Google proposes new town-like tech hub in Mountain View

Whoever thought the coronavirus pandemic would drastically change tech companies’ real estate plans in Silicon Valley, hasn’t met Google.

The Alphabet company has proposed a new tech campus in its historic home city of Mountain View, with plans to remodel 40 acres into a mixed-use center that includes housing, retail and community gathering spaces in a town-like tech campus, the company said Tuesday.

The Middlefield Park Master Plan envisions a campus that includes up to 1.33 million square feet of office space, 30,000 square feet of retail-type use, up to 1,850 housing units, and 20,000 square feet of civic and event space, as well as 12 acres of open space.

The city of Mountain View also requires developers to include residential space with large-scale commercial building, and the Middlefield Park plans show up to six residential buildings containing between 1,675 and 1,850 new homes. The company’s project aims to dedicate 20% of its residential space to affordable housing units.

While Google will retain ownership of most of the campus, most open spaces will be accessible to the public. It will include multiple parks, a recreation center that could be used for a soccer field, and an aquatic center.

“It’s certainly one of the ideas in the Precise Plan to create a mixed-use neighborhood where a lot of the needs and services are within walking distance from where you live and work,” Google real estate director Michael Tymoff told the Mountain View Voice.

The company is partnering with Australia-based real estate developer LendLease for the project.

The latest plan comes in addition to other Google expansions, including a larger proposed mixed-use campus 10 miles south of Mountain View in downtown San Jose. That project — whose plans are still undergoing city approvals through early 2021 — spans 80 acres and more than 7 million square feet and includes a major transit center, corporate hotel space, parks and tall buildings.

The latest plan also comes a year after Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company will invest $1 billion toward efforts to develop at least 15,000 new homes in the San Francisco Bay Area, which mostly consists of converting Google’s existing land into land zoned for residential space. Pichai said at the time that more than 45,000 Google employees live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tech companies including Facebook and Microsoft quickly followed suit, promising to build more housing in their perspective regions amid housing crunches.