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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

The citizens of Mountain View want nothing to do with tall buildings. They only have a handful that are over 5 stories.

A 12-story building was planned back in 2012 and they almost had a protest over it. The name of the town is 'Mountain View' and not 'city skyline view', after all.

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True, but it's also not "Bay View". Any buildings on the other side of 101, which is not residential, would block view to mudflats and salt ponds...

This shocked me the first time I went out to SV. I thought the bay would be a deep body of water with a shoreline, and it's basically a mud flat / salt factory. Really disappointing. Many cities built along rivers have better water views & access.

The Bay in the area in question is bounded by landfills and water reclamation ponds (meaning sewage treatment).

Before that it was more-or-less swamps and wetlands. Not beaches or real shorelines.

The muddy marsh/salt ponds surprised me too! But there are a few spots where the actual Bay (open water) is visible... e.g. Baylands Nature Preserve in Palo Alto. Also nearby hills have views -- I used to take walks to the top of the hill behind Google's Crittenden buildings, from where you can see a good bit of the southern Bay and up the peninsula northward. (Those hills also used to be MTV's garbage dump, so it could be worse!)

As a Seattle refugee, I still don't understand why there are so few boats on the bay.

I get that the Bay is not Lake Washington.. but seriously, lakes vary in height too, and still have docks.

Somehow the bay has almost no docks, no boating (except some sailboats way up north in SF), no recreation at all. Is it water quality? Chop? Regulation?

http://sfbay.wr.usgs.gov/sediment/southsfbay/depth_maps.html

there is a marina in redwood city, but notice how shallow the bay is south of SFO (aside from the channel) - much of that is mudflats (lakes don't have tides), marine preserves, etc.

Damn. DAMN. I didn't realize it was that shallow. (I'm familiar with the RWC Marina as I bike by there on my commute, and in college I rowed out of Seaport). Thanks. Obviously it goes without saying that if the water is only (say) 5m deep, there's a hell of a lot of crap between 0m and the 5m floor. The changing height is not as much of an issue; plenty of lakes vary in height by 5-10ft and docks accommodate it just fine.

Then why not build down instead of up? Besides the obvious suckitude that is working under ground? Build 5 floors of prisms and light pipes above ground and send sunlight down 20 stories or whatever the math works out to.

Normally next to the ocean is not a good place to dig deep. But I guess with enough money you can solve most problems.

Yeah Manhattan is a good example of going deep but Mountain View sits on soft soil rather than bedrock.

Mountain view borders the coastline of the bay. I just used a tool[1] to find the level above sea they are, and it shows ~ 8 ft. I imagine there are problems building below sea level when you are only a few hundred feet from the coast.

1: https://www.daftlogic.com/sandbox-google-maps-find-altitude....

I've heard there are concerns about disturbing the soil because it can trigger responsibility for dealing with the pollutants left by early valley hardware companies such as https://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/ViewbyEPAID/C...

That is an excellent point and a great way to find yourself the proud owner of a Superfund site.

Earthquakes. You'd be hard pressed to find a building in California with a basement. Say nothing of even a few stories down.

Sure, it can be done, but it's not that safe and requires a lot of extra expense.

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