Apple wins key permission for second Cupertino campus

Remember Apple’s plans for a second campus in Cupertino? Well, we do, and so does Apple, which this week won essential cooperation from city planners.

The company has been waiting for eight months for city planners to rezone the 7.78-acre plot to allow for office use. The planning commission finally reached a unanimous decision favouring this rezoning on Monday, reports Cupertino Courier.

The site, which is south of the Hewlett-Packard campus, houses two office buildings currently occupied by Apple employees. The commission could not reach a consensus last April when Apple requested the rezoning.

Apple acquired this property in 2006, before which the city had rezoned the previously industrial site into residential, figuring there may be a property boom.

Apple’s Michael Foulkes (presumably handling the property deal) said that the company has no immediate plan for the site, but has at least now got a better idea of what it will be allowed to do with the property, though one-acre of this must be kept aside for a public park (presumably with free Apple-provided WIFi and a giant sculpture of Steve Jobs).

The property is part of nine separate properties that Apple purchased at the Pruneridge site for an approximately 50-acre campus way back in 2006, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs shocked the Cupertino council with a surprise visit on April 18, 2006, when he announced the purchase of said properties.

"We are in 30 other buildings now and they keep getting further and further away from the campus," Jobs told the assembly. "We've rented every scrap of building we could find in Cupertino."

Head on over to Settb.it for some images of the second campus area as it looks today.