San Jose revamps Diridon area plans
Proposal includes large increase in office space, hotel rooms; city’s agreement with Google nears
“The San Jose City Council has before them not just the technical components ... but a grand vision of how these 262 acres can represent the best values of our future city.”
— Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association
San Jose’s latest revamp of its grand vision for transforming the area surrounding the Diridon train station and SAP Center features a massive increase in office space and hotel rooms from earlier plans as the city seeks to expand and revitalize its downtown core.
After crafting numerous versions of its Diridon area development plan, the city this week released a new environmental report that enlarges downtown and allows for much taller buildings and greater densities on its western fringes.
The San Jose City Council first approved the Diridon Station Area Plan in 2014, nearly three years before Google proposed its cutting-edge vision to build a transit-oriented neighborhood downtown. For the past two years, the city has proposed changes to its initial Diridon plan to accommodate Google’s transit-oriented village and reshape the western edges of San Jose’s urban core.
The overall plan for the Diridon Station Area, which contains the 80-acre footprint of Google’s proposed Downtown West neighborhood, was expanded slightly under the latest version to cover about 262 acres, up from 250 acres. Compared to the draft report of the plan released in October, the new environmental report calls for a 10% increase in office
space, a 2.5% increase in residential units and more than three times as many hotel rooms.
The updated development plan suggests that over the next two decades, the Diridon Station Area could experience a wide range of new development in the form of up to:
• 12,944 residential units.
• 14.14 million square feet of office space.
• 469,000 square feet of retail.
• 1,100 hotel rooms. The latest updates come as San Jose officials place the final touches on a draft of the development agreement reached between Google and the city that will spell out how much land Google will be allowed to develop and how much money it will contribute to cover the project’s impacts.
The contract, which may be released on March 15, will outline how much money the tech giant is offering the city to pay for new parks, transportation infrastructure and upgraded utility services. It will also reveal the number of affordable housing units Google plans to build on its land. The city’s Station Area Advisory Group is slated to discuss the development agreement at its next meeting on March 22.
The final blueprint of the Diridon Station Area Plan, which will be released later this spring and includes Google’s Downtown West project, is to go before the city’s Planning Commission and City Council for initial approvals in May or June. Due to the pandemic, the City Council’s consideration of the Diridon Station Area Plan, Google’s Downtown West transit village project and the development agreement between Google and the city were delayed last year by several months — from the end of 2020 to early to mid-2021.
“What a long way we have come in seven years since the original (Diridon Station Area) plan,” said Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association. “The San Jose City Council has before them not just the technical components — zoning and environmental clearance — but a grand vision of how these 262 acres can represent the best values of our future city.”
Google’s Downtown West project and the new development and economic activity anticipated to sprout around the new transit-oriented village, including the ambitious redevelopment of the Diridon train and bus station, will have long-lasting and far-reaching impacts on the urban core of San Jose.
Google’s Downtown West development could add up to 5,575 residential units, up to 6.3 million square feet of offices, up to 469,000 square feet of retail space and up to 1,100 hotel rooms.
Meanwhile, the remaining portions of the Diridon station area outside of Google’s project footprint may add up to 7,044 residential units, up to 7.8 million square feet of office space and up to 424,100 square feet of retail space, the city report estimated.
Under the latest version of the plan, some of the new buildings could be built as high as 295 feet, with the tallest concentrated in the southern part of the Diridon Station Area footprint near San Carlos Street. Other sections of the planning area — mostly on the western and southern edges — call for building height limits of 65 feet or 90 feet, according to the plan.
Bob Staedler, a land-use and planning expert who’s consulting with the Diridon Area Neighborhood Group, is advocating for decreased height limits adjacent to residential neighborhoods and increased heights elsewhere in the planning area to offset any loss in development space.
“The neighborhoods surrounding this have been some of the most supportive in the city in terms of development,” Staedler said in an interview Wednesday, “but the devil’s in the details in terms of how it gets implemented.”