Sunnyvale reimagines Moffett Park with 20K new homes

Sunnyvale, tasked by the state with issuing building permits for nearly 12,000 new homes between next year and 2031, has a plan to help address that mandate by putting developments in Moffett Park, the city’s main office and research hub where residential development is prohibited.

The city published on Dec. 19 a draft of what’s known as the Moffett Park Specific Plan, a document that outlines land-use and development standards in the roughly 1,270-acre area in the northernmost portion of Sunnyvale between now and 2040. The plan has wide-ranging implications for Sunnyvale and the Bay Area in general, mainly because it calls for allowing between 16,000 and 20,000 new homes, 15 percent of which would be deed restricted as affordable. The housing would be developed in an area dotted with office and research campuses owned or leased by large employers such as Google, Amazon.com, Lockheed Martin and Juniper Networks.

Map of Moffett Park (City of Sunnyvale)

The plan, accompanied by a separate draft environmental impact report also published online on Dec. 19, represents the next evolution of Moffett Park, which its 20th-century inhabitants mainly used for agricultural purposes and which the U.S. Navy partially used to support an airship base it built in 1933, comprising more than 1,000 acres spread across Sunnyvale and neighboring Mountain View. For decades Moffett Park was sparsely populated and considered a relatively remote part of the city, but that changed in the late 1950s, 60s and 70s with the creation of the Moffett Industrial Park and Lockheed Martin shifting its headquarters to the area from Southern California.

The area has since become Sunnyvale’s economic engine, home to dozens of tech companies and manufacturers and mostly built out with office and research campuses.

Currently, Moffett Park consists of about 18.5 million square feet of office, research and industrial space, restaurants and hotels, and institutional buildings including a fire station, a Veterans Affair research center and a community college, according to the draft environmental impact report. The city has approved the construction of an additional 3.4 million square feet there, meaning its total commercial development capacity is just under 22 million square feet. Six owner-users and developers — Google, Lockheed Martin, Juniper Networks, Jay Paul Company, Harvest Properties and the Navy — own a significant chunk of the park, the report said.

The last time Sunnyvale updated its Moffett Park specific plan was 2004, and since then, much of the area’s large swaths of developable land have been spoken for. Cognizant of this, the city is seeking to add about 10 million square feet of office, research and industrial capacity, split between six new districts created under the updated specific plan. By pairing that much new commercial space with up to 20,000 homes, the city envisions the area becoming a mix of what it calls “complete neighborhoods,” each oriented around a public open space and activity center and putting residents within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their homes or workplaces.

The city is accepting comments on its specific plan’s draft environmental impact report through Feb. 10. Several city boards and commissions will hold public hearings from January through March in which they will review and discuss the plan and report. Assuming Sunnyvale’s Planning Commission recommends the City Council approve both documents, the latter body is expected to take them up for approval in late March or April, according to the city’s informational website.

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