Moffett Park Housing: 265 Homes for a Former Google Site

Moffett Park Housing: 265 Homes for a Former Google Site

Moffett Park is one of the stranger neighborhoods in Silicon Valley, and not for anything you can see from the street. It is a 1,270-acre district packed with offices, labs, and parking lots, wedged against one of the busiest job corridors in the country, with almost nobody actually living in it. That is finally starting to change.

This month, Sunnyvale planning commissioners unanimously approved a project that turns a former Google building into 265 apartments. New Moffett Park housing like this is exactly what the district has been missing, and it offers a preview of what the area could become once offices stop being the only thing here.

Dallas-based Beam Reach wants to demolish a single-story research building at 1215 Bordeaux Drive and put up an eight-story apartment building with a small neighborhood park, as The Real Deal reported. It is one project on two acres. It is also a sign of where this whole part of Sunnyvale is heading.

What Sunnyvale Just Approved in Moffett Park

The building at 1215 Bordeaux Drive is not glamorous. It is a roughly 26,000-square-foot, single-story R&D box from 1973 that Google used and then listed for sublease back in 2023, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Beam Reach plans to clear it entirely and replace it with something far denser.

The Planning Commission signed off unanimously on June 8, per Bisnow, and KTGY designed it. If you know Moffett Park, the detail that should catch your eye is not the apartment count. It is the 15,000-square-foot park. Public green space in a district built almost entirely for cars and cubicles is a small but real signal that someone is finally planning for residents, not just workers.

Why This Moffett Park Housing Matters for Homebuyers

Here is the math that makes this story matter. The Moffett Park Specific Plan, which Sunnyvale adopted in July 2023, allows for a net increase of roughly 20,000 homes across the district, about 15 percent of them income-restricted, according to the city's plan. Today the area holds tens of thousands of jobs and a rounding error of housing. Lockheed Martin, Google, and a wall of R&D space, with the nearest real residential streets a drive away.

When a place generates that many jobs and that few homes, the people who work there bid up housing everywhere else. They commute in from older parts of Sunnyvale, from San Jose, from the far East Bay and beyond. Every home built inside Moffett Park is one fewer household competing for a 1960s ranch elsewhere in Sunnyvale's established neighborhoods. That is the quiet way supply near the jobs helps affordability, even when the new units themselves are not cheap.

And these will not be cheap, at least not at first. Market-rate apartments in a brand new eight-story building near Silicon Valley's biggest employers will price like it, in a county where the median home now sits around 2 million dollars. The honest read is that 265 units will not move rents on their own. But the full Moffett Park plan, if it actually gets built, is a different scale of intervention. That is the number worth watching.

What This Could Mean for Sunnyvale and Moffett Park

Moffett Park is a light-rail neighborhood, not a Caltrain one. The VTA Orange Line runs right through it, with stops like Moffett Park and Lockheed Martin, and the Specific Plan deliberately clusters the new housing into five pockets around those stations, as the city laid out when the plan passed. The idea is that you could live here and skip the car for the commute, which in this part of the Bay is close to radical.

Whether that works depends on things a rendering will not tell you. Does the ground floor get retail, or just a lobby. Does the new park connect to anything, or sit marooned behind a parking podium. How does Highway 237 feel at 5:30 on a Tuesday once a few thousand more people live here. The way we look at it when we compare neighborhoods, the building is only half the question. What grows up around it is the other half.

For now, anyone weighing nearby Mountain View neighborhoods or the more established parts of Sunnyvale should treat Moffett Park as a place in transition. Not good or bad. Just early, with most of the livability details still on the drawing board.

What to Watch Next

A few things will tell you whether Moffett Park becomes a real neighborhood or just a denser office park.

Building, not just approving. Sunnyvale is required to plan for 11,966 new homes by 2031 under its state housing assignment, as Bisnow noted. Approvals are the easy part. Watch how many of these projects actually break ground with construction costs where they are.

The next Beam Reach moves. The firm has two more Peninsula projects in the pipeline, including 207 units in Menlo Park. A developer placing repeat bets on office-to-housing is a useful signal about where the smart money thinks this is going.

Google's footprint. The same company that emptied this building pulled almost 2 million square feet of Silicon Valley sublease space off the market this year, reportedly to keep AI rivals from grabbing turnkey offices, The Real Deal reported. The office story and the housing story are now the same story.

Final Thoughts

Moffett Park spent decades as a place you drove to, worked in, and left. Turning even one Google building into 265 homes with a park attached is a small down payment on something better, a district where some of the people who power Silicon Valley can also sleep there.

If you are trying to figure out what that means for a specific block, the building permit is just the start. Schools, transit, the actual walk to the light rail, the price once it opens. Looking past the address to the neighborhood around it is the whole reason we built Houseberry. Our earlier piece on transit access and commutable Bay Area neighborhoods pairs well with this one if you are thinking about where the next wave of housing actually lands.

Moffett Park Housing FAQs

Where is the new Moffett Park housing being built?

At 1215 Bordeaux Drive in Sunnyvale, on a roughly two-acre site that held a single-story office building Google once used. Beam Reach plans an eight-story, 265-unit apartment building with a 15,000-square-foot neighborhood park.

How many homes will the Beam Reach project add?

265 apartments: 64 studios, 160 one-bedrooms, and 41 two-bedrooms, plus 217 parking spaces. Sunnyvale's Planning Commission approved it unanimously on June 8, 2026.

Will this make Sunnyvale more affordable?

Not by itself. These are new market-rate apartments and will likely price near the top of the local range. But adding homes inside a job-dense district eases pressure on older neighborhoods nearby, and the broader Moffett Park plan calls for up to 20,000 homes with about 15 percent income-restricted. Scale is what moves affordability, not one building.

What is the Moffett Park Specific Plan?

A long-term Sunnyvale plan, adopted in 2023, to turn a 1,270-acre office and industrial district into a transit-oriented, mixed-use neighborhood with up to 20,000 homes clustered around VTA light-rail stations. The Beam Reach project is one early piece of it.

Is Moffett Park a good place to live near the job hubs?

It is early. The location is hard to beat for commuting to Silicon Valley employers, and the light-rail access is real. But retail, amenities, and everyday livability are still being built. Treat it as a neighborhood in transition and research the specific block before you commit.

Sources

The Real Deal: Sunnyvale offices once home to Google poised for housing conversion

Bisnow: Beam Reach Proposes Turning Former Google Building Into Multifamily

Silicon Valley Business Journal: Sunnyvale Google housing project

City of Sunnyvale: Moffett Park Specific Plan overview

San Francisco YIMBY: Sunnyvale City Council Approves Moffett Park Specific Plan