Sunnyvale Libraries - II

I was looking at the cost estimates in the 2007 study.  They came out to about $450/sq ft (in the 3rd part of the study "3_r_sunnyvale_lof_building_program_070628.pdf") which seems in line with what I found elsewhere - specifically here:

http://libraryfacilitycentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/recent-library-construction-costs-in.html

Including everything else needed to equip a library, we're looking at around $500/sq ft. as the spread sheet available here shows:

http://www.library.ca.gov/lba2000/
(5th link down under "Resources")
Construction Costs for Recently Completed California Public Library Buildings (xls)

Here are a list of a few comparable Bay area cities (by income and house value) and their (sq. ft.)/person of library facilities.

Sta Clara - (88K sq ft)/pop 119K = 0.73 sq ft/person
Mtn Vu - (60K sq ft)/pop 76K = 0.79 sq ft/person
San Mateo - (106K sq ft)/pop 101K = 1.05 sq ft/person

Sunnyvale - (60K sq. ft)/pop 140K = 0.43 sq. ft./person

If we got one branch library sufficient to give us the sq. ft. per person that Mountain View has we would need 110K sq. ft. total or about 50K more space - almost as large as the existing main library.  That would be about $25M for the entire project.  Municipal bond interest rates are at about 2% for 20 years which works out to $1.5M/year, according to a mortgage calculator I used.  If we go for San Mateo's (sq. ft)/person we would need 147K sq. ft total or about 87K more sq. ft at $500/sq. ft = $44M.  At 2% over 20 years this would be $2.7M/yr.

By comparison, ABA's projected cost (page 17 of part 3) was $81M to tear down the existing library and build a new one of 143K sq. ft. = $566/sq. ft.   As it would still be only one library, it would not have solved the problem of accessibility that branch libraries address.