The Loma Prietan
September/October 2005
Sustainable Land Use Committee (SLU) 'Urban Hike'
On Saturday, June 25th, Sustainable
Land Use Committee (SLU) and other
community organizations toured the
award-winning Transit Oriented
Developments, or TODs, adjacent to
Mountain View's two Caltrain stations:
Downtown (Castro Street) and San
Antonio. Appropriately, the 50 'urban
hikers' used Caltrain to travel to and from
the two stations. www.caltrain.com.
We explored vibrant, new communities,
some literally having replaced parking
lots and vacant malls with neighborhoods
that promote walkability and transit
use, as well as providing essential housing
in this job-rich Silicon Valley city.
While denser than traditional Peninsula
suburbs, there was no crowding. Instead
we saw beautiful homes of different types
(but no monster homes!) and plenty of
parks and open spaces providing recreational
use for residents, visitors, and
wildlife.
The tour ended appropriately at the
"Mayfield Site" also adjacent to San
Antonio Caltrain station, but the northern
side by Central Expressway.
Currently this site is a huge, vacant
office building surrounded by vast
asphalt parking lots. We hope it will be
transformed into an award-winning
TOD, just like its sister site, The
Crossings. Unlike the other developments
we visited, this would be the first
where the city's new affordable housing
requirement would be applied.
lomaprieta.sierraclub.org/slu/
(click on Mtn View)