After years of spurning a certain tech giant, the brood behind a former farmstead has given in and leased its land to Google.
Freshly equipped with the family’s 1-acre plot, the company can now fully realize its vision for the area surrounding its Mountain View, California headquarters, Silicon Valley Business Journal first reported.
Since at least 2016, the Molinari-Martinelli clan has been rebuffing Google’s attempts to purchase their former farmstead, which was established in the 1940s by patriarch Victor Molinari — and was more recently in use as a rental property.
“We don’t need the money. Right now it’s not for sale,” Leonard Martinelli told the Guardian in 2016 of his family’s choice to hold onto their little parcel of rickety rental paradise.
“If we keep it, we keep our history,” added Martinelli’s sister, Sandra Martinelli Bilyeu.
At the time, the holdout patch of prime real estate was home to “battered pickups, a crumbling ice house,” a variety of trees (fig, tangerine, avocado, ancient pepper) and “a handful of eclectic renters,” including a self-described artist and working carpenter named Mihail Kivachitsky.
Over the years, the humble property became completely surrounded on all sides by the Googleplex, which it is now a part of.
According to the Business Journal, the family recently signed paperwork leasing the land to Google for 35 years at a cost of about $3 million, and additionally agreed to give the internet giant the first right of purchase should they choose to sell.
Google now plans to bulldoze the six buildings on the site and build 100 parking spaces.
Also in the works for the area are plans to build 1 million more square feet of office space, retail, two hotels, parks and a school.
The Molinari-Martinelli’s ceding their property is hardly considered a loss by many who hold little nostalgia for the area’s agricultural past.
“I don’t think anyone sees any historic significance” in the property, Mountain View city councilman Leonard Siegel previously told the Guardian. “Eventually all these properties are going to go. There’s nothing unique about them.”
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