Corso — Mountain View Lot 12

A surface parking lot next to Mountain View City Hall is becoming 120 apartments, all of them deed-restricted. Corso broke ground on May 27, 2026 on Lot 12, a 1.5-acre city-owned site downtown, developed jointly by Related California and Alta Housing in partnership with the City of Mountain View.

Project Scope

The building is five stories and 120 homes, restricted to households earning between 30 and 60 percent of area median income. The set-aside structure goes deeper than a typical tax-credit deal: 20 apartments for people transitioning out of homelessness, 15 for residents with intellectual or developmental disabilities, and 10 designated permanent supportive housing. BDE Architects designed it.

The capital stack is the harder engineering. A $23.5 million city loan incorporating federal and state grant funds sits alongside nearly $20 million in Santa Clara County loans, layered with tax credit equity and permanent debt. Deals with this many public sources have to close every layer on compatible timelines, and each source carries its own compliance monitoring for decades after the building opens. Completion is expected in 2028.

Why It Matters

Publicly owned surface parking is the cheapest land a high-cost city has, and Mountain View is one of a growing number of Bay Area jurisdictions treating it that way. The land contribution is what makes the rents work: at Santa Clara County construction costs, no 30-to-60 percent AMI project pencils if it also has to buy a downtown parcel at market.

The location does the rest of the work. Corso sits within walking distance of Mountain View’s Caltrain and VTA light rail station, which means the deep-affordability households living there can reach jobs across the Peninsula without a car. That combination, public land plus transit adjacency plus stacked public subsidy, is now the standard template for getting affordable units built in the region’s most expensive submarkets. The constraint isn’t the design. It’s how many city-owned lots are left.

Project Team & Details