New residential tower planned for San Jose
The development near proposed tech offices would add to the downtown transformation
In recent months, anyone walking through downtown San Jose has seen the signs of its transformation: A series of new residential towers breaking ground, on their way to bringing about 1,300 apartments and condominiums to the 250 squareblock downtown core. In addition, around 20 projects promising another 6,000 or so units are in the pipeline, recently approved or under review by City Hall.
One more now is on the horizon: a 24-story tower at the corner of Almaden Boulevard and Park Avenue — across the street from Adobe Systems’ headquarters, where that tech company is planning an expansion that could bring 3,000 more workers to downtown.
As first reported Thursday in the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the new tower is planned by Equus Capital Partners, which has submitted an application to the city to build the mixed-use project. Plans call for 260 residential units — weighted toward studios and one-bedroom apartments — above 1,500 square feet
of retail space fronting
Park Avenue.
Equus didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment on the proposal.
Designed by Steinberg Architects, the tower is proposed as an expansion to Equus’ existing City View Plaza Complex, which includes office buildings and about 40,000 square feet of restaurant space, such as Scott’s Seafood and Morton’s Steakhouse.
Not only would the new tower stand across the street from Adobe’s planned expansion — as well as the Center for the Performing Arts — but
it would complement another nearby project: the 25-story mixed-use Museum Place tower that received a go-ahead this week from the City Council. Insight Realty Co. plans to knock down the cityowned Parkside Hall — next to the Tech Museum — and build the 1.4 millionsquare-foot, mixed-use Museum Place complex including residential, retail, hotel and offices.
And of course, just a hop and a skip away from all of this is an even bigger, proposed game-changing project — the massive, transitcentered Google village with up to 20,000 new jobs and 8 million square feet of development near Diridon Station.
If its tower is to become a reality, Equus still must
leap plenty of planning hurdles. In 2015, Cupertino-based KT Urban proposed a similar project for the site, hoping to build a 24-story residential tower above retail space. But those plans got stuck in bureaucratic mud and never moved forward.
“There’s a lot more people who have to weigh in” on Equus’ proposal, cautioned John Tu, the city planner who began looking through the plans earlier this week. But, he added, “Downtown zoning allows projects to move forward with a lot of flexibility.”
Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association, said the project would set in place yet another critical piece of the newly emerging downtown: “It’s dense. It anchors a corner that isn’t anchored right now. It introduces residential into this kind of static location, and on the boulevard side it’s going to introduce more life onto what is really more of an office corridor.”
Mike Kim, chief investment officer for Simeon Properties, which developed the 21-story Centerra luxury apartment complex downtown, concurred: “It’s a great real piece of real estate and it’s not well utilized right now. And it’s timely in the sense that it’s on the heels of the Google and Adobe moves. So that’s a super location. I hope it happens.”