it recommends that the city do community outreach and study on topics including:
* Whether to add residential and retail uses to create neighborhoods in the area
* Business analysis of the potential benefits and drawbacks for the city and existing businesses
* Needs for infrastructure including transportation, utilities, schools, and parks/open space
The Moffett Park area, consisting of 1,156 square feet (about 1.8 square miles) of office and industrial buildings, hosts offices for companies including Google, Amazon, NetApp, HP, Microsoft, Juniper Networks, Bloom Energy, and Yahoo! (now part of Verizon). The area is served by transit including VTA’s light rail line, and what is soon to be a high-frequency bus route, the VTA 523 line, which connects to downtown Sunnyvale and Caltrain (the route is currently served by the less-frequent 54 bus).
Studies in the last several years have consistently shown that adding housing near jobs and services is likely to result in less driving and carbon pollution than single use office parks – in addition to helping to alleviate the region’s deep housing shortage.
When considering evolving a car-centric office park into a neighborhood, it’s important have enough housing (including the existing neighborhoods not far away) to support retail and services, to enable car-centric lifestyles, and to plan a place with streets and paths that are safe for walking and bicycling, with public space for people to enjoy.
Following the Planning Commission’s consideration on Monday, City Council is expected to review the decisions about evolving Moffett Park into a mixed-use neighborhood on February 6, 2018.
This is outstanding! With the majors getting enrolled in smart urbanism concepts, and very high employee and / or office concentrations, they will be able to accurately determine the value of transit to various destinations for their employees, and the value this creates for their businesses. That in turn opens the door to spending some of their many billions of dollars in reserves on super-high-value-and-performance-to-cost-ratio, advanced, elevated, group rapid transit, with infrastructure built with Bosch Captive Columns and Ultra-High-Performance-Concrete, and super-advanced, relatively-low-cost coaches to go with it.
In other words, if they see the value for themselves, they have the cash to pioneer it. And if they pioneer it, that pays the startup expenses for the new industries that can roll it out at lower cost still, across all the routes that need it, in the SF Bay area and statewide.
[…] near light rail and a frequent bus to downtown/Caltrain. The Sunnyvale Planning Commission recently supported the request to study the opportunity to evolve the office park into a mixed use neighborhood, with […]