The fate of six city-owned residential properties and vacant lots on Charles Street and Mathilda Avenue has yet to be determined.
The Sunnyvale City Council voted unanimously Oct. 14 to not surplus the properties and subsequently put them up for sale until the city manager can come up with a more developed strategy on what to do with city-owned properties.
“It appears to me that we’re missing a key component in terms of how to manage our assets,” city manager Deanna Santana said during the meeting.
While the city has surplused and sold several properties in the past, council members hesitated to sell the properties bounded by Charles Street and Iowa, McKinley and Mathilda avenues. They raised questions about possible alternatives to selling, including entering long-term lease agreements or assembling more properties on the block to be able to sell a more contiguous piece of land.
Santana suggested city staff return to the city council with some framework in terms of how to efficiently carry those tasks out and when it is appropriate to do so.
“Allow for us to look at the land that the city owns and apply it through that lens so that we have better categories, so we’re just not doing this randomly,” Santana suggested, as the council meeting passed midnight.
While one of the property owners within the block spoke in favor of surplusing the land so that he might sell to a developer, the council decided it would be more appropriate to further explore its options.
One such option included doing a land swap, as some council members suggested obtaining open space in exchange for the properties.
“Developers have an easier time gathering up land than we do,” Mayor Jim Griffith said.
Public works director Kent Steffens suggested the council keep in mind the overall size of the properties that would be made available.
“One of the challenges is this is less than one acre, and so somebody’s not going to come in and give us five acres for one acre,” Steffens said. “It’s a pretty small area to leverage for an open space parcel.”
The council also recommended that as the strategies were being developed by city staff, to include the property owners in the discussion.
Over several years, the city purchased these properties with the goal of assembling land to kick-start the redevelopment of the low-density commercial and residential uses to higher density multi-family/commercial mixed use, per the Downtown Specific Plan for the area.
The six parcels are composed of three single-family homes located on Charles Street and one duplex and two vacant parcels fronting Mathilda Avenue.
An active real estate market is what spurred the discussion to declare the properties as surplus. According to city staff, the combined value of the six properties in Block 15 is estimated at $3.5 million.
Residential developers interested in redeveloping the properties into a mixed-use project have already contacted the city, staff reported. The owners of the four other parcels located between the city parcels have also indicated an interest to sell.
If a sale were to occur now, a project could be built on approximately half of the block.
