Thank you to the Council for supporting more housing in the East Whisman area. This will fit in nicely with the current large-scale housing project (~600 units) currently under construction adjacent to Whisman Station and across the street from the Slater Elementary School campus, currently slated to reopen in 2019. With walkable, transportation-oriented residential development and a walkable neighborhood school, northeast Mountain View can become an even more active, vibrant, and connected neighborhood.

I welcome and support Council's move towards more flexible land use in the East Whisman area. If land owners had been allowed to build residential units in East Whisman, or the North Bayshore for that matter, I expect that they would have done so years ago, considering how hot the rental and ownership markets have been. Property owners and developers respond to market forces like high rents much more quickly than city councils do, and build what prospective businesses and residents want. And if they build something nobody wants, they lose money, or go out of business.

Lots of new residential is coming. 592 units are being built around the corner from me in the South Whisman area now. The property at Moffett and Middlefield is expected to have 1143 units [Web Link Check out the 38 pages' worth of projects in the current planning pipeline [Web Link Don't forget the 10,000 units being studied for the North Bayshore!

This hot market is almost sure to change before all of these projects and plans are completed. I encourage the Planning Commission and City Council to be flexible when considering zoning changes, and to leave property owners more than one option for how to best use their land to respond to the unpredictable needs of the future.

Greg Colodonado misrepresents the scale of new housing to call it "lots".

Look at the size of the parking lots in the office complexes our city has approved. That is what a large development looks like.

Look at the parking lots at any of our housing areas. That is what comparatively small development looks like.

As long as we keep approving office parks with giant parking lots and housing with small parking lots, you know that our city council is making things worse for renters and new home buyers.

"As long as we keep approving office parks with giant parking lots and housing with small parking lots, you know that our city council is making things worse for renters and new home buyers".


Parking is determined by empirical evidence of similar developments. The fact that the number is higher for office parks means that they have higher a higher demand for parking. I trust parking experts more than I trust council members. Most council members also trust the transportation experts. That's why they don't listen to novices.

"One of Mountain View's office-heavy jobs centers could be an epicenter of new housing"

Not that it's central to this article, but people who appreciate language will be happier when more writers move past today's fad of writing "epicenter" to emphasize any and every center. (Will the new housing be underground? Unlikely; yet that's what the quoted sentence above implies, to readers who actually understand "epicenter" -- literally, above the center.)

There's also the hope that we'll move beyond other current word fads, like "on the cusp of" (from writers who appear not to know what a cusp actually is), or "meld" (traditionally a specialized term in card play, but used by people who don't seem to know that). "Hope is what keeps us alive" -- Raymond Chandler.

In the past I recall that the area north of 101 was not zoned residential because of clay soil and liquifaction in the event of earthquakes. I live close to El Camino and a soil analysis says "moderate risk of liquifaction."

My questions: Given that the north of 101 area IS at greater risk, does this affect the desirability of high-rise residential construction there?

And given predicted rise of the oceans/SF Bay, are residential buildings in that area doomed to be "beach homes" in a few decades?

Boy, after hearing about health issues for those who live in the Superfund site, and what Google had to do to make their office buildings safe over there, I chose not to live over there. Superfund sites are dangerous. We should not build until after it is cleaned up.

I have a question: How polluted is the land in this part of East Whisman from past Semiconductor activity?

Urban sounds great. Let's just make sure there's grocery / pharmacy / parks / etc.

A nice well planned mix use project with new units, retail space and new shiny medium rise office buildings to replace the mostly single story buildings.

At night and weekend a majority of parking spaces go empty.

Near the end of the article it mentions the TCE issues. This subject should be closely reviewed before permitting a lot of new housing. Didn't there have to be major mitigation and/or teardown of public-paid housing (for Moffett Field families -- military) because it was discovered to have TCE issues there and the tenants objected?! While we need more housing, lets' be sensible and examine the possibly polluted areas closely.

Many aren't aware of the high rates of cancer as well as ALS cases at Moffett Field/NASA close to the area in question here. Hopefully the situation will be remedied as Google did with it's office buildings it acquired in that area.

cancer rater were abnormally high until 2005, but they have been normal since then? I was hesitating to buy something in that area at the time because of the superfund sites, but ended up elsewhere so I haven't kept track very closely.