Sunnyvale Approved 137 Townhomes You Can Actually Buy

By Elena Marsh · Published August 28, 2026

Sunnyvale's Planning Commission approved 137 townhome condominiums on a former industrial site at Kifer Road. In a city where three of every four new homes are apartments, that is the unusual part.

The vacant former industrial site on Kifer Road in Sunnyvale where 137 for-sale townhomes were approved in August 2026.

On Monday, August 24, 2026, Sunnyvale's Planning Commission voted 7 to 0 to approve 137 townhome condominiums at 1484 Kifer Road, on a 4.44-acre parcel that has held a single-story industrial building for decades. The units will be sold, not rented. In Sunnyvale that is the headline, because roughly three of every four homes the city has finished since the start of 2024 sat inside buildings of five units or more, which in practice means apartments.

Commissioner Martin Pyne moved it, Vice Chair Galen Kim Davis seconded, and nobody voted against. The staff report files it as PLNG-2025-0451, a special development permit plus a vesting tentative parcel map creating 137 condominium units on four lots. The word condominium is doing real work in that sentence. Some coverage has called these apartments. The city's own record says otherwise.

Thirteen buildings, 137 doors, one crossroads

  • Site: 1484 Kifer Road at Uranium Drive, APN 216-27-023, 4.44 acres, zoned Flexible Mixed-Use II inside the Lawrence Station Area Plan
  • What goes away: a 96,410 square foot one-story industrial building, demolished
  • What replaces it: 13 three-story buildings, 137 for-sale condominiums, average about 1,280 square feet
  • Mix: 129 three-bedrooms, four two-bedrooms, four one-bedrooms, ranging from 478 to 2,105 square feet
  • Below market rate: 28 homes at moderate income, about 20 percent of the project, against a 15 percent city minimum
  • Parking: 244 spaces for 137 households, roughly half of it tandem
  • Systems: all electric, no natural gas connection, rooftop solar
  • Developer: City Ventures, buying from Fortinet, whose headquarters sits a few hundred yards up the same street

Three of every four homes Sunnyvale finished were in apartment buildings

This is the number that makes the project interesting, and it comes from Sunnyvale's own annual housing reports to the state rather than from anybody's press release. Table A2 of the city's 2024 and 2025 Housing Element Annual Progress Reports breaks completed homes down by structure type. Here is what two years of building looked like.

Structure type20242025Two-year totalShare
5 or more units (apartments)5151,0671,58275.8%
Single-family attached (townhomes)6924030914.8%
Single-family detached1833512.4%
Accessory dwelling units74721467.0%
All homes completed6761,4122,088100%

Structure type is not a perfect proxy for who owns the deed, but it is close, and the named projects back it up. The three largest completions of 2025 were The Martin on South Taaffe, Hartwood on Willow Avenue and Ira D. Hall Square on Sonora Court. All three are rental. Between them they account for more than three quarters of everything Sunnyvale finished that year.

Set 137 against the 360 attached and detached houses Sunnyvale completed across all of 2024 and 2025 and this single project equals about 38 percent of two years of for-sale-shaped output. Against 2025 alone it is close to half. One approval on one industrial lot should not be able to move a city's ownership numbers that much. That it can is the story.

Sixteen waivers is how 137 fit on 4.44 acres

The project used State Density Bonus Law, which is the tool that makes the arithmetic work. In exchange for the 28 deed-restricted moderate-income homes, City Ventures took two concessions and 16 waivers from Sunnyvale's physical development standards.

Sixteen is a lot of code to set aside. Setbacks, separation between buildings and lot coverage all shift. The most concrete one is parking: Sunnyvale caps tandem spaces at half a project's total, and this one runs somewhere between 53 and 60 percent tandem, which only clears because a waiver says it can. Tandem parking means one household shuffling two cars in a driveway, and there are six unassigned guest spaces for 137 homes. We are pro-housing here and would take this project over another warehouse without blinking. That does not make the parking arrangement pleasant.

The below-market homes are also visibly smaller, at 795 square feet against a project average near 1,280. Deed-restricted ownership at moderate income is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable in Santa Clara County. It is still worth saying out loud that the affordable homes are about 57 percent the size of the market-rate ones.

The soil under a margarine plant has not been tested

Long before Fortinet paid roughly $44 million for this parcel in 2021, and before the city declared it surplus property back in 2017, 1484 Kifer Road was a Unilever margarine plant. The environmental checklist prepared for the project states that no Phase I or Phase II environmental site assessment has been completed for the site, while also noting that the parcel does not appear on the Cortese List, GeoTracker or EnviroStor.

The mitigation is reactive rather than preventive: a soil management plan requiring work to stop if crews hit soil that looks contaminated, plus the standard handling rules for asbestos and lead paint in the building coming down. That is a normal way to do this in California. It is also the honest answer to a buyer asking whether anyone checked, which is: not yet, and the plan is to look while digging.

Kifer Road is not a walk to Caltrain, whatever the plan is called

The site sits inside the Lawrence Station Area Plan, a joint Sunnyvale and Santa Clara framework built around Lawrence Caltrain station, and the project's environmental clearance rides entirely on that plan's existing studies. Transit-oriented is the label. The ground is less tidy. Lawrence station is about eight tenths of a mile away, a fifteen to eighteen minute walk, and Walk Score rates the address 35 out of 100, in the range it calls car-dependent.

The immediate neighbors are Fortinet's campus and a records storage facility directly across Uranium Drive. This corner of north Sunnyvale is still an industrial district with housing arriving in it, not a neighborhood with an industrial edge. Our nearest scored neighborhood, Lakewood, sits just north and carries a 3.4 out of 5 on amenities, with strong public spaces and a weak 2.0 for nearby merchants. That gap is exactly what living up here feels like: parks and playing fields are close, a walkable errand is not.

Schools deserve a warning rather than an answer. Sunnyvale is split between districts, and Santa Clara Unified runs schools physically inside Sunnyvale, including Braly Elementary and Peterson Middle, both in the Lawrence and Kifer quadrant. Elsewhere in town you land in Sunnyvale School District and Fremont Union High. No city document assigns this specific parcel, so confirm it with the district's own locator before it becomes part of your reason for buying. It is the kind of thing that quietly decides a family's decade.

What these will probably cost

City Ventures has published nothing on pricing, so treat what follows as an estimate rather than a number. New townhome communities in Sunnyvale currently advertise base prices from about $899,000 at Toll Brothers' Vantage at The Station up through roughly $1.5 million at Terraces at The Station, with Pulte's The Square starting near $1.09 million. City Ventures generally prices under Toll Brothers. With 129 of the 137 homes carrying three bedrooms at an average near 1,280 square feet, the low-to-mid $1 million range is the defensible guess.

For scale, our price history puts the Sunnyvale median at about $2.48 million as of July 2026, and Lakewood, the closest neighborhood we score, at about $1.44 million. A new three-bedroom townhome in the low seven figures is not cheap. It is roughly half the citywide median, which in this city counts as an entry point, and there are only ten Sunnyvale neighborhoods in our ranking where you can look for one.

The dates that matter next

City Ventures has a second Sunnyvale ownership project moving, 28 townhome condominiums at 845 Stewart Drive, which filed a CEQA exemption notice in February. Two for-sale projects from one builder in one city is not a trend on its own. It is a builder reading a gap in the market that the annual reports have been documenting for two years.

Planning Commission approvals of this type in Sunnyvale are generally appealable to the City Council, so this is an approval rather than a final one until that window closes. No construction start, sales opening or completion date exists in any public document yet. The next real signal is a demolition permit on the Kifer Road building, and after that, a sales trailer. When Google recommitted to its Sunnyvale offices we wrote that the jobs were never the constraint here. This is what the other side of that sentence looks like when a city acts on it, one warehouse at a time.

Sources

About the Author

Elena Marsh

Longtime Bay Area resident and housing writer who reads the council agendas and planning staff reports most people skip, covering development, zoning, and transit-oriented housing across the region.