Developer suggests downtown San Jose could be tech mega hub
SAN JOSE » In early November, veteran development company Jay Paul Co. launched the first speculative office tower in downtown San Jose in a decade, a project dubbed 200 Park that will sprout at the corner of Park Avenue and South Almaden Boulevard.
Across the street from what will be an 875,000-square-foot tower, Jay Paul has proposed a tech mega- campus that could accommodate 3.8 million square feet and multiple office towers. Besides these two redevelopment sites, Jay Paul Co. has also bought two other prominent downtown San Jose properties: a historic building that the company is renovating at North First and West Santa Clara streets, and the iconic 50 W. San Fernando St. office tower.
Jay Paul, chief executive officer of his eponymous company, recently spoke with this news organization about what might be in the works for downtown San Jose and the projects his development firm is planning in the urban core of the Bay Area’s largest city. His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What are your thoughts about the potential in downtown San Jose?
A: The city has done a lot of planning to put housing and office buildings in close proximity so people can live and work in the same environment. You can’t get that in a suburban environment. In a downtown, you have higher buildings, you have all the amenities.
Q: Are millennials such as young tech workers becoming more interested in living in a downtown area?
A: Young people want to live and work in the same place. They can get out of their condo or rental apartment and walk to where they want. You see young people on those scooters and stuff. Downtowns have the environment for people to live and work and get to where they want, restaurants, the theater, all kinds of amenities.
Q: You have been a pioneer in development, such as the Google deal in Sunnyvale, which was the first time Google expanded outside of Mountain View. How did you know Sunnyvale could be more than defense contractors?
A: What we tend to do is we try to get enough land, enough density, to create a campus environment, which a lot of the technology companies are really looking for, so they can get a critical mass of people and have the amenities they want. We first pioneered that with Pacific Shores in Redwood City at 100 acres. We created all sorts of amenities in Pacific Shores and a campus environment.
Q: Can that be done in downtown San Jose?
A: If you can get enough critical mass, as we have here in San Jose. You can create buildings that are very suitable for big tech companies to put groups of people in one place, create the amenities, the outdoor space, the proximity to things where people want to go like restaurants.
Q: Do you see downtown San Jose, the 200 Park tower, the CityView project, as places where major tech companies can locate?
A: Typically, we do really large projects. We have done projects with a couple of a million square feet with one tenant or a couple of tenants. We just finished the project in Sunnyvale, 1.9 million square feet, we had both Facebook and Amazon in there.
Q: What might be the pattern in downtown San Jose?
A: What’s going to happen with downtown San Jose, you are going to see a couple of very large tenants, two or three in a building, or in a very large site, four different tenants.
Q: Do you sense the same sort of pioneering spirit in downtown San Jose that you saw in Redwood City and Sunnyvale?
A: What is really important and significant is the Mayor (Sam Liccardo) and (Councilman) Raul (Peralez) and the City Council have put a lot of thought into creating the kinds of planning with the housing and the office buildings in proximity, doing a lot of urban planning. We deal with a lot of cities, their planning departments, building departments, you can just tell San Jose has put a lot of work into accepting this kind of development.