I have gone to the 'other corner' for food about twice in the last two decades (Taco Bell). I much preferred the original Fiesta Del Mar. (but after 'too' opened up downtown? started going there)

I agree that this neighborhood area, on a very visible main drag - could again support the right iconic retail/food spot. If there is no reserved retail, we know by downtown, that Office Space will start to erode on mixed-use neighborhood uses.

What Councilwoman from Wagonwheel neighborhood would like to have the local (award winning) little burrito place displaced from the Whisman Road shopping center? I agree with members McAlister, Siegel and Rosenberg. The magic number for Council 'majority decisions' in a vote is FOUR. Please, step up Lisa!

Any room for trees in this project? I mean real trees - not the wimpy little overgrown shrubs they normally plant.

People living here will find it impossible to leave by Terra Bella in the mornings when Shoreline is already gridlocked. How does the city council expect to fix this problem?

I agree with Albert, traffic is already unreal at that corner. How come none of the Stierlin Estate neighborhood had any chance commenting on this massive project. We are the one's most affected my this project. And the only grocery store in the area is that now so famous Safeway on Shoreline. I guess the council believes that all those new residents will walk there since it not just the long checkout lines but also limited parking during peak hours. Shoreline Blvd is way past traffic capacity most any hour of any day. Oh my, this council is destroying our once lovely city one monster project after another.

Seven stories, I don't know what to say. I'm stunned.

Let ALL the Googlites live there, with shuttles to and from work. Get them off the streets and out of the neighborhoods.

I'm not convinced that "Shared parking with the nearby office building could be one of the ways to off-load parking demand in nearby lots" is a reasonable or feasible plan. Offices frequently need more parking spaces than they originally anticipate and housing always needs more for visitors and guests of residents.

Just say No! So tired of the horrific city council approving one bad project after another. No retail, massive traffic, dark caverns of roads, cheesy cookie-cutter overpriced high density housing do not make a pleasant community in which to live. Companies could find other locations that would welcome the influx of jobs /housing rather than trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Large companies such as Google would attract people to those jobs wherever they were located.

Please change the name of Mountain View; it no longer applies if you build this monster housing project. Developer Acres, Toxic Terrace? I don't think people want to live here.

Alphabet/Google employees = 72,053

As of 2016, the American multinational internet company, headquartered in Mountain View, California, had 72,053 full-time employees. Up until Alphabet's creation in 2015, these figures were reported as Google employees.

Source: Web Link

I know this article isn't about Google, but I assume they are trying to cram all of their employees (and families) into Mountain View. They really have outgrown mountain view, isn't there a cap on this sort of thing? I see potential for a ghost town like Detroit, Mich. if they go elsewhere or fold.

How about No-Mountain View? Toxic Terrace is clever, but rather upity.

@ the_punnisher: How about No-Mountain View? Toxic Terrace is clever, but rather upity. I think we can do better.

"Kowloon Walled City" seems like a good name, with the way things are going. 7-story (soon to be 17 story, then 70 story?) tenements lining the city boundaries, blocking all sunlight and Mountain Views.

I used to live a block from here. That is way out of proportion.
Hey, City Council, what happened to following our General Plan? We put a lot of effort into visioning how our city should grow and evolve, but you routinely ignore that and approve these changes. When you take industrial area and make it residential (a windfall for the land owner in this climate) it knocks our city balance out of whack. That was done before to create the housing imbalance, but 2 wrongs don't make a right. Make a good plan. Follow the plan. Don't feel pressured by these developers that don't have to live with the consequences. Please!

"But mah views!" said all the Boomers.

If you guys wanted the entire city of Mountain View to remain a quiet suburb then you should have bought the whole city. Thank god we're building more housing in the midst of the crunch.

I think that allowing the developer to remove the retail space is a mistake. As noted in the article and by other commenters, Fiesta del Mar was successful at this location, and there is other retail across the street. Adding residential density plus the new office workers who are about to occupy the buildings under construction should actually make it more viable.

The Council should make retail space a requirement, regardless of what the developer says (they will always complain about anything that makes their project a bit more complex). Even if the retail space isn't occupied right at the start, it's important to have the space built in for the future, as this is going to be an even more important gateway location in the future.

OMG! Just stop! Stop the building! Stop converting open space and trees to cement, stop with giant housing, corporate developing. JUST STOP!

People, wake up and LOOK at what is happening. Mountain View is turning into a city without heart or humanity, every man/woman for themselves, due to corporate takeoeover. As with all addictions, comes a crash and burn. We think we are immune to crashes. This recent flood of overbuilding, over industrialization, overdevelopment, overcoprporatizarion is an addiction and we will crash. People have forgotten the years of vacant buildings and contamination left behind by previous hungry corporations. We still have repercussions decades after GE, Fairchild and ofhers abandoned acres of contaminated land, leaving homeowners to suffer. Try a one year moratorium on building. Seriously.

JUST STOP!

Challenge to YIMBY and anyone else to claims to support this project -- head over to Shoreline & Terra Bella at 9:30 AM today (or any workday) and just observe auto traffic. Come back and let us know how functional roads will be (or not) once you add 1000 more cars (likely all headed north on Shoreline). No need to post here again until you have actually done this.

Oh, BTW, Google/Alphabet has some property in/near Boulder, Colorado. They have even had NIST be forced to build height restricted buildings. Web Link
I shouldn't worry about Google planned expansion plans. Plenty of Mountain Views and expansion space. The people maintain a similar behavior pattern that I call it Berzerkeley East. The students even protested like Mountain View residents did: Web Link

@Juan

I get stuck in that traffic constantly, and yet I wish this building was 14 stories or more. We need better mass transit infrastructure and we need more housing, but either of those things requires an arduous uphill battle with people who want it to be 1970 again in Mountain View, so I'll take what I can get.

[Post removed due to disrespectful comment or offensive language]

What comes first; a great transit system or unlimited growth? Any city can only support so many residents and workers. Mtv View has reached its limits, by the way were is all the water coming from for these new residents. Hetch Hetchy has only so much storage space, and the next drought will come again.
New schools will be needed, or are all of these new residents single without children and move away once they get married and have children. This city needs to stop building anything and follow the existing general plan. You can not add unlimited growth without the support facilities. And this has nothing to do with 'not in my backyard' ,it's about quality of live.

We should be expanding our infrastructure to handle more growth, but that's often a way of just saying "no growth" because those same people will still find a way to block the infrastructure developments. The housing is coming, so start supporting the infrastructure improvements that are going to be needed for it.

And where are the kids who live in this new massive development going to go to school? The MV schools are already overcrowded. There needs to be better coordination between the MV City Council and the school districts, which seem to operate completely independently of each other.

There's a great solution to that problem: build more schools. It doesn't make sense to hold housing hostage for that, though. Otherwise, we'll hear "Why are you building more schools? There aren't enough kids to support it."

We should do what we need to do to handle our growth, which includes building more housing, building more schools, improving our public transit. We can do this together so that everyone who works in Mountain View can afford to live here.

Complete and utter nonsense, there is absolutely NO responsibility for a city to ensure its workers can afford to live in their city.

This is crazy. Who are you that think this is a RIGHT? Show me where, EVER has it been said that a City should provide housing?

You guys keep chanting this mantra, thinking if you repeat it enough it will make it true. The Voice keeps publishing articles giving such a slanted view it's ridiculous. And posts thatcontradict this social engineering are deleted.

Wow. Talk about a population being manipulated. Wake up Mountain View. Wake up.

Sigh. Why not RETURN THE WHISMAN SCHOOL AND PROPERTY BACK TO WHAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR: a PUBLIC SCHOOL! That is also another change I cannot understand. buses lined up to drop students off and buses to pick them up aftr the school day was finished. We HAD a set of plans for the future of Mountain View AND WE PAID THE SPECIAL TAXES! So, where is the future Mountain View I PAID FOR? I see no BART THAT I PAID FOR with a spur past San Jose to access the housing going south. Yes, I planned for better access rather than the Charley Fox I see now. You would already have grade separations like RTD Light Rail has RIGHT NOW!
So who P***ed my money away? [ dead silence ]. I think that Mountain View leaders better grow a pair and ask about BART transit for the Peninsula. No HSR without keeping the promises made for the BART TAX. Otherwise, that money should be given back to the TAXPAYER WITH INTEREST ACCRUED!
NO HSR WITHOUT BUILDING OUT BART!( that would have solved these crises decades ago AND CALTRAIN wouldn't exist! BART is already electrified and smelly diesels wouldn't be killing people and Gunn HS students at grade crossings.
On the other roadblocks to bringing BART down the Peninsula: hasn't anyone heard of the power of foreclosure for the public good?:EMINENT DOMAIN? RTD Light Rail has successfully done this multiple times. I'll bet HSR will do this. So how about making good on those promises? No more Caltrain or expensive electrification; JUST MAKE GOOD ON YOUR PROMISES AND BRING BART DOWN THE PENINSULA. END HSR IN SAN JOSE AND KEEP BART GOING UP TO SF without using the TRANS-BAY TUBE!

RANT FINISHED.

@Crusader

"Complete and utter nonsense, there is absolutely NO responsibility for a city to ensure its workers can afford to live in their city."

Your generation will not be missed.

More housing is good! But I would support the "condos" on Terra Bella having a 3-story pedestal and rising to 7 stories with a setback.

Wow, the city of Mountain View really knows how to go overboard. First we build massive apartments (many of which are recently completed are still not full) because we need more housing. They are mostly rentals, so people living there will never actually be able to own anything and live here as they age, they will be forced to be renters forever or move away to buy something. Horrible planning.

Then we vote for rent control so we can keep rents artificially low so everyone can live here. We will see the negative effects of this decision 10-15 years from now when all these buildings start to age and look horrible, being rented out increasingly to people of questionable records.

Many people arguing for both of these options pointed to the increasing numbers of people living on the streets in campers saying if there was more housing we wouldn't have people camping on the street. And yet, in my neighborhood the number of campers continues to increase with the city doing nothing about it! These people have no interest in getting out of their campers and paying for adequate housing like the rest of us do.

It would have been much smarter to focus on one of these solutions and make changes gradually. By doing all three at once we have guaranteed that Mountain View will not be a place that our children will want to live. Our neighboring cities have been much smarter, and are making smart changes gradually. It's really a shame Mountain View didn't have the self-control for better planning and more foresight. Now all us residents will pay the price.

Just wait until the tech industry hits a bump (as it always does) and Mountain View quickly becomes a dirty, run-down, crime-ridden area with bad schools and rough neighbors. It won't matter that my future children can afford to live here. They won't want to anyway.

@Such a shame

You nailed it......

@Such a shame

The Measure V rent control won't apply to "these buildings" since it doesn't apply to anything anything built since 1995.

Lousy location for a park? Is there really ever a lousy location for a park? I think there could be creative ways to not have it interact with the soil . Has anyone seen some of the small parks in SF? Or maybe a rooftop park for residents and the public? or between buildings? These things don't have to be like Shoreline. Cities aren't just streets, cement,tar, buildings and companies....

And to be honest, should we be promoting any place built today that does not encourage people to get out and walk around even if it is not connected well to other places yet because they weren't built that way before?

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