History
Orchards to the jobs-housing gap, in six chapters.
Week of October 5–11, 2026 · Updated Saturday, October 10, 2026 · Source: Mountain View Legistar (live)
How a farm town of orchards became a city with more jobs than housed workers — and why nearly every argument at City Hall traces back to that.
The land between the creeks and the bay marsh was Ohlone country for thousands of years before any of the names on today’s street signs existed. The village groups of this part of the peninsula are usually recorded as Puichon, within the wider Tamien and San Francisco Bay Ohlone world; the bayshore that is now Shoreline and North Bayshore was a marsh and mudflat economy, not empty land.
The Spanish mission system, and then the American state, dispossessed those communities without ever extinguishing them. The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area is their descendant organisation and is not federally recognised, which is the practical reason no tribal government sits at the table when Bay Area cities make land decisions. That absence is a live fact about Mountain View planning, not a historical footnote.
One trace survives in the city’s own land records: Rancho Posolmi, in what is now the North Bayshore area, was granted to Iñigo, an Ohlone man, on his own ancestral land — one of very few Mexican land grants made to a Native Californian.
In 1842 the Mexican government granted roughly 8,000 acres — most of the modern city — to the Castro family as Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas. Castro Street carries that name.
A settlement grew up around a stagecoach stop on the road between San Jose and San Francisco in 1849: a blacksmith, a store, a hotel, a saloon and a school strung along El Camino Real. When the railroad came through in 1864 the centre of town moved half a mile north, off the highway and onto Castro Street beside the tracks. That is why downtown Mountain View is a compact walkable grid pointed at a train station rather than a strip along a highway — and why a level crossing sits in the middle of the city’s main street to this day.
The city incorporated in 1902.
For half a century Mountain View was a fruit town in what was then the largest fruit-growing and canning region on earth. Orchards, packing sheds and seasonal cannery labour were the economy. That labour force, much of it Mexican-American, built Castro City, an unincorporated community on the city’s edge later absorbed and largely cleared — a piece of local history the Mountain View Historical Association has worked to keep visible.
The single decision that shaped the north half of the city was federal, not local. In 1931 Congress authorised the Navy to take title to land at the bay edge. Naval Air Station Sunnyvale was commissioned in 1933 and renamed Moffett Field the same year, for a rear admiral killed in the crash of the airship Akron. Hangar One was built to house the airship USS Macon, which arrived in 1933 and was lost off Point Sur in 1935. The hangar — eight acres under one roof — outlived the airship programme by ninety years and is still the largest object on the skyline.
In 1939 the NACA opened an aeronautical laboratory on 62 acres beside the airfield. It became NASA Ames Research Center. A large federal research institution therefore sat on Mountain View’s northern edge decades before the semiconductor industry existed — which is why the north of the city developed as a jobs district and the south as neighbourhoods, a split still visible on every land-use map.
The Navy closed the base in 1994 and NASA took over the airfield, renaming it Moffett Federal Airfield. It is now leased to a Google affiliate, which is restoring Hangar One after its siding was found to be shedding toxics.
Electronics and then software filled in around the federal base, on land that had been orchard. The pattern that defines the city set itself here: the job base grew far faster than the housing stock, and the gap never closed. Rent pressure that reads as a modern emergency has roots four decades deep.
The city bought the bay-edge land in 1967 and ran it as a landfill, taking garbage from San Francisco. In 1969 the California legislature created the Shoreline Regional Park Community — a separate legal entity covering about 1,550 acres of North Bayshore, funded by property tax increment, and governed by the seven members of the City Council sitting as its board. That district is why the Council appears twice on the same agenda, and why the school districts negotiate with the city over Shoreline tax revenue.
Shoreline Park opened on the capped landfill in 1983, with early problems from methane fires. The promoter Bill Graham built Shoreline Amphitheatre beside it in the mid-1980s. The venue most of the Bay Area knows Mountain View for stands on the city’s own garbage, on city land, in a tax district created by the state.
Google leased the former Silicon Graphics buildings on Amphitheatre Parkway in 2003 and bought them in 2006. Bay View, the first campus the company designed and built from nothing, opened in 2022, inside the Shoreline district. Mountain View became a global address and one of the most job-dense small cities in the United States: the city’s own figures put the daytime population above 120,000 against a resident population under 90,000, with roughly 1.7 jobs for every employed resident.
How much housing goes next to all those jobs has been the central municipal argument ever since. It is fought through precise plans — district- level rulebooks that decide what a whole area is allowed to become. North Bayshore and East Whisman are the two that matter most; the city maintains twenty-five such plan areas in total.
Two rent measures reached the ballot in 2016. Measure V, the tenant-backed Community Stabilization and Fair Rent Act, wrote rent control and just-cause eviction protection into the city charter and created a five-member Rental Housing Committee to set the annual allowable increase. Measure W, the Council-backed alternative, would have created binding arbitration by ordinance, amendable by the Council. Measure V won narrowly, with about 53%.
The charter placement is the part that matters most and is least understood: because the CSFRA is in the charter, the Council cannot amend it. Only the voters can. It is the single most consequential thing Mountain View voters have done to their own housing market, and it is why a committee most residents could not name sets the rent ceiling.
As rents rose, several hundred people ended up living in RVs and other vehicles on Mountain View streets — the most visible expression anywhere in Silicon Valley of the gap this page keeps returning to. In 2019 the Council passed ordinances barring oversized vehicles from most narrow streets and streets with bike lanes. Opponents forced the question onto the ballot, and voters upheld the restrictions as Measure C in 2020.
The Law Foundation of Silicon Valley then brought a class action arguing the rules targeted the poor. It settled in 2022, obliging the city to keep at least three miles of street segments available for oversized vehicles, to publish a multilingual parking map, and to wait 72 hours after a citation before towing in most cases. Alongside enforcement the city and county built safe-parking sites, including the largest in Santa Clara County.
The current chapter is about jurisdiction. The regional housing allocation assigned Mountain View 11,135 homes to plan for in the current eight-year cycle, and a run of California housing laws — culminating in transit-oriented density rules that override local zoning near rail — has moved a large share of land-use authority from the Council to Sacramento. The R3 multifamily zoning rewrite is an attempt to shape density on the city’s own terms before the state’s terms apply by default.
Read the last hundred and twenty years in one line: a farm town got a federal airfield, the airfield got an industry, the industry got the world, and the housing never caught up.
Legistar carries the modern legislative record. Older documents live in a separate archive maintained by the City Clerk. For anything before that, the Mountain View History Center inside the public library holds historical newspapers, photographs, oral histories and obituary records, and the Mountain View Historical Association keeps the pre-digital story including Castro City and the Rengstorff House.