MENLO PARK, CA—Frank Petrilli has represented clients such as Facebook, Bohannon Development Company and LinkedIn on a number of Bay Area projects. He obtained approvals for Facebook's new headquarters expansion and represented LinkedIn when the city council awarded it with the available development rights in the North Bayshore area.

He is an attorney in the San Francisco office of law firm, Arent Fox, who focuses on all aspects of land use. Petrilli advises clients on key issues, projects and policies impacting the Bay Area related to development, land use, housing and transportation. He recently discussed approvals processes, local government and CEQA in part two of this exclusive.

GlobeSt.com: What distinguishes campuses designed for tech users from speculative office projects?

Petrilli: Their development objectives are different insofar as traditional real estate developers are more risk averse and interested in returns, whereas the metrics and goals for tech companies or any user developer are more about accommodating growth and worker happiness. Highly sustainable design and creating healthy places to work are very important. The amount of care that is taken in looking at daylighting, indoor air quality, curated open space and so forth to promote employee wellness and productivity is astonishing.

Tech companies are willing to make bolder and more innovative architectural moves as well. We've seen that with clients' large open floorplans designed by world renowned architects, as well as fully landscaped green roofs that provide social spaces for employees. Space planning is another important consideration, and our clients are constantly pushing the envelope in terms of finding ways to promote human interaction and collaboration at specific scales depending on the product team and end-users.

GlobeSt.com: How does California's unique regulatory environment shape the entitlement process for large campus projects?

Petrilli: The California Environmental Quality Act plays a huge role. CEQA's intent is to ensure that decision-makers understand the environmental impacts associated with projects and impose mitigations to lessen those impacts where feasible. And while that process often results in improvements to a project, the challenge is that the original intent–focusing on impacts to the physical environment like air quality, noise, sea level rise and so on–has increasingly been distorted over time.

What we're seeing is increasing pressure to use the environmental review process as a political tool to look at issues like displacement, gentrification and other socio-economic issues. That is not only outside the scope of the statute, but poses major technical problems since there are no reliable ways to meaningfully evaluate those phenomena on a project-by-project basis. And at a more basic level, it creates the risk of sowing confusion about what's really driving these big societal changes. The drivers are historical in scale and need to be understood in the context of how our economy, living patterns, personal and collective choices, policy decisions and a range of other factors have evolved over the course of the last century. As practitioners, we deal with these issues every day and try to find ways to inform public opinion, elevate the dialogue and be sensitive to the concerns of various stakeholders. It's not an easy task, especially in the context of an entitlement process.

Instant Insights /

Space Planning Promotes Wellness and Productivity

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