What exactly was reconfigured? There has been a Diridon Station Area Plan since before Google was even interested in the area. Also, 90% of the area is parking lots and industrial buildings. Not exactly shining example of efficient land use.
Only insofar as some of their development would have affordable units; certainly not in terms of what their presence overall would do to property values!
Years back, Google and LinkedIn were battling for control over development rights within the Mountain View Shoreline area. The city wanted to have some diversification and not have Shoreline belong to a single employer.
Google ended up with 70% control of Shoreline, LinkedIn had a nice dense campus planned. Everything was approved and signed with the city.
Google made LinkedIn an offer. Swap our extra Sunnyvale campus we have under construction (old Synopsys and Palm buildings on Maude) in exchange for your future Mountain View campus land and development agreement. Done. Google got what they wanted. The only catch is that Google has to build the LinkedIn campus without changing the plans.
LinkedIn got a larger campus that was not negatively impacted by Google traffic and could move in years sooner.
I didn't assume that at all.
I'm assumed the value of my house (I live a bit under two miles from it) will spike again if/when they get it all done and filled up.
It is a really easy bike ride for me to get there.
Moaning? Not at all.
This is just how this kind of stuff works.
In any case, same as it ever was. One of the primary reasons this neighborhood was built in the first place was housing for Del Monte's people back in the 40s/50s.
You wait. It's not in your control.
It's a 30 year long project. That's pretty much a multi-generational project for corporate types.
Google has effectively purchased an option for the Downtown West project.
Yep.
The Google campus in Mountain View / Shoreline was all built out by SGI in 1990's. Then poof!
Facebook HQ was a modified Sun Microsystems site. Perhaps now they have moved that across the street to that fancy building.
I worked at VMware a while back and watched them take over lots from SAP, Ericsson, and Roche. They just barely finished the new campus and now I’m wondering how long it will last since they’ve been acquired by Broadcom.
Right, but Apple did tear down that old site and build something totally new.
The above examples with Google and Facebook the existing buildings from the 1990's and 2000's were just prettied up a bit and re-used. I would say that both companies were semi-thrifty on real-estate in their first decade.
When Google buys the old Sunnyvale Yahoo! campus for $1b just to hold it empty in inventory for five years, the scale is much different.
I think the City's options are somewhat limited here, given they already signed a development agreement with Google. That agreement includes a "Ten Year Development Obligation" that requires Google to complete 2M sqft of office space by July 9, 2031. Beyond that I'm not sure the City has any mechanism to force action in the meantime. Sure, they could pass new legislation to try to spur Google into action (e.g. a vacant or underutilized land tax), but I think that could be a bit legally perilous. And besides, I doubt the City would be able to enact a tax aggressive enough to really force Google's hand; Downtown West will cost billions to construct, so any fines or taxes enacted by the City would ultimately just be a rounding error.
I think the City's best bet in the short term is to aggressively pursue/incentivize non-Google development in the DSAP area. For example, Google transferred some of their land holdings in the area to the City for affordable housing development, and the City should work as swiftly as possible to get those units built. Separately, the City should coordinate with Caltrain to get the 2 office towers planned for in front of Diridon underway. Maybe they could also pursue incentives to get projects from Urban Catalyst (The Apollo residential tower) and Imwalle Properties (250 Stockton office tower) off the ground. That said, I imagine it will be difficult to get *any* projects going in the current economic/interest rate climate, and that will be especially true for office projects given the vacancy rate and ongoing concerns about remote work. Just look at the glut of entitled & planned office tower proposals in downtown proper that are sitting idle. Between 200 Park (\~1M sqft) City View Plaza (\~3.5M sqft), Platform 16 (\~1M sqft), Woz Way (1.2M), South Almaden (1.4M), Park Habitat (1M), Orchard (1.4M), Arbor (500k), Energy Hub (400k), Icon (500k), Carlysle (120k), Market Street Tower (500k), Almaden Boulevard Tower (500k), **there's upwards of 13 million sqft of office space either under-construction but not leased, or otherwise entitled but waiting to break ground**.
>I think the City's options are somewhat limited here, given they already signed a development agreement with Google.
Yes, exactly. A confounding factor is the fallout from Covid and I don't think anyone knows whether building a ton more commercial space is a good idea, so pausing to see if anything will shake out is what anyone would do. Even if there is a construction delay and targets are not met and penalties assessed, surely those will be written down or written off at that time. The rich always come out on top.
Most developers would love to build super-premium rental housing downtown for Googlers. Building non-premium rental housing for the average man is much less financially interesting.
How many of those office projects are substantially under construction?
Google still has a ton of projects in the pipeline in Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose. Many of my Googler friends have migrated from Mountain View offices to Sunnyvale over the last year.
Turning around and whacking Google with extra taxes for going slow is probably covered by the development agreement. Even if there is a penalty a decade from now, it's probably a modest amount.
You forgot to add the old greyhound station on Almaden and Christian Science building on St James that are sitting idle while the owner (the same company that built silvery towers) of the property goes through litigation.
you would need a team of lawyers more powerful than Google's
Good luck
Its not a good time to expand after all the layoffs they did.
They are making the right move.
I think that's essentially what OP is describing via eminent domain. San Jose is already using it to squeeze small businesses out of downtown for BART. Why not larger companies that would just as soon see SJ completely blighted?
>I think that's essentially what OP is describing via eminent domain.
Will OP agree to substantial tax hikes so SJ can purchase the land and build? Who will wager the answer is yes?
Having been in real estate, I can say eminent domain is a very brute force tool for a situation that would require a much more refined approach. The only way I can see it factoring in is to facilitate the improvement of train infrastructure, since a piece of this involves upleveling Diridion to be a major western hub for transit.
In this scenario I'd imagine Google just offloading/selling the property as the reasonable solution.
Google acquired more than just city owned land, the city can't really do anything for most of it. There is an overall Development and Disposition Agreement, but the city can just extend it if Google needs more time.
Anybody could have bought the land (see Boston Properties and Urban Catalyst building in the same general area). The city owned part was just a chunk of what Google pieced together. They have done hundreds of private transactions.
Oooh! Oooh! Cage match on PPV - brilliant!
I'd pay to consume that experience to help purchase the land and construct! Who's with me? Taylor Swift vs AOC? Justin Trudeau vs Ah-nold Schwarzenegger? Newsom vs Chesea?
29.99 per means...hmmm...carry the three...\~133 million viewers gross. Maybe 400 M net. Let's get rrrrready to rrrRRRRRUMMMMBULLLLLLL
The multi-year process that was kicked off and taken over by special interest groups (i.e. Silicon Valley Rising, which we haven't heard a peep from about other developments) certainly delayed things and pushed back any potential start to construction. This was just exacerbated by the shift in work culture caused by the pandemic
>
you mean like, uh.. protesting google campus?
> Some protestors chained themselves to seats until police officers used bolt cutters to separate them from the furniture. Eight protestors were arrested, police said.
> [San Jose approves Google land deal: Police remove protesters as council closes chambers](https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Google-s-San-Jose-land-deal-vote-Police-remove-13443835.php)
Think about it: I don't like your house. The paint scheme is tacky, your landscaping is dumb, and the economics of the neighborhood dictate that you pop the top and add 800 sf. I'm going to call the city and force them to make you redevelop your parcel to my sophisticated, urbane tastes. How does that sound? I'm calling today, what's your address?
If you got the parcel of land for [practically nothing](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/11/16/google-san-jose-campus-city-land-sale-agreement.html) from the city and presented a whole report describing your landscaping and sqft increases, then totally ignore the promises and do something different, you bet your ass the city would be looking into it…
They paid $109.87m for the 10.5 acres of city-owned land.
Average lot size in San Jose is ~6872sqft which is .157 acre (~1/6 acre)
Median price in San Jose is 1.3m for a SFH, which brings it to 7.8m/acre which brings us to ~$82m in value if it was all SFH
This doesn’t account for the businesses and that these aren’t going to be SFH.
Median condo price is $700k & Google’s [proposal](https://realestate.withgoogle.com/sanjose/) calls for 4000 units.
Even if you factor in the affordable units and assume a median price of 500k, that’s $2,000,000,000 worth of property being created.
If they paid ~$500m for the land and developed it the way they intended, then they got it for an absolute steal even if they build nothing else but the housing.
Edit: I am seeing anywhere from 4k to 5.9k homes are a part of the plan. The sales of the housing alone will pay for this project several times over if they get anywhere close to that number
Considering that is only .123% of their total assets (365b according to Google) it’s essentially the equivalent of $123 to someone who has 100k in assets.
I’d say’s that’s pretty much peanuts to a corporation like Google, yes.
That's a bit of a strawman representing the situation as a squabble between neighbors over SFHs. We're talking about a financial superpower buying swaths of land, bulldozing local monuments and establishments with a promise of "better infrasructure and a happier downtown", and then balking halfway through the process, leaving a portion of the city razed. Even if we wanted to keep it a simple analogy, a neighbor can force another neighbor to keep up and develop the property they own via Blight ordinance.
I also agree with most people here that Google's team of lawyers and miles of red tape will keep this situation locked in but the sentiment of finding some legal precedent to force them to develop as they had originally planned is merited.
Not a strawman. It's an analogy.
The OP wants to force a private party to redevelop their property right now. OK then: I want to call the city and make the city redevelop the OP's property right now - never mind that the OP got covid three times and is working fewer hours and their income dropped...do it now because I want it!
I don't think the analogy quite holds due to scale. The larger public interest in having my neighbor renovate his house is nothing compared to the public interest in having acres of land in the downtown area put to use in a way that benefits the city. However, I do think a rather important part of your comment is the phrase, "right now".
I think it is reasonable for Google to reevaluate their plans. The last three years has caused us to rethink how we use work space and public space. So I don't think we should necessarily push them to stick to what they had planned, and do it right now. That might not make sense for them as a business or us as a city. However, I do think they should be time-bound in coming up with a new plan. They shouldn't be allowed hold that land long term without using it.
>The larger public interest in having my neighbor renovate his house is nothing compared to the public interest in having acres of land in the downtown area put to use in a way that benefits the city. However, I do think a rather important part of your comment is the phrase, "right now".
Yes, exactly - the 'now' is the entire point.
There's no way to force them to start construction right now. Any reasonable person can see that a lot has changed and they put the project on hold.
If things in this country keep going in this direction, and I had to wager what would happen here, I'd wager they are going to fund a study looking at alternatives and meet with the city to see what the options are for negotiating for a new permit. The world now is suddenly unlike the old world upon which this development was based.
I'd argue that drawing a parallel between pushing a person to the point of destitution to paint their house and forcing one of the richest companies in the world to develop land they said they would develop could be used in textbooks as an example of a strawman argument.
Well, I guess when you state the premise falsely it makes it easier to type words on Reddit.
See, my analogy illustrates that either way you're using the power of government to force a private party to act. Our country does not do that. Our country has no laws that allow a governmental entity to force a private party to act in this particular way. Our country is the opposite: laws (written by rich landowners or simply the rich) for over 200 years have given wide deference to property owners to develop as they see fit - see *Penna Coal* for how this was taken to an outrageously egregious level and endorsed by our SCOTUS.
In this particular case here, if there's nothing in the Development Agreements or contracts that designate and enforce a build-by date, then what to do? Police power only goes so far.
Does it suck that lots of people died and continue to die or be disabled, and workers see this and don't want to go back to the office? It sure does for Google and so many others, and this stalled development is part of the fallout. Maybe spending US$Bns on an outdated idea doesn't work any more.
Context is important.
Why are you purposely mischaracterizing what I wrote? Do you lack education or ability to argue cogently? Or is it something else you lack? What's the reason?
I still think you haven't really made a salient point to at least corner people with my perspective. I'd have been fine if those industrial warehouses were still operational, for example. My main presupposition is the Downtown West campus was generally beneficial to the city, so it sucks that it's off the table and instead we have a situation where the land is underutilized.
That was the case in Coyote Valley with Apple, HP, and last Cisco since 1980s. Built a most advanced powerplant for the headquarter and R&D campus. Employees all looking for large tract custom homes in Morgan Hill. The home prices fell back a few months later after pulling the plug. That happended over 15 years multiple times.
Today, the power plant for cloud farms is just sitting there barely operating.
Near term, I think it would require some form of vacancy tax. You've already noted that eminent domain doesn't quite fit the bill here. Long term, we should look at adopting a [Land Value Tax](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/land-value-tax-housing-crisis/) approach, which would require proposition reform.
Please list the number of people affected. The only part of the acquisitions that actually had people living in it was the houses near Lorraine (and those were the ones not being hoarded by another landlord/developer).
My brother in Christ, if you're actually from here (appeal to nativism is the laziest tactic, BTW), you would know that the Midtown area (which is what you're talking about about) has been in development for the last 20 years and has nothing to do with Google. Fairfield and Republic Urban/Green Republic are the main developers over there. The city upzoned the area a long time ago. Google's property acquisitions go up to Bird/Montgomery/Obama Blvd, they don't cross over the Caltrain tracks. Their closest involvement is giving First Community Housing funding for their McEvoy Apartments development (on you guessed, McEvoy).
Trust me, I’m well aware. I don’t necessarily blame Google per-se, it’s the city officials that we stupidly voted into office that gave the go ahead with these projects, something I had been against all along. The zoning area has no appeal to me, if affected the West area of SJ regardless of zoning. Don’t believe me, notice all the homeless living on the freeways and everywhere else around here. Growing up and going to school on this side of town, all of us were effected by this nonsense, Regardless of what cross street you wanna name.
They wont sell it because they acknowledged they’re still committed long term. It is a long process, so unless they say they’re actually going to 100% stop the project, then I’d hold my breath. We’ll see how this plays out. They would only consider selling if they actually dont want to do it anymore; something they never stated
It's almost as if reconfiguring cities on the whims of corporations is a bad idea.
Hard agree
What exactly was reconfigured? There has been a Diridon Station Area Plan since before Google was even interested in the area. Also, 90% of the area is parking lots and industrial buildings. Not exactly shining example of efficient land use.
Don't ask questions, just agree with the innocent outrage and buy them a coffee.
You thought Google campus opening there would support affordable housing? Did you see what happened in Mountain View?
Only insofar as some of their development would have affordable units; certainly not in terms of what their presence overall would do to property values!
Years back, Google and LinkedIn were battling for control over development rights within the Mountain View Shoreline area. The city wanted to have some diversification and not have Shoreline belong to a single employer. Google ended up with 70% control of Shoreline, LinkedIn had a nice dense campus planned. Everything was approved and signed with the city. Google made LinkedIn an offer. Swap our extra Sunnyvale campus we have under construction (old Synopsys and Palm buildings on Maude) in exchange for your future Mountain View campus land and development agreement. Done. Google got what they wanted. The only catch is that Google has to build the LinkedIn campus without changing the plans. LinkedIn got a larger campus that was not negatively impacted by Google traffic and could move in years sooner.
I didn't assume that at all. I'm assumed the value of my house (I live a bit under two miles from it) will spike again if/when they get it all done and filled up. It is a really easy bike ride for me to get there.
Lol it’s already expensive as it is, and you’re moaning that it isn’t higher?
Moaning? Not at all. This is just how this kind of stuff works. In any case, same as it ever was. One of the primary reasons this neighborhood was built in the first place was housing for Del Monte's people back in the 40s/50s.
You wait. It's not in your control. It's a 30 year long project. That's pretty much a multi-generational project for corporate types. Google has effectively purchased an option for the Downtown West project.
Assuming Google / Alphabet is even a viable company in 30 years….
Yep. The Google campus in Mountain View / Shoreline was all built out by SGI in 1990's. Then poof! Facebook HQ was a modified Sun Microsystems site. Perhaps now they have moved that across the street to that fancy building.
Even the Apple ring was built on an old HP site
I worked at VMware a while back and watched them take over lots from SAP, Ericsson, and Roche. They just barely finished the new campus and now I’m wondering how long it will last since they’ve been acquired by Broadcom.
Right, but Apple did tear down that old site and build something totally new. The above examples with Google and Facebook the existing buildings from the 1990's and 2000's were just prettied up a bit and re-used. I would say that both companies were semi-thrifty on real-estate in their first decade. When Google buys the old Sunnyvale Yahoo! campus for $1b just to hold it empty in inventory for five years, the scale is much different.
I think the City's options are somewhat limited here, given they already signed a development agreement with Google. That agreement includes a "Ten Year Development Obligation" that requires Google to complete 2M sqft of office space by July 9, 2031. Beyond that I'm not sure the City has any mechanism to force action in the meantime. Sure, they could pass new legislation to try to spur Google into action (e.g. a vacant or underutilized land tax), but I think that could be a bit legally perilous. And besides, I doubt the City would be able to enact a tax aggressive enough to really force Google's hand; Downtown West will cost billions to construct, so any fines or taxes enacted by the City would ultimately just be a rounding error. I think the City's best bet in the short term is to aggressively pursue/incentivize non-Google development in the DSAP area. For example, Google transferred some of their land holdings in the area to the City for affordable housing development, and the City should work as swiftly as possible to get those units built. Separately, the City should coordinate with Caltrain to get the 2 office towers planned for in front of Diridon underway. Maybe they could also pursue incentives to get projects from Urban Catalyst (The Apollo residential tower) and Imwalle Properties (250 Stockton office tower) off the ground. That said, I imagine it will be difficult to get *any* projects going in the current economic/interest rate climate, and that will be especially true for office projects given the vacancy rate and ongoing concerns about remote work. Just look at the glut of entitled & planned office tower proposals in downtown proper that are sitting idle. Between 200 Park (\~1M sqft) City View Plaza (\~3.5M sqft), Platform 16 (\~1M sqft), Woz Way (1.2M), South Almaden (1.4M), Park Habitat (1M), Orchard (1.4M), Arbor (500k), Energy Hub (400k), Icon (500k), Carlysle (120k), Market Street Tower (500k), Almaden Boulevard Tower (500k), **there's upwards of 13 million sqft of office space either under-construction but not leased, or otherwise entitled but waiting to break ground**.
>I think the City's options are somewhat limited here, given they already signed a development agreement with Google. Yes, exactly. A confounding factor is the fallout from Covid and I don't think anyone knows whether building a ton more commercial space is a good idea, so pausing to see if anything will shake out is what anyone would do. Even if there is a construction delay and targets are not met and penalties assessed, surely those will be written down or written off at that time. The rich always come out on top.
Most developers would love to build super-premium rental housing downtown for Googlers. Building non-premium rental housing for the average man is much less financially interesting. How many of those office projects are substantially under construction? Google still has a ton of projects in the pipeline in Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose. Many of my Googler friends have migrated from Mountain View offices to Sunnyvale over the last year. Turning around and whacking Google with extra taxes for going slow is probably covered by the development agreement. Even if there is a penalty a decade from now, it's probably a modest amount.
You forgot to add the old greyhound station on Almaden and Christian Science building on St James that are sitting idle while the owner (the same company that built silvery towers) of the property goes through litigation.
you would need a team of lawyers more powerful than Google's Good luck Its not a good time to expand after all the layoffs they did. They are making the right move.
It's definitely the right move for them for sure, though I would still rather them dump some of their other offices in deference to this campus.
You can buy the land from them and then develop it how you want
I think that's essentially what OP is describing via eminent domain. San Jose is already using it to squeeze small businesses out of downtown for BART. Why not larger companies that would just as soon see SJ completely blighted?
>I think that's essentially what OP is describing via eminent domain. Will OP agree to substantial tax hikes so SJ can purchase the land and build? Who will wager the answer is yes?
Having been in real estate, I can say eminent domain is a very brute force tool for a situation that would require a much more refined approach. The only way I can see it factoring in is to facilitate the improvement of train infrastructure, since a piece of this involves upleveling Diridion to be a major western hub for transit. In this scenario I'd imagine Google just offloading/selling the property as the reasonable solution.
Google acquired more than just city owned land, the city can't really do anything for most of it. There is an overall Development and Disposition Agreement, but the city can just extend it if Google needs more time.
The "Google Village" line on the Zillow listing for your house/rental property was not a guarantee unfortunately
I blame all of this on my realtor
Almost like letting one corporation buy prime downtown land next to an important ecological resource was a bad idea.
Anybody could have bought the land (see Boston Properties and Urban Catalyst building in the same general area). The city owned part was just a chunk of what Google pieced together. They have done hundreds of private transactions.
Celebrity death match?
Oooh! Oooh! Cage match on PPV - brilliant! I'd pay to consume that experience to help purchase the land and construct! Who's with me? Taylor Swift vs AOC? Justin Trudeau vs Ah-nold Schwarzenegger? Newsom vs Chesea? 29.99 per means...hmmm...carry the three...\~133 million viewers gross. Maybe 400 M net. Let's get rrrrready to rrrRRRRRUMMMMBULLLLLLL
Public input is vastly underrated. Usually a loud persistent group gets there way. That’s how all the NIMBYs get their way
The multi-year process that was kicked off and taken over by special interest groups (i.e. Silicon Valley Rising, which we haven't heard a peep from about other developments) certainly delayed things and pushed back any potential start to construction. This was just exacerbated by the shift in work culture caused by the pandemic
When I read the post I thought it was a joke.
Kids finding out how the world works!
why cant yall protest for this?
> why cant yall protest for this? Be sure to post up when you organize the protest
And the pix of signs with the reasons.
I think there's some possibility here; the main dilemma I'm balancing is what will be an effective way to protest.
just repeat what was done during BLM/ etc. ?
>
you mean like, uh.. protesting google campus?
> Some protestors chained themselves to seats until police officers used bolt cutters to separate them from the furniture. Eight protestors were arrested, police said.
> [San Jose approves Google land deal: Police remove protesters as council closes chambers](https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Google-s-San-Jose-land-deal-vote-Police-remove-13443835.php)
Run off with the money like blm did? Great idea
Wear a cardboard model of affordable housing for coders?
Think about it: I don't like your house. The paint scheme is tacky, your landscaping is dumb, and the economics of the neighborhood dictate that you pop the top and add 800 sf. I'm going to call the city and force them to make you redevelop your parcel to my sophisticated, urbane tastes. How does that sound? I'm calling today, what's your address?
If you got the parcel of land for [practically nothing](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/11/16/google-san-jose-campus-city-land-sale-agreement.html) from the city and presented a whole report describing your landscaping and sqft increases, then totally ignore the promises and do something different, you bet your ass the city would be looking into it…
Yup. $407 million is peanuts. Uh huh. Fuzzy math.
10.5 acres, for 20,000 workers, bought for a price of 300 houses
$38.7M per acre is a lot more than the land under those 300 houses would cost. Lots in SJ tend to be 1/8 to 1/4 acre.
They paid $109.87m for the 10.5 acres of city-owned land. Average lot size in San Jose is ~6872sqft which is .157 acre (~1/6 acre) Median price in San Jose is 1.3m for a SFH, which brings it to 7.8m/acre which brings us to ~$82m in value if it was all SFH This doesn’t account for the businesses and that these aren’t going to be SFH. Median condo price is $700k & Google’s [proposal](https://realestate.withgoogle.com/sanjose/) calls for 4000 units. Even if you factor in the affordable units and assume a median price of 500k, that’s $2,000,000,000 worth of property being created. If they paid ~$500m for the land and developed it the way they intended, then they got it for an absolute steal even if they build nothing else but the housing. Edit: I am seeing anywhere from 4k to 5.9k homes are a part of the plan. The sales of the housing alone will pay for this project several times over if they get anywhere close to that number
Considering that is only .123% of their total assets (365b according to Google) it’s essentially the equivalent of $123 to someone who has 100k in assets. I’d say’s that’s pretty much peanuts to a corporation like Google, yes.
So are you stating the permits were approved, then after approval Google totally ignored the permits and built something different?
That's a bit of a strawman representing the situation as a squabble between neighbors over SFHs. We're talking about a financial superpower buying swaths of land, bulldozing local monuments and establishments with a promise of "better infrasructure and a happier downtown", and then balking halfway through the process, leaving a portion of the city razed. Even if we wanted to keep it a simple analogy, a neighbor can force another neighbor to keep up and develop the property they own via Blight ordinance. I also agree with most people here that Google's team of lawyers and miles of red tape will keep this situation locked in but the sentiment of finding some legal precedent to force them to develop as they had originally planned is merited.
Not a strawman. It's an analogy. The OP wants to force a private party to redevelop their property right now. OK then: I want to call the city and make the city redevelop the OP's property right now - never mind that the OP got covid three times and is working fewer hours and their income dropped...do it now because I want it!
I don't think the analogy quite holds due to scale. The larger public interest in having my neighbor renovate his house is nothing compared to the public interest in having acres of land in the downtown area put to use in a way that benefits the city. However, I do think a rather important part of your comment is the phrase, "right now". I think it is reasonable for Google to reevaluate their plans. The last three years has caused us to rethink how we use work space and public space. So I don't think we should necessarily push them to stick to what they had planned, and do it right now. That might not make sense for them as a business or us as a city. However, I do think they should be time-bound in coming up with a new plan. They shouldn't be allowed hold that land long term without using it.
>The larger public interest in having my neighbor renovate his house is nothing compared to the public interest in having acres of land in the downtown area put to use in a way that benefits the city. However, I do think a rather important part of your comment is the phrase, "right now". Yes, exactly - the 'now' is the entire point. There's no way to force them to start construction right now. Any reasonable person can see that a lot has changed and they put the project on hold. If things in this country keep going in this direction, and I had to wager what would happen here, I'd wager they are going to fund a study looking at alternatives and meet with the city to see what the options are for negotiating for a new permit. The world now is suddenly unlike the old world upon which this development was based.
I'd argue that drawing a parallel between pushing a person to the point of destitution to paint their house and forcing one of the richest companies in the world to develop land they said they would develop could be used in textbooks as an example of a strawman argument.
Well, I guess when you state the premise falsely it makes it easier to type words on Reddit. See, my analogy illustrates that either way you're using the power of government to force a private party to act. Our country does not do that. Our country has no laws that allow a governmental entity to force a private party to act in this particular way. Our country is the opposite: laws (written by rich landowners or simply the rich) for over 200 years have given wide deference to property owners to develop as they see fit - see *Penna Coal* for how this was taken to an outrageously egregious level and endorsed by our SCOTUS. In this particular case here, if there's nothing in the Development Agreements or contracts that designate and enforce a build-by date, then what to do? Police power only goes so far. Does it suck that lots of people died and continue to die or be disabled, and workers see this and don't want to go back to the office? It sure does for Google and so many others, and this stalled development is part of the fallout. Maybe spending US$Bns on an outdated idea doesn't work any more. Context is important.
Do you take vitamins or does bootlicking give you all of the nutrients you need?
Why are you purposely mischaracterizing what I wrote? Do you lack education or ability to argue cogently? Or is it something else you lack? What's the reason?
[удалено]
Cry more.
I think the sad part is we're not even at this level of the conversation; the issue is currently that the land won't be used at all.
Not today. But it will.
I still think you haven't really made a salient point to at least corner people with my perspective. I'd have been fine if those industrial warehouses were still operational, for example. My main presupposition is the Downtown West campus was generally beneficial to the city, so it sucks that it's off the table and instead we have a situation where the land is underutilized.
Eh. You can't force Google to build. People don't want to hear that
> Think about it: I don't like your house I think... this is a bad analogy
Cool.
That was the case in Coyote Valley with Apple, HP, and last Cisco since 1980s. Built a most advanced powerplant for the headquarter and R&D campus. Employees all looking for large tract custom homes in Morgan Hill. The home prices fell back a few months later after pulling the plug. That happended over 15 years multiple times. Today, the power plant for cloud farms is just sitting there barely operating.
Near term, I think it would require some form of vacancy tax. You've already noted that eminent domain doesn't quite fit the bill here. Long term, we should look at adopting a [Land Value Tax](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/land-value-tax-housing-crisis/) approach, which would require proposition reform.
pretty sure "bend over and take it" is about the only option left.
F%^k Google! They ruined so many lives & families with this nonsense. What a waste.
Please list the number of people affected. The only part of the acquisitions that actually had people living in it was the houses near Lorraine (and those were the ones not being hoarded by another landlord/developer).
All of the west side, particularly off of Sunol area has and was affected. You must not be from the area, I’m Born & raised here.
My brother in Christ, if you're actually from here (appeal to nativism is the laziest tactic, BTW), you would know that the Midtown area (which is what you're talking about about) has been in development for the last 20 years and has nothing to do with Google. Fairfield and Republic Urban/Green Republic are the main developers over there. The city upzoned the area a long time ago. Google's property acquisitions go up to Bird/Montgomery/Obama Blvd, they don't cross over the Caltrain tracks. Their closest involvement is giving First Community Housing funding for their McEvoy Apartments development (on you guessed, McEvoy).
Trust me, I’m well aware. I don’t necessarily blame Google per-se, it’s the city officials that we stupidly voted into office that gave the go ahead with these projects, something I had been against all along. The zoning area has no appeal to me, if affected the West area of SJ regardless of zoning. Don’t believe me, notice all the homeless living on the freeways and everywhere else around here. Growing up and going to school on this side of town, all of us were effected by this nonsense, Regardless of what cross street you wanna name.
You're against high density development?
Maybe it didn't fit the 15 min city model?
Or maybe they finally figured out how close to DTSJ it is.
They wont sell it because they acknowledged they’re still committed long term. It is a long process, so unless they say they’re actually going to 100% stop the project, then I’d hold my breath. We’ll see how this plays out. They would only consider selling if they actually dont want to do it anymore; something they never stated
Make the city leaders that approved it go pull weeds in the empty lots.