Mountain View Developers Building OpenAI-Adjacent Housing

The saying goes that if you build it, they will come. When it comes to housing near offices in Silicon Valley, builders are banking on tech employees wanting to live close to their work.

Developers are flocking to the area surrounding OpenAI’s new Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View’s East Whisman district, the San Francisco Business Times reported. Mountain View city leaders have designated East Whisman as a prime housing development area that could receive as many as 5,000 new housing units.

A joint venture between Diamond Construction, Huettig & Schromm and Stackhouse De la Peña Trachtenberg Architects is pursuing the redevelopment of an aging office building at 490 East Middlefield Road with modern apartments. The eight-story building will include 460 housing units above ground-floor retail space.

The goal is to “deliver a different product than what this area is used to — more like something you’d see in an urban setting,” Andrew Jacobson, part of the development team, told Mountain View City Council members earlier this week, according to the Business Times. The City Council advanced the proposal, paving the way for the developers to start construction.

Nearby at 355 East Middlefield Road, multifamily stalwart Essex Property Trust is planning to replace 85,000 square feet of dated office and research buildings with 576 housing units. Down the street at 675 East Middlefield Road, Prometheus Real Estate Group is looking to redevelop two aging office buildings with 836 apartments, a new office building and public open space on site.

A similar story is unfolding in neighboring Sunnyvale, where Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has been in expansion mode around its headquarters campus. The 37-acre Cityline development has been pitched as a local entertainment hub for tech workers. Artificial intelligence-powered software company Databricks has taken advantage, opening an engineering office in the mixed-use development from Hunter Partners and Sares Regis Group.

“Silicon Valley never had a downtown,” David Hopkins, president of development at Sares Regis, told the Business Times. “Now it does.”

Office-to-residential conversion projects have spread across the Golden State as developers are wary of rising construction costs and tariffs. Earlier this week, Van Daele Homes purchased a 109,000-square-foot office building in San Ramon’s Bishop Ranch master-planned community with plans to turn it into 73 residential units.

— Chris Malone Méndez