Does Jac Siegel know that there is a shoe store downtown? It seems to be doing just fine.

How can a small retail shop surive the onslaught of chain stores, malls and the online retailers.

Office space is needed right now, retail not so much.

A very short sighted view by our city "leaders". With all the new housing going up nearby we need to keep Castro St. interesting to flourish. This creates a precedent. What if Castro was all offices. Who would come to Mountain View then?

This is a tough one. Retail is needed to make downtown Mountain View come alive. But if the zoning of that part of Castro St says offices are OK, then should stick to the rules we set ourselves.

Actionable insight for the rest of us: If you want a living downtown, spend money there! For me, there are few Sunday pleasures greater than buying books and Books Inc, followed by a light lunch at the cafe upstairs.

@Charlie: Not that I would mind a lot of cool retail, but that is NOT what downtown MV is known for. People come for the restauants. There are tons, and a new beer garden being built. And it is SO packed on any evening that parking is near impossible, so I don't think the crowds are going anywhere. Retail is just not the thing here.

We are toasting the city district for who?

BTW people you want to stop a CEQA project it is called a writ of mandamus. File them left and right and put the breaks on what appears as a city under siege.

There is so much happening it makes my brain hurt just to wrap my head around it. What are we doing? I have zero love of that little shopping center, but its a slippery slope from council with only one mind: fill the coffers of the developers and screw the people they have no voice. This is corruption folks, Bell style of corruption.

I want to know the relationships to council and developers. Smells bad here, real bad.

How about the city council set aside some below rent money to help the poor retailers keep their business's going downtown? We're so ready to help the poor residents, why not help the poor businesses?

It worked great for the USSR for so many years. Our enlightened city council must surely be thinking along these lines of thought already.

"How can a small retail shop surive the onslaught of chain stores, malls and the online retailers."

Castro Street is a mall run by Mountain View and building owners. Much of it has become a Food Court. It would be unfortunate if too many storefronts on Castro Street became offices - one way out of that is larger buildings with a ground floor retail requirement when they are built. The flip would be higher rents, of course.

The future of the area surrounding downtown is higher density as is the area surrounding downtown Palo Alto. University Avenue may turn into a Santana Row, apartments and all. Ultimately the market determines land use. When a very modest single family house sells for millions, the building is doomed. It's something like the forest progression. True, if an owner can skip a stage before they sell, they make out. That's one of the motives I suppose of the people who demand that the world around them freeze to the horizon the day they start making mortgage payments and who work tirelessly for general taxpayer funding for neighborhood improvements. The house may be the only savings they have which is risky. Only a few are really interested in the ecology...

Mountain View is also moving relentlessly up market. One can wish Google, etc, every success, but soaring rents are driving out a sizable part of the population and mean there is little or no bootstrap startup space available. Higher income tenants in lower end buildings will prove less stable, at some point the buildings will go and be replaced by higher density.

We gather that funds with access to the current cheap money have been buying up housing. Is that true in this area? Can anyone make informed speculations about any such activities in this area? Since valuations of rental properties are mostly a multiple of the rents one would think that speculators would make rents and other prices more unstable.

Look at the building at Castro and Church, the 2 story building that most likely will be torn down, look at 895 West El Camino, this end of Castro St has been a mix of retail and offices.

Their was a shopping center on Castro St where the Kaiser Medical building stands, across from 444 Castro St is a mix of offices and retail.

Yes it would be nice to have Santana Row shops, why not do a Sunnyvale.

Rather have a food court then a big empty mall. We do have some retail, better then most places.

We (Mountain View, using our tax dollars) spent a ton of money to create a vibrant downtown area that is the envy of many neighboring cities. What makes it great is that there ARE places to walk to and shop at and dine. I love the description that this is a mall whose food-court has grown quite large.

The offices at ground floor kill our downtown. Just like a mall with many closed shops. Castro is being shortened by two blocks with this change of a block to offices. I bet Amici's will feel it. This is short sighted. We started to see this in 2000 where the tech boom was so large that nothing could compete on a level playing field. We were fortunate that ended abruptly before too much damage was done - though we are still paying in many ways with pensions that tried to compete.

What we need is zoning that matches our planned use. We built downtown to be an open mall. Zone it as such, the same way a mall would be managed. First floor retail only. Rent on first floor will stay lower than the upper floors, when offices are in high demand like now. They shouldn't be competing with each other in an area where we have invested in creating something special.

As more nicer looking office buildings are built, older office buildings might become affordable, those ground floor offices might move to nicer digs. Ground floor units might become retail. Give it time with what is going on downtown, new housing units popping up here and there, new young people moving in, new workers, new visitors.

We have a few places left that new mixed use building can be built, across from the train station, and 400 block of Castro St, odd side of the street. Retailers want something larger then what we have to sell those thousand of shoes.

The downtown area will die if retail is converted into offices, we have to find a way to reverse this trend. This an important job for city planning, don't just roll over and give in to offices.
It's my understanding that retail brings in good money in sales tax, what kind of taxes are paid by offices.