September 25, 2019
As blogged on Fast Company, The sprawling office park near the main buildings at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, looks a lot like other corporate campuses in Silicon Valley, with low buildings sitting in a sea of parking. But the company hopes to transform it into a walkable, liveable neighborhood—and the designers working with Google on the redesign hope that it can become a model for turning other pavement-filled suburbs into green spaces where people are less likely to drive.
“In many ways, the premise of making a more bikeable, walkable, human-scale neighborhood was the starting point and fundamental to the project,” says Laura Crescimano, founder of Sitelab Urban Studio, the urban design and strategy firm that led the creation of a proposed plan—now under a long process of review by the city of Mountain View—to use the land to build 5,700 new homes while shrinking local traffic.
The plan calls for 3.12 million square feet of office space and as much as 400,000 square feet of new retail space along with the homes. Twenty percent of the housing will be affordable. It’s a response to a plan passed by the city in 2017 that rezoned the area, called the North Bayshore district, to spur new housing development because of the housing crisis. (The demand for housing in Mountain View is so great that a small house that was completely destroyed in a fire recently sold for $1.6 million, above the asking price of $1.48 million; the house previously sold for $16,000 in 1955.)
Google, which owns most of the land in two areas called Shorebird and Joaquin, wanted to use its property to help begin to tackle the local housing shortage. But it also wanted to do that in a way that made people living there less likely to drive. The proposed design expands the “green loop,” a multi-use trail that currently exists between Google offices, to circle the entire district. “It’s hundreds of acres that now, instead of just connecting an office building to an office building, it’s connecting neighborhoods,” says Crescimano. The plan connects the loop to regional trails and a new bike bridge, being built by the city, that crosses a nearby highway so that people can easily walk or ride a bike into downtown Mountain View and reach the train station. Within the new development, a pedestrian-focused “social spine” lined with retail stores and other neighborhood amenities will be a short walk from apartments, so residents don’t have to drive to run most errands. An elementary school is planned for the district, so kids can also walk to school. The plan also calls for a “pretty aggressive” reduction in parking compared to standard developments in the area, she says, with parking consolidated in garages that can later be converted into other uses.
