A 4.4-acre industrial parcel owned by cybersecurity giant Fortinet at the corner of Kifer Road and Uranium Drive in Sunnyvale could soon be bulldozed to make way for 137 townhomes, part of a broader wave of office-to-housing conversions reshaping the city's tech corridors. The site sits several blocks from Fortinet's headquarters focal point across the street to the east, on land the company originally bought for a very different purpose.
Developer City Ventures wants to demolish the existing 96,400-square-foot industrial building at 1484 Kifer Road and replace it with 13 structures containing townhome units, according to The Mercury News. Fortinet bought the property for $44 million in 2021, and the newspaper reports the proposed unit mix includes four one-bedroom units, four two-bedroom units, and 129 three-bedroom units, with sizes ranging from 478 to 2,105 square feet and averaging 1,280 square feet. City filings for the project, tracked under File #: PLNG-2025-0451, confirm City Ventures applied for a Special Development Permit and Vesting Tentative Parcel Map to demolish the building and construct the townhome condominiums, according to City of Sunnyvale records, which note the proposal was scheduled for review by the Sunnyvale Planning Commission this year.
Affordable Units and a Streamlined State Approval Path
Of the 137 planned townhomes, 28 units — just over 20% of the total — would be designated affordable, per the newspaper's report. City Ventures is also seeking to use Senate Bill 330 provisions for streamlined approval, a state law that bars local jurisdictions from subjecting compliant housing developments to more than five public hearings, freezes local development fees as of the preliminary application date, and prohibits downzoning or arbitrary delays. The law, known as the Housing Crisis Act of 2019 and extended through 2030 by SB 8, was enacted to remove discretionary entitlement barriers during California's housing shortage.
The parcel falls within Sunnyvale's Lawrence Station Area Plan and carries a Flexible Mixed-Use II zoning designation, which permits high-density residential development alongside commercial and R&D uses while streamlining environmental review under existing impact reports, according to city records. The plan was established to encourage transit-oriented, mixed-use redevelopment around Caltrain, and the proposed development sits roughly 0.75 miles from the Lawrence Caltrain Station — a location the city says supports its broader goal of clustering housing near transit and regional job centers.
Fortinet's Sprawling Real Estate Push Around Its Headquarters
The proposal lands on land that is just one piece of a much larger buying spree. Fortinet has spent $623.9 million on properties across the Bay Area, including $225.2 million for sites in Union City, per the Mercury News report. Within Sunnyvale alone, the company has spent $398.7 million buying numerous properties, most of them next to or near its new headquarters at 909 Kifer Road.
Hoodline previously reported that Fortinet paid approximately $47 million in cash in March to acquire seven parcels along Kifer Road and Commercial Street, adding to a 2024 purchase of a 27-acre Santa Clara campus for $192 million — part of a mega-campus land grab that has unfolded alongside $6.8 billion in company revenue in 2025. The 1484 Kifer Road site itself was purchased separately, in December 2021, for $44 million — about $459 per square foot for the 96,410-square-foot facility, according to property records.
A Citywide Pattern of Office and Industrial Land Turning Residential
The Kifer Road proposal is not an isolated case. It mirrors a pattern playing out elsewhere in Sunnyvale, including a proposal at 1215 Bordeaux Drive in Moffett Park to replace a former Google building with 265 apartments, a project Hoodline covered when it emerged that a low-slung office tower could become an eight-story apartment stack.
That pattern is being driven in part by state pressure. Under California's 6th Cycle Regional Housing Needs Allocation, Sunnyvale is legally required to plan for 11,966 new housing units between 2023 and 2031 — more than double its prior cycle's target, according to city records. As of March, city housing officials reported that Sunnyvale had completed or permitted only 16% of that allocation roughly 40% of the way through the eight-year cycle, according to The Silicon Valley Voice, though staff noted nearly 4,000 units were in preliminary or active planning stages.
City Ventures, the developer behind the Kifer Road proposal, was established in 2009 and is headquartered in Irvine and San Francisco. The builder specializes in solar-powered, energy-efficient, all-electric townhome communities on urban infill sites, and it has built a business around targeting underutilized commercial real estate in supply-constrained coastal markets, according to the company's own materials.
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