YouTube wants to double its office space and add 10,000 new jobs with a new global headquarters — here’s the video site’s plan to super size (GOOG, GOOGL)

YouTube HQ, expansion, San Bruno, David Woltering

YouTube wants to dramatically expand the company's headquarters.
The city of San Bruno, CA, recently presented four options for the public to consider.
The plan favored by YouTube would call for a dramatic increase in the amount of office space and jobs located in the area.

SAN BRUNO, CA — More than 13 years and millions of uploads later, the tiny video startup that began life above a pizzeria has grown so large that entire neighborhoods must be reshaped to meet its needs.

YouTube’s managers began to seek an expansion of its San Bruno, CA headquarters last year. On Tuesday evening, the city of San Bruno presented four separate development plans for the 98-acre area around YouTube’s offices for public consideration. More than 50 people showed up at the San Bruno Senior Center to review the plans and offer input.

According to city managers, YouTube favors a proposal that would add 2.3 million square feet of office space and eventually bring more than 10,000 new jobs to the area. Not all those jobs or space would belong to Google but David Woltering, the community development director for the city of San Bruno, said “The vast majority of it would be YouTube’s.”

That YouTube is bursting beyond its current office space should surprise no one. The world’s No. 1 video-sharing service and the second most-visited site on the Web (Google is No.1) is supposedly raking in big ad dollars, according to analysts. In May, analysts from Morgan Stanley said they believe if YouTube were a standalone enterprise, it would be more valuable than General Electric, IBM, PepsiCo or Comcast.

The expansion plan for YouTube’s headquarters is just the latest sign that YouTube continues to grow and parent company Google doesn’t expect that growth to end any time soon.

Proposed development of area around YouTube's HQ

To help make way for the expansion, YouTube spent more than $300 million to acquire a total of about 40 acres within the existing San Bruno Bayhill Office Park. YouTube proposes to "intensify" use of that property to add somewhere between 1.7 million and 2.5 million square feet to the existing 900,000 square feet of office space on that property.

Currently, the overall area has 1.6 million square feet of total office space, 145,000 square feet dedicated to retail, and no space allotted for the public or civic uses.

YouTube favors a plan titled “Alternative 4, Greenway Connection,” which calls for adding the most office space of any of the proposals, with 2.3 million square feet. Alternative 4 also includes adding 21,000 square feet for retail, 4.5 acres for public open space and nothing for civic uses. Underground parking would be built.

On the opposite extreme, Alternative 1 allows for the addition of 1.09 million square feet of office space, 9,000 square feet for retail, 6.2 acres for open space, and 1.7 acres for civic uses.

The expansion still has a lengthy review process ahead of it before a specific plan is adopted, but Woltering said he thinks that the draft plan could be completed before year’s end. Following that, there would be a formal hearing process to consider plan adoption sometime in the first quarter of next year.

YouTube hopes to break ground sometime by the end of 2019, Woltering said.

On Tuesday, members of the public, most of whom appeared to be well into their 60s, seemed most concerned about the need for additional parking and traffic mitigation. They complained that their streets were already clogged and adding 10,000 new workers sounded like a strong concern.

Graphic of development around YouTube's HQ

Woltering said the workers would be added gradually in stages by YouTube and the other companies in the area over a 20-year-period.

That a reasonably important part of YouTube business was being settled in the auditorium of a suburban senior-citizen center seemed strange. The plastic seats, cookies, and gray hair juxtaposed in my head with some of YouTube's typical video fare. Cardi B and Markiplier would have seemed out of place here.

YouTube appeared to be popular among home and business owners in the area. Some of those who commented praised the company for being “a good neighbor.”