First went plastic bags. Now, California cities are increasingly banning that constant companion to hot lunches and coffee: polystyrene, a type of plastic better known by its household name Styrofoam.

The Mountain View City Council has approved six homes on Fairchild Drive for redevelopment into 18 row houses. But this project is displacing current residents out of their homes in costly Silicon Valley.

Shaved snow — a frozen dessert that is popular in Asia — might not be at the top of one’s mind when conjuring up a local signature dish. But SnoZen in Mountain View features it.

In a region where roads are regularly crammed with cars, Mountain View officials say that making their city bike-friendlier is a top priority.

Open space accounts for nearly a quarter of Palo Alto, but only one-eighth of Mountain View. City leaders recently voted to create a park in the Rengstorff Planning Area.

Sara Hayden is from Wyoming and earned her bachelor’s degree in Chinese language and culture from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. Hayden has ghostwritten for a New York Times bestselling author, interned and freelanced at The San Francisco Chronicle, produced multimedia at the Northern Colorado Business Report and worked as a news reporter at the Half Moon Bay Review. Follow @haydensaraa !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:'https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);   [contact-form-7 id="27332" title="Sara Hayden"]