It would be nice if a map/location plan was added with articles such as this so that we can decide on the potential impact it has to our own address. This area is close enough it will probably create yet more traffic issues.

The headline had me worried that the project was replacing park land with housing. Its the Sylvan Park neighborhood but not Sylvan Park itself.

Oh that's rich...who is the Prometheus kidding, it costs millions of dollars to clean up contaminated land. That would cut into their profit margin. I'm sure there will be lots of back door deals being done, payoff's of some sort to the Council. The Prometheus group is big with deep deep pockets.

Just what we need ... more $4,500 to $6,000 a month apartments that will never be subject to rent control. And, of course, the city will forego the 70 affordable units in lieu of cash. Great.

@ gareth davies

Done!

What I dont get is why build more apartments and houses no one can afford. Have you seen the Homeless problem in mountain view??? The Goggles and Yahoos buying RVs and being homeless on purpose?? Due to high rents??? This place is killing its own kind. NO ONE CAN AFFORD THE BAY AREA ANYMORE NOT EVEN THE TECHIES!!!!!! Supervisors of Mountainview... Stop your special interest and realize the problems you are creating and not fixing.

Peak hours traffic is already terrible at Evelin/Moorpark/Bernardo. Any measures to mitigate the impact of 500-1000 new cars in the area?

The water cleanup that Prometheus must be sufficient and well regulated by the city, since it is a critical issue for anyone moving into those apartments. In addition, the parking lot capacity needs to be reviewed carefully as well.

Headline is miss leading! Big difference between a "471-home project" and a "471-apartment complex" which is what the article describes.

Prometheus and the city government do not care about current residents (except those temporarily on the city council). It is all about money and power.

There has been ZERO outreach by the City of Mountain View to the residents of the Sylvan Park Neighborhood. This Jan 3rd meeting was conveniently scheduled 2 DAYS after a major holiday weekend. Most of learned about it too late to attend. Not that it matters, it's a done deal from what I can tell. You kind of wonder if back room deals are being made between Prometheus and the City of MV.

How did Promo get to own the city and build so many apartments?
What special relationship do they have to get approval to build whatever they want wherever they want?
Now it’s a so-called “housing crisis”. Don’t see Los Altos or Atherton building thousands of luxury apartments.
What do residents get in return?
Water rate increases, traffic, more taxes to pay for schools, composting, bad air,crowding while Promo execs live in the hills and who knows what city Council gets?

Also change the headline from “city considers” to Prometheus orders the city to approve another luxury apartment complex.
Done deal.

Prometheus + contaminated site + housing. What could possibly go wrong?

if prometheus cleans up the site - i for one strongly support this project. Some people might like living next to dilapidated warehouses and contaminated grounds, I don't. We need more housing and this is a prime location so let's use it.

This is teal sad! More unaffordable housing for people do make good money but can’t afford 4000-5000 rent because after all there are other bills to pay such as utilities food car payments etc etc wow

With over crowding school, does the city take into consideration of how the influx of new tenants once the project completed would overburden the school system? What’s their resolution? Will Prometheus have to foot the bill for that too?

I live next door to this lot. Construction on this project started in the middle of last year by demolishing the old buildings. It's stopped for the past few months (grass growing on the empty lot). Odd that they are only now getting permission from Planning...

The "significant groundwater contamination" is obviously very concerning for the entire neighborhood. I'm sure none of the residents of the area are aware.

FYI I believe the other apartment complex being built at Evelyn & Bernardo is all low income units.

It says "471-home project," then the first words of the summary make very clear that those "homes" are apartments (or as some advertisements like to write, "apartment homes") -- apartments that residents will make their homes, once built.

Commenter above who was bothered by "home" in the headline seems unaware it's a general word with several common meanings. (Must have picked up only the recent and pushy Realtor euphemism of deliberately always writing "homes" when they actually mean houses.)

This does absolutely nothing for affordable housing and everything to do with added pollution, traffic, gentrification, overcrowding schools, and enriching developers. This is so perverse and we need much better city planners. This is continuing to displace long time and new residents. Thumbs up city council, and never forget that Showalter, Rosenberg, and Siegel all sold Mountain View's most valuable long term asset- Our Water! That enough is career suicide in politics!

I wholeheartedly support any additional housing in Mountain View.

Even if these are high priced units, that's 471 families with money who are no longer bidding up the cheaper housing stock in the city, displacing people with less money. In a supply constrained area, any supply helps with price increases, even if it's expensive.

Yes, there will be school impact. That's why the city collects taxes and has school boards. The job of the school board is to provide education for the local children. When cities grow, schools must grow. We wouldn't have any cities if people argued against housing because of school impact! Infrastructure has to catch up with population growth.

Infrastructure, not simply schools, must precede an influx of people to be effective. Otherwise, we will all continue to suffer the failure of vision. Like now.
How many sardines can you fit in the can?

The city has proven it doesn't pre-build infrastructure. It'll have to follow.

You can contact the CEQA - resources.ca.gov/ceqa/more/faq.html about the rapidly diminishing air and water quality. If there was a rapid transit that efficiently moved the masses from 1-2 hours driving distance in 30 minutes it would provide more housing cost relief than clogging the city streets with pollution. Unfortunately our cities still don't have a coalition for public transportation. Lagging infrastructure is a ridiculously poor way to grow a city. All new high density should be required to have green rooftops to curtail warming. They should be required to be built with local labor too.

You probably don't remember there was a time when the city built the roads first. There is no more space to expand transportation unless we knock down housing. I am sure if the 471 homes were required to bike only and uber there would be less objection to such unsustainable growth.

It should be 1000 new units at a minimum. Shame that egregiously low height limits are keeping these projects from really taking a bite out of the housing crisis, but any new units are better that none.

Let's pave over every inch of soil. So all rainwater will run of into the bay and the ocean. The groundwater will not be replenished and the air quality will get worth. And the council sold our water, so I guess no more landscaping only hardscape around here. The trees will die, but who cares, it's build build. One question, since all the new apartment complexes have for lease signs, what's the vacancy rate?

Hopefully these units rent for $7500-$8500/mo. This would allow me to jack up my rent that I am losing to rent control. They can afford this with their google paychecks. Trickle down!

Shame that egregiously high height limits are jamming up the neighborhood with unrestrained traffic and air pollution. This is not a walkable location and should remain industrial as we are displacing small business.

I, for one 17-year Mountain View resident, support this project. Indeed, it should come sooner.

I have been living around the Sylvan Park area for about 12 years. Indeed that proposed area is blighted, it should be cleaned up / modernized long time ago. The location is pretty convenient in terms of transportation, you can get on both 237 and 85 within a few lights. Compared with rush hour traffic on El Camino Real or Shoreline, Evelyn is nothing.

I see a lot of talks about affordable housing. Yes, the more housing available, the cheaper it would get. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. Don't you see those people living in RVs all around Mountain View. How could you not be compassionate for them, they are also your fellow human beings, they deserve better. For all the NIMNBs in disguise, I despise your pettiness.

You have my vote on this, City Council.

It would seem poor planning to put so many of the City's eggs in the Prometheus basket. No doubt Prometheus is financing these huge projects (all over the City) with borrowed money, if they run into financial trouble that spells big trouble for Mountain View. When the downturn comes there are going to be a lot of empty apartments.

Why not build townhomes and condos that can be SOLD to people who will become part of the community for the long term, not a two year stint on the way to someplace else. Their track record is not impressive. Web Link (the few five star reviews sound like they are written by copywriters)

@@YIMBY

Agreed, it'd be a good idea to put more funding towards mass transit and other infrastructure improvements as well while we're adding more housing.

@MyOpinion

"When the downturn comes there are going to be a lot of empty apartments"

Assuming there is such a severe downturn, then that's a good thing. That means cheaper housing costs and lower financial barriers to entry for property ownership. And then when the upturn happens again, there's extra buffer supply of housing supply to grow into before we hit crisis levels again.

The neighbors have NO CHANCE of stopping this project. At most, a minority of the politicians on the city council will vote NO to say they did.

I am also a resident of Mountain View, and I've been one for twenty years. I live close enough to this development for its traffic to affect me, and it'll be in the same school district as my kids. I will be showing up to show support wherever others show up to show opposition, because I can't stand to see Mountain View sliding deeper into being a techie only enclave.

@Resident

Don't throw your back out pulling up that ladder.

Infrastructure is at capacity, there is no more room to build. The City Council should make developers build more infrastructure, otherwise NO DEAL.

You want to build a 471-home project in Sylvan Park? Sure no problem, just add an extra lane to Central Expy. between Sunnyvale and Shoreline, call us when it's done and you can start building.

You want to build a monstrosity next to San Antonio? Great, but you'll need to build a school next door first.

Developers make billions, residents get traffic. Time to say NO DEAL.

@Juan

If only the neighbors of the farmer who sold the land that your house was eventually built on had put up as much of a fuss as you are now.

How is an extra lane on Central Expressway going to help the occupants
of the new apartments get to work at Google?

"YIMBY" is always chiming in. Development is progress or no one's business except property owners - according to "YIMBY." Even zoning laws offend "YIMBY."

Naturally, this proposed development is not in YIMBY'S backyard. Were it, YIMBY might be singing a different tune.

Mountain View is FOR SALE to the highest bidders. The good news is that many residents are retired and free to sell and move away to a place that protects folks from every Tom, Dick and corporate "YIMBY" with a plan for ruining your neighborhood.

I say let them build. More housing is desperately needed. My rent went up $300 last year, and it's going to keep going up unless we increase the supply of housing.

@Fred

I've heard this argument before. What do you think my personal objections to development adjacent to me would be? Do you imagine me bemoaning a changing character of the neighborhood?

Have you considered that I simply view cities as things that grow and change, and that new buildings going up around me would be a natural and expected occurrence over time? And that if, for some reason, a new development impacted something that I liked, such as a view, that I would view me trying to block the development as not worth the contribution to the financial hardships that others are facing from the housing crisis?

I can't imagine being so personally disconnected to other human beings that I could walk outside, see an apartment complex getting built, and get so angry at the idea of more people moving into MY neighborhood. Or to actually have an opinion about a building being "too" tall, to the point of actually being motivated to complain to politicians about such a thing. That a city should stop growing because of me is such an alien thought process.

Let's say YIMBY has or buys a house in Mountain View. Say on Eunice near El Camino Hospital. He says Yes In My Back Yard. So, to light the whole city, PG&E proposes a nuclear power plant next to YIMBY's house. It will take 3 years to construct and will employ 50 workers a shift - three shifts a day, 7 days a week. No parking is needed because the city council is allowing parking on the streets - especially in front of YIMBY's driveway. To help with construction, a HOME DEPOT is proposed for five to-be- condemned lots opposite YIMBY's house. But business hours will be restricted to 5 a,m, to midnight - except for deliveries. The power plant will be safe. One in a million chance it will explode. YIMBY is not so greedy as to object. Is he?

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@Fred

Ah, I see that you've dragged the goalposts quite a distance there. We've apparently gone from discussing NIMBYism against housing development to surrounding a house (which I assume is a detached single-family home in this case) with a Nuclear Power Plant and a Home Depot. Do you feel that these are equivalent situations to having a large apartment complex be built next to you, or are you simply trying to go in one particularly extreme direction to find a limit?

For what it's actually worth, the real issue with the 3 year Nuclear Power Plant would be the construction noise. Your 24/7 hypothetical is egregious, there are already timings for construction to be done that limit noise during night-time hours. But I don't actually have an issue living next to a Nuclear Power Plant (you should have suggested a Coal Power Plant, open-air sewage storage, or a house you plan to live in if you really wanted to test me on this).

Parking in front of a driveway is a towable offense, but I assume the reason why you chose that specifically over simply suggesting that street parking would be unavailable was that I could just say I'd park in my garage or driveway. You know, those 4 parking spaces you tend to get with a detached single-family home? Unless you're using 2 of those spaces for storage and spilling your parking concerns out onto public street, then yeah, that's too bad for you.

Still, I go back to my earlier question, do you actually feel that these are equivalent or comparable situations to say, having a 10 story 4 block apartment complex built in the condemned lot that is apparently next to this detached-single family home?

@YIMBY

Throw out my back pulling up that ladder? I think you misread. I will be showing up to show support for the development. I'm tired of seeing my friends, and my kids' friends families moving away from the Bay Area due to cost. Luck is now a bigger factor in owning a residence of any form here than hard work. If the only solution is to build, I say, build to the sky, simply overwhelm demand with supply. Cities change and grow, trying to stop it is selfish once you've already got your foot in the door.

@Resident

Misread the techie enclave comment. Don't throw your back out trying to keep the ladder there for the next generation to climb up while others fight against you to pull it up. =)

We need to approve 10+ story housing. We also need to approve more Condos. Apartments make Mountain View residence temporary and creates lots of population churn. We need more property ownership and we need really tall buildings.

Mountain View has 3-forms of transit (4 if you include rapid). It's not a small town and isn't meant to be.

... We also need to remove the weird restrictions on FAR ratios and reduce the setback requirements for <6000 sqft lots. People should be able to build the house they want; many will even be able to rent out a portion of it at a later time.

"simply overwhelm demand with supply"

Current real estate demand is driven by two things: 1) the sheer insatiable demand of Big Tech for low-cost h-1b workers and 2) the even more insatiable demand of overseas speculators for Bay Area real estate as an investment.

The only way it could ever be physically possible to build enough housing units to even approach, let alone surpass this demand is to put a damper on at least one of these factors.

Mountain View is a town meant to have a view of the mountains! Mountain View is a town meant to have clean air and water and be able to drive across town in less than 30 minutes. Mountain View is still full of generations of folks who think the Kyle's telling them how the Town they built should exist should learn how to drive safely.

@@Kyle

"Mountain View is a town meant to have a view of the mountains!"

I mean, on the one hand, there's a whole generation of people being squeezed financially by high housing costs and having any semblance of a middle-class existence put further and further out of reach as property ownership (even simple condos) becomes ever more impossible to afford.

But on the other hand, views of the mountains, right?

@@Kyle: No one was promised any of that. This was a town filled with orange groves and TCEs. Your delusions are holding society back and forcing your children and their childhood friends to move to an entirely different state.

As it stands, Mountain View has 4 different forms of mass transit. It's not a small town. The world's population continues to climb and 20-, 30-, even 40-somethings have a right to live a good life and (gasp) own property. This has nothing to do with H1Bs and everything to do with a lack of construction.

"This has nothing to do with H1Bs "

It has everything to do with inordinate demand across the Bay Area. The inordinate comes from 1) overseas investors buying up our land for investment purposes, often leaving it unoccupied because that is more convenient than renting it out or AirBnB'ing it, and 2) population explosion resulting from Big Tech bringing in countless H-1Bs. I used to say bringing in people from across the country and the world, but recent reports tell us that within the USA, more people are moving out of CA to other states than the other way around, so the net influx now comes solely from foreigners and the majority of those are H-1Bs.

I'd be completely fine with having a tax on non-primary residences that are being left empty just to be used as assets to store wealth.

I'm not fine with anti-H1B policies. I think there should be regulations in place to prevent whole teams being replaced by H1B, such as requirements that they be paid market wages for the positions they hold and are being hired for the experience they bring. But I know lots of fantastic people that are here on H1B, and I'd rather grow to accommodate them. This is a tech hub, it's going to attract tech talent world-wide.

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@Anke

It is true that the big tech companies have great perks; meals, haircuts, dry cleaning, doctors, dentists, recreation, child care, auto service, gym, showers, as you said.

Meals are cooked by cooks, haircuts from barbers, dry cleaning is done by laundromats, doctors and dentists get paid, child care, auto service and gyms need people to staff them, and showers need plumbers.

All these perks create jobs for non-techies. Wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to commute for hours a day to make their ends meet?

We have a shortage of housing for everyone, not just H1B's who have to prove that they're skilled. I guarantee you there are no H1B's for dry cleaners or hair dressers, and they have to live somewhere too.

Like I said, build to the sky! I'll be very disappointed when my street is packed with people and cars, but I will be elated that Mountain View is accessible to people of modest income as well.

"Meals are cooked by cooks, haircuts from barbers, dry cleaning is done by laundromats, doctors and dentists get paid, child care, auto service and gyms need people to staff them, and showers need plumbers.

All these perks create jobs for non-techies. Wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to commute for hours a day to make their ends meet?"

Of course, and the "gated colony" model includes not only the techies themselves, but all the support personnel needed to provide all the amenities. Although my post clearly elicited a reaction so strong from YIYBY/Wow that her/his posts had to be deleted, it's not at all far-fetched and in fact has been done in this country repeatedly. It's the company town model of the coal mining companies.

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Clearly this project will be approved at some point and I am fine with that, but the density, lack of parking and impact on surrounding Sylvan community are serious issues which need to be addressed. Notification to residents was limited to 500 foot radius of this project so many of us are learning about this late in the game. Those outside the notification boundary (essentially all of Sylvan Park) can sign up to receive notifications. City Planner Sierra Davis will be sending a link to an 'eZine' per request. Contact her at Sierra.davis@mountainview.gov (I will post on nextdoor once I received it).

Also recommend that those interested read the 15 January 3rd page staff report, you can find a link to it on page two:
Web Link


DO WE NEED MORE HIGH DENSITY LUXURY APARTMENTS?
Mountain View has NINE Prometheus properties, all rentals, rents generally range from $3000 to $6000 for luxury apartments, with a very small percentage as 'affordable'. Why is the City putting so many eggs in the Prometheus basket (so to speak). Why are they not seeking out developers who will build townhomes/condos so that people who want to make a life in Mountain View can BUY a home. Source on Prometheus: Web Link Aside from that it is a free country, so if it has to be rentals, so be it. Years ago they wanted to build apartments along E Dana (on Sunnyvale border) City would only allow duplexes in line with the surrounding homes. So why not townhouses on this parcel?

AFFORDABLE HOUSING
From what I can gather affordable housing is potentially limited to 15% of units, 70 out of 450+, But even at that the proposal states that Prometheus avoids providing on-site affordable units by pre-funding off-site development of their affordable housing obligation. How is this managed? Where is this off-site affordable housing? Seems like the goal is to keep ALL units at market rate, how many affordable units exist today in MV as a result of the NINE Prometheus projects? Where are they? Does anyone know?

PARKING
Prometheus proposes 674 parking spaces for 471 units, of which 15 percent are for guest parking (not nearly enough) . The proposal meets the City’s “Model Parking Standard” of ONE parking stall per studio/one-bedroom unit, and TWO parking stalls for each two+ bedroom. There will be couples in the studios/1bed and 2-4 roommates living in the 2/3 bedrooms due to the exorbitant Prometheus rents. There is no street parking on Evelyn Ave. Where will these people park?

PUBLIC PARK -
The City requires a public park as part of the project, however there is no parking for said park. The project does not currently show any public parking spaces exclusively for the use of the park. East Evelyn Avenue is developed as a two way street with bike lanes on either side, which does NOT allow for street parking in the immediate vicinity.

TRAFFIC IMPACT
No mention of traffic impact on Sylvan Corridor which met criteria for Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP) in 2017. The neighborhood has been working with the City for 18 months, with traffic calming measure to be implemented Summer 2018.


MY BOTTOM LINE: That parcel of land should be developed, but not at the proposed density, there are also a host of other issues, schools, environmental cleanup, etc. I urge anyone interested (pro or con) to take the time to read the documents and to fully understand what is being proposed before jumping on a soapbox.

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