City revisits Sobrato housing proposal
It’s been nearly a year since the Mountain View City Council adopted the lofty goal of building nearly 10,000 new housing units on and around the Google campus. So far, no housing projects have been approved, but that may be changing.
In 2015, the Sobrato Organization had proposed building 635 housing units and a 231,000-square-foot office building at 1255 Pear Ave. But it pulled the proposal in June after stating that developer fees — particularly a park fee that in one year rose by roughly $30,000 per unit due largely to increase land values — had become too high for the development to be profitable.
The City Council on Tuesday night revisited Sobrato’s proposal and agreed to move forward with a modified plan for possible approval at the council’s Oct. 23 meeting. The plan could allow for 855 units if the city purchases a portion of the project site from Sobrato. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty, but it looks to me that there’s a really good chance that the project will be approved,” Mayor Lenny Siegel said Wednesday. “Sobrato felt confident enough they could proceed with the project at a profit.”
To help make the project pencil out, the council tentatively agreed to trade some park fees for dedicated park land and publicly accessible open space like a playground — and not require Sobrato to pay all the fees associated with the construction of a new school in the Mountain View Whisman School District. Those concessions could extend to other housing developers like Google, which is expected to build up to 8,000 housing units in North Bayshore. Siegel said Google has not yet submitted a plan, but the tech giant would first build new office buildings, because existing office buildings would be demolished to make way for the housing units.
The council is still considering whether to allow 220 additional housing units in Sobrato’s project.
The development could jump from 635 to 855 units if the city opts to purchase a 1.4-acre parcel from Sobrato.
Nonprofit developer Mid Pen Housing has tentatively signed on to develop up to 140 below-market units affordable to renters making at or below 60 percent of the area median income.
That plan would not include a park, however. The amount of affordable apartments could go as high as 231, some of which people could purchase, in another option that would keep the total at 635 units but would provide a 1.4-acre park.
Siegel said the city is anticipating a proposal from Eden Housing to build 100 affordable units in the plan area and said Summer Hill homes has expressed interest in a housing development near the Computer History Museum.