"predictions that self-driving cars and new mass-transit options will enable most of the future residents to go without owning a vehicle"

Lol! Come on. This just means more cars parked on the street. I wonder if the developers believe what they're saying -- I assume not.

Of course you need one car per bedroom, planning for less works only in places like New York City. So the current City Council will believe anything the builders say no matter how far fetched.

i appreciate the voice having an article about this before it happens. thanks!

This City Council needs to get the heck out of Mtn. View. Stop screwing up Mtn. View for the the likes of Google. I hope you are here when Google goes bust. Why don't you just vote among yourselves to rename the place Googleville? Not like you can see the darn mountains anymore. You are insane to think the people that work at Google will no longer need to drive. I assume that at least "some" people that work there have or have children. NOBODY that has a child will only just take public transportation. Daycare calls. You wait to jump on public transportation. You get to daycare. Pick up your child. Take public transportation. They let you off at Grant road. You walk sick child to El Camino hospital. You people are insane.

Anticipating a need for parking is self-fulfilling: if you build housing surrounded by plentiful cheap parking, it will attract residents who need cars for daily commuting. No one wants more cars in North Bayshore. We do, however, desperately need more housing. So, let's build housing with little-to-no parking.

Won't people with cars move there anyway, and just park on the street? Not if it's illegal to park on the street throughout North Bayshore. Only a few die-hards will hike across highway 101 daily to park on the street in some other neighborhood.

Won't apartments with no parking be unattractive to people who need cars for daily commuting? Yes, that's precisely the point. They may not be attractive to you or me, but the popularity of commuter buses from San Francisco suggests there are plenty of people willing to deal with scarce, expensive parking. There is so much pent-up demand that new housing will get snapped up.

North Bayshore is a unique opportunity for Mountain View to finally make a real dent in the local housing crisis and create a vibrant, walkable neighborhood from scratch. It would be a shame to scale it back due to self-fulfilling assumptions about parking.

And to think that owners will automatically sell when they get jobs out of the area. Lets see, $50,000 selling fees, and increase in property taxes y moving to a new home. Need for cars won't change.
Town needs to encourage high density development. Adding jobs to the area and rent control is just plain stupid. Increased rents due to imbalance of supply. Fault of planning commission.

Any City Council plan for new housing must be subject to formal, legal approval by the affected K-6 and HS school districts prior to being implemented. MV has totally sc**wed the local school districts with its grossly imperious fiscal negligence. Now it's time for MV to make both legal and financial restitutions for its gross, prior financial abuses of its school districts. The MV "city council" and "planning commissions" must be forced to face the realities of responsible financial governance, and not just totally irresponsible dreams of unlimited housing expansion.

The city once had a chance to coordinate with Google to build a world leading tech corridor in North Bayshore that had $200 million in public benefits attached to it: Web Link

Rather, the city went with Linkedin, which waned, and Linkedin then passed that property back to Google, not without casualties along the way like small businesses like Cheryl Burke Dance Studio that Linkedin closed down.

In turn, no one got fully what they wanted, Google didn't get all of their bold vision, nor is the city getting all the public benefits it was once offered.

Now, Google, which owns most the land in North Bayshore is asking the city to approve up to 8,950 in new housing, even knowing that additional housing would restrict commercial development for itself.
Web Link

If Google is willing to use its land for housing, why should the city stop it? Tuesday will be a real test if the each city council member will work with Google to take hold of the greatest chance to address the regional housing crisis, roll up their sleeves and engineer solutions to the challenges like owls, traffic, schools that new growth will bring, or just be a naysayer that hides behind the problems (owls, traffic, schools), and pretend the housing crisis and the rows of homeless living in RV is someone else's problem.

Former MV City Manager Bruce Liedstrand, who envisioned vibrant downtown Castro decades back has this vibrant vision for North Bayshore: Web Link (pdf)

Ed wrote: "if you build housing surrounded by plentiful cheap parking, it will attract residents who need cars for daily commuting. No one wants more cars in North Bayshore.  So, let's build housing with little-to-no parking."

The most remarkable feature of a social-engineering mindset (let's force everyone to conform to enlightened living according-to-me) is its quasi-religious faith, which resists the lessons of practical experience, or selectively perceives just the evidence that it likes. (If that weren't true, there wouldn't still be True Believers arguing -- without ever having experienced it themselves, naturally -- that Communism is an enlightened doctrine, just poorly implemented in [every one of the, what, 100?] examples tried so far.)

Some San Francisco residential neighborhoods adopted the "if we don't provide parking, people won't drive" faith. Practical result: People still drive to them, and now spend on average 29 minutes cruising the neighborhood looking for the rare parking-space opening -- many burning a gallon of gasoline, fouling the air. Does this reality inform policy discussions here in MV? I've never seen it mentioned.

Yes, let's just drag our feet some more on this and continue to let housing costs skyrocket. You guys are pulling the ladder up so fast it's going to launch into orbit.

@Common sense: It's a little odd to bring up communism in a debate about what sorts of housing the government should allow developers to build in North Bayshore. Maximum units per acre, minimum setbacks, maximum building height, minimum off-street parking per unit, heritage trees, school fees, etc. aren't hallmarks of libertarianism. For that matter, nor is the invisible hand of the market setting the price of valuable San Francisco parking spaces close to $0, encouraging residents to burn gas in search of a freebie. As long as scrapping zoning altogether is off the table, we're stuck doing central planning. The politburo would be proud. Let's get on with it.

Doing something foolish in phases doesn't make it any less foolish.

Maybe the city council should consider putting this project on hold COMPLETELY until they can come up with answers to questions like "Where will the children that live there go to school?" and "Where will the people get water since we sold ours to East Palo Alto? and "Where will people who live there and don't work at Google park their cars?" before they proceed.

I know those are difficult questions but they need to be answered BEFORE adding more residents to this town. The infrastructure is terrible now. They need to tell us how adding 20,000+ more people is going to improve the situation.

I have lived here all my life,over 64 years in Old Mountain View and now in the Shoreline area. This city has changed so much over time it's sad. The traffic is ridiculous and the cost of rent is so high seems only Google employees can afford it.. My kids grew up here as many others and can't afford the rents.let alone buying a house where they grew up. Maybe the city Council should think about all the older and younger people just trying to survive here. It's not always about making more money for the city.

The question the City Council should always be asking itself is, how is what they're doing benefiting the CURRENT residents of Mountain View? Can the existing infrastructure really support such a huge influx of residents? Does building huge apartment blocks create new neighborhoods, or just a temporary place people live until they move on to their next job? What's to stop North Bayshore from becoming another California St. apartment city?

@Jackie unfortunately it is about making more money for the city given the unfunded pension liabilities. It's sad. At some point someone is going to get the squeeze and City Council is doing its darnedest to make sure that it's not them.

@Jackie

If you want your kids to afford rent in the area, then the Bay Area as a whole needs to start building more high-density housing to increase supply and spread out demand. This includes Mountain View building housing both near downtown around it's Caltrain station and nearby major employers like Google.

@YIMBY

I'm not sure if you don't understand that the current residents have a particular quality of life that they have enjoyed and is being destroyed by this push to add thousands more people or if you just don't care.

The people already here are the ones that matter. Not everybody chooses to live in a high-rise apartment with no personal space and no sense of community. If that is what you are looking for, we have a lovely city north of here that is already set up for that sort of lifestyle and it is close to the public transport you admire and think everyone should use. There is no reason to expect current residents to hand over yet more tax dollars willingly to pay to have their city transformed into a place they have no desire to live.

You are welcome to have a different opinion. What you are NOT welcome to do is to deride those who don't agree with you.

@psr

Yeah, I'm fully aware that you guys walled yourselves off from being impacted by rising housing costs by passing Prop 13, and then went on to pretend that you're living in a gated community and stalled all new housing developments in order to keep your "quality of life" while everyone else suffered the costs of that. You're only able to have this mindset because you've externalized the costs of preventing growth in Mountain View onto everyone else. Why don't you go appreciate the overly generous tax subsidy you're getting and stop preventing the rest of us from having a place to live here? Otherwise maybe you shouldn't have Prop 13 anymore, and instead you should have the housing crisis hit you in the wallet just like everyone else?

@ YIMBY

You act as if Prop 13 was passed last week and nobody in the area is aware that it exists.

Prop 13 was passed to prevent people from being priced out of their homes due to the actions of others which cause housing prices to rise. The reason it was passed was to maintain the community built by people who had invested years, decades or even centuries in building it and preventing those with no concern for the area other than to exploit its benefits, then move on when they are no longer taking more than they give.

The reason the housing crisis isn't hitting me harder (and I pay plenty in property taxes, make no mistake about that) is because I chose a place to live and put down roots for the long term. I'm not here because I owe my soul to Google. I'm here because my family has been in the area for over a century. Why should I pay more so that you can have your apartment and pay next to nothing for the same services I have to pay thousands to provide?

It's a shame that there are people that can't afford to live here, but that isn't my fault. That blame lies with those who decide to build companies here because they like the weather. That doesn't mean those of us who were here before and built the place that you find so desirable should pack up and leave because it suits you. Maybe they should pick a nice place somewhere else that is affordable and has a lot of open acreage and a need for new industry. Then you can build whatever sort of place you like rather than taking an established community, destroying it and putting in place what you want.

When you go to visit people and stay in their home, do you repaint the room you are given to suit you? The principle is no different.

Great of psr to come in here to try and virtue-shame everyone else.

If you pay a lot of property taxes, what's the effective property tax rate on the market value of your home? I'm going to guess you don't have the integrity to actually answer this question, since you're someone born on third base and have gone through life thinking you hit a triple.

@psr

It's good for you that your family has been here for a long time, but your children and their friends, won't be, because you refuse to built housing for them. FYIGM am I right?

"Google is investing in modular homes that’ll serve as short-term housing for them. Google has ordered 300 units from a startup called Factory OS, which specializes in modular homes. The deal reportedly costs between $25 and $30 million." Source Verge and WSJ: Web Link Video of the modular home startup working with Google: Web Link

@psr

"Prop 13 was passed to prevent people from being priced out of their homes due to the actions of others which cause housing prices to rise."

And the same exact thing is happening right now, except it's families who were renting because Prop 13s side-effects priced them out of the buyers market. Families move out of the bay area every day because they can't afford rent after the latest increase. Families that would have loved to put roots down but couldn't because of how crazy expensive housing has become.

No, it is your fault and the fault of ever other person like you who perpetuate a tax subsidy that gives you financial incentive to shout down any attempt to build more housing for others. It's your fault and the fault of others like you who took advantage of the social contract that your parents generation and the generations before them all adhered to in order to build this country up and create an achievable concept known as the American Dream. That social contract saw the orchards that used to be here get paved over for housing so people like you could have a place to live. And instead of paying that effort forward and supporting high-density housing so that others might also have a place to live here, you've instead opted to tear the social contract up and proclaim that no one deserves to live anywhere now that you happen to own your own home.

Yeah, boo hoo, Google moved in and gave the Millenial generation good jobs. That must be so difficult for you. It's incredibly telling that you can't see this as anything but an annoyance for you. Do you even work anymore?

Didn't someone just mention "virtue-shaming?"

"YIMBY" continues, spam-bot-style, rehashing a very limited repertoire of talking points like:

"Jackie, If you want your kids to afford rent in the area, then the Bay Area as a whole needs to start building more high-density housing to increase supply and spread out demand."

Never the least acknowledgment that a "huge influx of residents" (Nihonsuki's phrase above) created this whole problem (without which, Jackie's kids might ALSO still afford rent in the area). This accelerated demand by newcomers has much to do with making "housing costs skyrocket" (anyone present here at times without sudden massive hiring knows well that housing costs didn't just naturally always rise like this; sometimes indeed they fell).

What's truly remarkable is not so much that sudden hordes of newcomers create "skyrocketing" housing costs (a classic situation), but that they even proceed to complain about the problem self-righteously: pointing an accusing finger at absolutely anyone except themselves.

The Bay Area has always been a desirable region to live in. Aside from an influx of new people, you're also going to have the children of current residents who will want homes as well. You can't just freeze the region and think that no repercussions will occur from that. And you can't just blame it all on newcomers as if you should be able to wall off the Bay Area to anyone else.

I appreciate the overly generous tax subsidy that Prop 13 represents. There is also an overly generous (as compared to largest industrial nations) federal tax credit for borrowing money, rather than saving, for purchasing a residence. I do not think the national tax mortgage-interest deduction mistake will be reformed in my lifetime. I choose not to fight the Prop 13 (even commercial property) public policy mistakes, because I can see no political reform movement inCA that can possibly correct this in the next quarter centaur.

I totally agree with Chris Chiang. We need to see what we can do, on the positive side, to get more housing built locally. How we do it is called local control, and much of it is enshrined in our California Constitution. Forcing communities (like Menlo Park and Los Altos) to take up their share of local housing, is also under the sovereign control of our state.

My family has now been in California for a century but I do not hold any senior-sonority rights when I cast my ballot. I have the same voting power as every other adult resident citizen who chooses to vote! This is, IMO, the California spirit. Newcomers welcome. Innovation welcome.

sorry for the spelling/typing : in CA, century, senior-seinority

@Steven Nelson,

When we don't build enough houses, newcomers are manifestly UNwelcome. Unless you meant to say "rich newcomers."

Look at @psr above: "The people already here are the ones that matter." That seems to be the more common sentiment currently in Mountain View.