Saltwater pools, wine room, private theater: Welcome to North San Jose
Crescent Village apartment complex lures tech workers
North San Jose might be best known for its sprawling office parks and crowded expressways, but it’s also home to the largest apartment complex built in the United States in the last decade — Crescent Village.
A Mediterranean-style luxury complex of glittering saltwater pools, manicured green space and buildings with names like Milano and Toscana, the village boasts 2,188 units and a host of impressive amenities just for residents — from a wine room and dog-washing station to gaming space and a private movie theater. An on-site Starbucks keeps residents, who regularly pay more than $3,000 a month in rent for a one-bedroom home, and visitors, caffeinated. Patxi’s Pizza and Curry Up Now keep them fed.
Today, as the Bay Area grapples with a pressing housing crisis, the giant master-planned community, named the largest complex of the last decade by Rent Cafe, serves for some as a prime example of how to tackle the region’s shortage of homes quickly and in a big way: just build a lot of units at once.
But for others, it’s a symbol of exclusivity, a place where residents can easily spend the bulk of their time secluded in their city within a city, not shopping and dining around town. Prospective tenants visiting developer Irvine Company’s website to “explore the neighborhood” around Crescent Village are told of the “dynamic dining scene” and karaoke bars of Japantown.
In reality, the popular area is about five miles south.
“It does serve a need, for sure, and helps relieve pressure on other, older housing stock that might lead to displacement,” said Michael Brilliot, deputy director of San Jose’s planning department. But, he acknowledged, “We really want to try to figure out how we create more of a neighborhood there.”
When Crescent Village opened in 2012, a city press release extolled its “resort-style” offerings and then-mayor Chuck Reed thanked Irvine Company for its “significant investment in our community,” along Zanker Road just north of Montague Expressway. Last year, a Mercury News analysis found Irvine to be among the largest landowners in Santa Clara County.
But by 2013, it was the subject of negative national media reports. Google housed interns in the complex and their “loud parties, late-night hot-tubbing sessions and other un-neighborly behavior” that year upset other residents, the New York Intelligencer wrote. The complaints subsided, but Crescent Village still appears on corporate housing websites, with monthly rates reportedly in the $6,000 range — high even by Bay Area standards.
On a recent sunny afternoon, Verena Niemeier was throwing a ball for her lab mix, Milos, to chase in the city park in the middle of the complex.
Niemeier has lived for about a year in Verona, a section of more than 400 apartments that opened a few years after the initial 1,750 units were completed.
“The park, the trail, the amenities … people are nice,” Niemeier, who commutes to San Leandro, said when asked why she and her boyfriend decided to call Crescent Village home.
But, she said, “It would be nice to have a supermarket to walk to.”
And while Niemeier understands why some people might see the complex as a bit of a bubble amid a sea of corporate campuses, that aspect appeals to some other residents.
Jenny Dyer has lived at Crescent Village for almost three years. The streets around her last place, she said as she pushed two young children in a stroller through the park, were kind of sketchy.
But at Crescent Village, she said, “It’s nice that there are always people out,” whether they live in the area or are office workers from nearby Intel and Cisco taking a lunchtime stroll. And she appreciates how quiet the area is on weekends.
She rinses her dog’s muddy paws at the dog washing station after walks in the park, her husband enjoys the gym and the whole family loves the pools in the summer.
Erik Schoennauer, a land-use consultant who has worked with the Irvine Company (although not on Crescent Village), thinks such large-scale developments make sense. California, he pointed out, is not going to cure the 3.5 million unit housing shortage state officials cite “by building a bunch of 10-unit complexes.”
For developers, he said, big master-planned projects mean cheaper construction and fewer trips to City Hall. And in the case of Crescent Village, with its proximity to Silicon Valley jobs, there was little risk of failure.
“It’s a critical part of the strategy to produce enough housing,” Schoennauer said.
But executing that strategy locally is becoming increasingly challenging for its proponents.
“The core Bay Area is in essence built out,” he said.
Many cities are reluctant to rezone what vacant land does exist — often industrial — even for housing. Take San Jose’s recent hesitancy over rezoning industrial land for teacher housing, for instance. Still, there are some mega-projects in the works across the Bay Area, including a plan that could add thousands of homes around the new Berryessa BART station, and a city plan for North San Jose that calls for thousands more homes, which will almost certainly mean some rezoning. San Francisco’s Treasure Island could eventually hold thousands of homes. But even East Bay cities like Dublin have little empty land.
“I’m torn,” acknowledged Councilman Lan Diep, who represents the area. San Jose — and most every city in the region, according to state targets — needs the housing. But he’s not keen on giving up industrial land, which generally brings in more tax revenue than residential property, and, he said, projects like Crescent Village can “take away some local charm.”
To be fair, before Crescent Village rose up, the space it now occupies was home to a drab Sony Electronics building. But, Diep said, he’d prefer new housing “focused on housing and less on lifestyle.”
In places like Paris or London, with walkable boulevards and vibrant street life, he noted, many people live in small flats and spend their time out in the city, not cloistered away playing bocce or wine tasting behind locked doors.
“The living is done throughout the city,” he said.
Advocates of the major Google development slated to open west of downtown San Jose say the tech giant has committed to integrating more organically into the surrounding neighborhoods and designing its space in a way that invites the community in.
“That’s easier to do downtown than in a place like North San Jose,” Brilliot said.
Mike Bertram, who lives nearby and serves on the board of the River Oaks Neighborhood Association, which is open to Crescent Village residents, doesn’t love the idea of massive amounts of new housing flooding his neighborhood.
“The traffic has gotten a lot worse” in recent years, he said. But generally, he added, Irvine Company, which has other properties nearby, “has been a good neighbor.”
Irvine Company did not respond to a request for comment.
It beats another ugly, gray complex nearby, he said, and given the housing crisis, amounts to “a pleasant necessary evil.” Also, he said, the public River Oaks Park that runs through the development serves as green space for more than just Crescent Village.
But Bertram said residents, many of whom seem to spend a brief amount of time renting at the complex before moving on, aren’t typically very engaged in the neighborhood association, unless the topic of discussion is schools, and public officials seem to overlook the area and longtime residents’ pleas for more libraries and community centers.
“Don’t just bring in housing,” Bertram said. “Bring in things that make a community.”
Contact Emily Deruy at 408920-5077.