Doesn't sound like the plan includes retail space, specifically for a supermarket. With 2000 residences and no food shop, I don't know how it can be called a "sustainable development."

The article cites two rough square-footage plans. Here's how I see them stacking up.

Current plan: "The 3-million-square-foot project" minus "a million square feet of commercial space" (Is retail "commercial"?) minus "600,000 square feet of academic space" leaves 1,400,000 square feet for "nearly 2,000 homes", or about 700 square feet per home. This development is on leased land: the homes will be rented/leased and are much more likely to be multistory apartments than single-story detached homes. At "$1 billion", the cost per square foot is $333. Is that high, low or medium?

EIS plan: "2.9 million square feet" minus "600,000 square feet of academic space" minus "300,000 square feet of industrial space" minus "100,000 square feet of training and conference space" leaves 1.9 million square feet for 1,930 housing units, or about 984 square feet per apartment. (No commercial, no retail.)

Either way, we are talking about 2,000 to 6,000 people, depending on the average number of people per apartment. Are these people going to be considered Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Santa Clara County residents? Where are they going to shop? Are they going to be students, commercial or industrial workers, or what? Does the square footage for housing include garages? Does the square footage for non-housing include parking?

Based on my recollection of the EIS conceptual drawings, we are talking about 3- and 2-story buildings, including parking structures. This is necessary because "the 77-acre site" has about 3.35 million square feet. IF we're talking about a single-story development, that leaves about 350,000 square feet (about 8 acres) for such amenities as garages, parking, sidewalks, streets and, oh yeah, landscaping and parks.

As usually NASA does not care about the local population.

Nor do they care about the Military community in the area…. We lost the Base Exchange in Feb of 08 and it is no telling when we will lose the Commissary. It would be nice if The Bay Area Congressional Delegation (8th, PELOSI, NANCY/9th, LEE, BARBARA/12th, SPEIER, JACKIE/13th, STARK, PETE/14th, ESHOO, ANNA/15TH, HONDA, MICHAEL/16TH,LOFGREN, ZOE ) *CARED*…

Check out this link

Web Link

Click on the NASA Ames Development Plan (NADP at the top of the page. It is 99 pages and is a 89.9Mb file.

Here is a extraction from page 1 of the PLAN – ::::

“The NASA Ames Development Plan (NADP) details the transformation of the original 200-hectare (500-acre) campus of NASA Ames Research Center and the 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of the former Naval Air Station Moffett Field into an integrated, dynamic research and education community in the heart of Silicon Valley. This transformation will be fed by the establishment of the NASA Research Park, a 86-hectare (213-acre) research and development campus for partners from academia, industry and non-profit corporations with shared goals in support of NASA mission.” (NADP, page 1)

/signed/
Military retiree/presently federal employee

Doug, since Foothill/DeAnza and UCSC will be heavily involved, I would expect that a lot of the housing would be in the form of dorms and/or student apartments, which aren't typically very big. The actual mix of housing — how much of it is for students and postdocs vs. employees and families — is probably more important than the average square footage of a unit.

Another important question is, if a substantial proportion of it is family-style housing, what impact will that have on local schools, and has that been planned for?

And what about roads and other such infrastructure? My husband worked for Yahoo! for three years, and had to daily navigate the road zoo around 101, 238, and Mathilda — I shudder to think how much worse that could become at rush hour with a significantly larger local population. (He tried biking it at first, but concluded that was just too dangerous.)

Consideration should be given to extending Light Rail from Ellis and Hwy 101, through this new development, and cross the Stevens Creek waterway so that it travels by Shoreline Amphitheater, Google and Intuit. In this way, car travel would be minimized and workers/residents can have access to mass transit, such as the train station.