Developers eye North San Jose mega village near Cadence HQ
The site would focus on shopping, food and entertainment
SAN JOSE >> Developers are eyeing a huge north San Jose village of shops, offices, hotel rooms, entertainment centers, homes and open spaces, a project that — if approved and built — bids to be a destination and game-changer for that part of the nation’s 10th-largest city.
“The idea is to make this an experience, a destination,” Sanjeev Acharya, president and chief executive officer of Siliconsage Builders, the developer of the village, said in a interview Monday with this news organization. “It will be like Santana Row, a mini version of a regional mall.”
The property under review for development is located near the corner of Montague Expressway and Seely Avenue and is perched on the banks of a creek. Sunnyvale-based Siliconsage Builders is developing the site, which would rise on three parcels.
“The emphasis for this development will be on the amenities, it will not be on the residential,” Acharya said. “The emphasis is the shopping, the restaurants, the food, the entertainment. This will be a very pedestrianoriented environment, with all underground parking.”
What’s envisioned on the site: 500,000 square feet of retail, possibly in a mall configuration; 700,000 square feet of office space, a 350-room hotel, a theater totaling 50,000 square feet, an amphitheater totaling 30,000 square feet, 3,250 apartment units and 4.5 acres of open space. At present, the site is zoned for industrial park uses.
“Wow,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive of San Josebased Silicon Valley Synergy, after reviewing what at present is a very preliminary proposal. “This would be a huge project. It is ambitious and exciting.” His firm provides land use planning and consulting services.
Currently, the 31.5-acre site consists of orchards, crop fields, small structures and a Cadence Design Systems building. The site is across the street from Cadence’s San Jose headquarters.
Adding to the potential attraction of the site as a huge village with an array of uses: It is next to Coyote Creek and a lengthy trail system.
“This is place-making at its finest,” Staedler said. “It takes a site that is under-utilized and would up-zone it to the max. I don’t think anyone has thought of anything of this type in this part of San Jose. There are not a lot of amenities in this area.”
The primary focus of the development, Acharya note, will be on the non-residential components.
“There will only be enough residential to support the amenities that we have planned,” Acharya said.
Those amenities could appeal to the growing number of tech companies — and their employees — that have expanded into north San Jose or downtown San Jose, or are actively planning huge expansions in one or both areas. Chief among those are Google, Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung.
However, Adobe is prepared
to begin construction during 2019 on a new office tower in downtown San Jose that would dramatically add to the tech giant’s existing downtown campus of three high rises. And Samsung has opened a huge new north San Jose office complex.
“We’re far from done building out office buildings, restaurants, and retail in San Jose and Silicon Valley, because not everyone in this region can always go to Santana Row,” said Mark Ritchie, president of Ritchie Commercial, a realty brokerage. “The tech giants of Silicon Valley are hiring at a pace that has never been seen before. We are in a new era of these tech enterprises that I call digital nation states.”
City officials such as Nanci Klein, San Jose’s deputy director for economic development, when told of this new proposal, didn’t comment directly about its merits, but she noted that these are the kinds of developments that San Jose seeks to examine and nurture.
“Does San Jose want developments that are dynamic places, are destinations, and create economic growth in mixed-use settings? Yes,” Klein said.