Google has lost a key battle in the race to build new offices in its hometown city of Mountain View.
After a 6 1/2-hour meeting to decide which of several developers can build a limited amount of new office space allowed in the North Bayshore neighborhood, Google watched the Mountain View City Council shred its ambitious proposal from four sites to just one. A project of translucent canopies and meandering public greenways that attracted international buzz will be forced down to a fraction of its proposed size, if it gets built at all.
“It’s a significant blow,” said David Radcliffe, Google’s vice president of real estate, just before the City Council voted 4-3 after midnight Wednesday to move ahead with a development process that includes only one Google building.
Meanwhile, the City Council allowed another tech company, LinkedIn, to move forward with the entirety of its project to build a mixed-use complex that will include a cinema, shopping center and the new LinkedIn headquarters.
Also shot down was an office and residential development by prominent builder The Sobrato Organization. Allowed to proceed were smaller office developments by firms Rees Properties and Broadreach Capital Partners. The latter is building for Google as the tenant.
Google might have overreached by proposing so much square footage despite a tight cap on office development approved by the city last year, but it was also caught off guard by the changing political priorities of a new City Council that wants to build housing that the previous council banned. Although Google also wants to build housing to accommodate its workforce, it did not expect that the city would propose to put that new housing on the same sites where Google proposed building its new headquarters.
Above: Of the four sites where Google proposed building a canopied campus for 10,000 new workers, the Mountain View City Council allowed only one of them (represented by heart) to proceed early Wednesday morning, shelving three other sites (represented by lighting).
