- Google has finally acquired the remaining piece of property it needed to realize its vision for a bespoke village near its Mountain View headquarters.
The Molinari-Martinelli family has leased its 1 acre of land to the tech giant for 35 years for around $3 million, as first reported by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, with an option to extend and potentially buy the property should it become available.
The family held on to the property for years as Google continued to acquire land surrounding its offices in a quest to remake the area into a small village that would include homes, retail, hotels, parks and a school.
Now, the family appears to have given up after years of contending it was protecting its family history. The former fruit and vegetable farm on Charleston Road was established more than 70 years ago by Victor Molinari but was more recently used as a rental property. Sandra Martinelli Bilyeu, a surviving relative, told the Guardian in 2016, “If we keep it, we keep our history.”
According to a council report from the city of Mountain View, Google plans to build a parking lot with 100 spaces on the Molinari property at 1851 Charleston Road, demolishing two barns, two sheds, a home and an apartment building in the process, as they don’t conform to the needed residential zoning. The 153-acre mixed-use neighborhood has already been given the go-ahead, and the city gave the company 30 years to complete the development.
Google did not return a request for comment as of publication.
This isn’t the only massive, city-in-a-city-esque development in the works in Silicon Valley, or even for Google: The firm’s 80-acre “Downtown West” mega campus in San Jose has wrapped up its first demolition phase (costing the city some longtime institutions), and though CNBC reported that the development is now on hold, Google says it is assessing how best and when to move forward. Meta, meanwhile, is working on its 1.6 million-square-foot “Willow Village” in Menlo Park.
