Stretching a City’s Limits
CreditJason Henry for The New York Times
MOUNTAIN
VIEW, Calif. — Apple is moving into Silicon Valley headquarters that
look like a spaceship. Facebook is expanding its campus with a new
building designed by Frank Gehry. Now it’s Google’s turn.
This
week, Google, the search giant, is expected to propose new headquarters
— a series of canopylike buildings from Heatherwick Studio, a London
design firm known for works like the fiery caldron at the 2012 Olympics,
and Bjarke Ingels, a Danish architect known for his innovative designs.
The
project in Mountain View, which Google has not made public but has
discussed with members of the City Council, is likely to aggravate an
increasingly testy relationship between the company and community
leaders who fear the company is overrunning their small city.
When
Google moved here in 1999, it had a dozen employees and a search engine
known only to computer aficionados. Now, its 20,000 local employees
make it the biggest employer in a city that is bursting at the seams.
“Our
problem is that we have too many good jobs,” said Leonard M. Siegel, a
66-year-old environmental activist who was recently elected to the City
Council. “Everyone else wishes they were in our situation, but it’s a
crisis for the people here.”
The
same story is playing out across Silicon Valley. In Menlo Park, home of
Facebook, the November election featured a measure — ultimately
rejected by voters — that would have cut downtown office growth in half.
Citizen groups in nearby Palo Alto have rebranded their City Council’s
most anti-development members as “residentialists.”
“Nobody
wants change,” said Gilbert Wong, a councilman in Cupertino, Apple’s
hometown. “It’s my role as an elected official to explain to our
residents that either you get on board and help us figure out the
balance between jobs and housing, or other people are going to make that
decision for us.”
Google
owns or leases about 7.3 million square feet of office space in
Mountain View — roughly equivalent to three Empire State Buildings. That
includes most of the property around its headquarters on the north side
of the city near Highway 101, which cuts the length of the valley,
according to Transwestern, a commercial real estate brokerage.
That
success has brought Mountain View loads of tax dollars and a 3.3
percent unemployment rate, as well as skyrocketing home prices and
intolerable gridlock. Good and bad, tech is responsible for most of it:
Technology companies account for 27 percent of the jobs in the Silicon
Valley region, compared with 7 percent in California and about 5 percent
nationally, according to Moody’s Analytics.
The
result is an existential argument that pits residents who want to halt
the city’s growth against people who think Mountain View needs to grow
up and become a real city.
Mountain
View, about 40 miles south of San Francisco, has close to 80,000
people; with its strip-mall thoroughfares and streets of single-family
homes, it looks like a sleepy suburb. But since hiring has boomed, the
city’s roads swell with commuters during the morning and evening rush.
Katherine
Suri, a retired NASA scientist, moved to the city in 1974 and lives on a
quarter-acre lot whose original views included a nursery and apricot
orchards. She spent a good deal of the ’80s chauffeuring her children
around town in an Oldsmobile station wagon.
Now
her view is of other houses, and the traffic is so bad that Ms. Suri
makes sure to schedule her doctors’ appointments around 11 a.m. When she
walks to the Y.M.C.A. each morning, she sometimes has to weave between
cars stuck in gridlock.
Evening traffic earlier this month along the freeway near Google’s campus. Jason Henry for The New York Times
Despite
the inconveniences, Ms. Suri has accepted that the city will change
whether she likes it or not. “Mountain View is getting more populous
with Google and the other companies, and that’s just the way it is,” she
said. “We need to learn how to deal with it.”
Google
has tried to reduce traffic, for both the city and itself. It
transports its employees to work in private buses and was at one point
experimenting with bringing some of its San Francisco workers in on
boats. In January, the company started a free daytime shuttle that is
open to the public; its workers pedal around the city on multicolored company bikes.
Since
so much of the traffic is associated with Google, Mountain View has
spent the last two years debating a plan to redevelop the city’s North
Bayshore area, which surrounds Google’s main offices and is close to
major highways.
Google’s
vision for a new Googleplex, the nickname for the company’s
headquarters, will include bike and pedestrian paths and is one of
several development proposals from various companies expected to be
submitted to the city on Friday.
“These
companies are world-class corporations bringing worldwide attention to
Mountain View, and Mountain View needs to evolve to a world-class city,”
said Ken S. Rosenberg, one of seven members of the City Council. “One
of the criteria of a world-class city is that it is architecturally
interesting.”
Even
if Google’s proposal is accepted, the city’s most divisive issue — how
much new housing to build and where — has yet to be settled. Google
executives have said on several occasions that they want to add housing
to North Bayshore, but Mountain View’s outgoing City Council found many
reasons to say no.
One
argument was that it would be dangerous to burrowing owls that live
underground in adjacent Shoreline Park. Another was that if people moved
there, they would soon want more schools and other expensive services.
Others feared that new housing could create a Google voting bloc.
Last
November, in an election that was widely viewed as a referendum on the
city’s housing policies, Mountain View elected three candidates,
including Mr. Rosenberg, who campaigned on the idea of adding housing
near Google’s campus, an idea that runs contrary to the previous
council’s redevelopment plan.
Google’s
headquarters proposal does not include any plans for housing. But the
company has told the City Council that it wants housing, and lots of it.
Councilman Siegel, for one, agrees. He wants to amend the city’s plan
to allow at least 5,000 new housing units.
That this could bring in even more Google employees is just what some people fear.
“This
last election we had maybe 12,000 voters,” said Jac Siegel, a city
councilman who left office this year and is not related to Leonard
Siegel. “If you brought 5,000 people in and they all work for Google and
they said, ‘We want you to vote for this candidate,’ they can own the
town.”
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