EMBRACING URBANISM
San Jose’s development chief talks about major projects on the horizon and how the city is gearing up for the transformation
Kim Walesh doesn’t know exactly what Google’s downtown village will look like when the internet giant submits its draft plans to the city this fall, but San Jose’s economic development director feels strongly about this: “It’s one of the most important next-generation development projects happening in the U.S. if not the world right now,” Walesh said. “I fully expect that they will propose something unlike any tech work environment we’ve seen.”
Walesh, who is also deputy city manager, held one of the first meetings with Google to try to lure the company to San Jose. She has city planning in her bones, having grown up in Wisconsin building elaborate toy cities in her basement — with Hot Wheels racetracks as freeways and Weebles as people.
Now, she is helping guide San Jose’s historic transformation from a sprawling suburban community into an urban one, attracting companies and developers to bring
jobs and revenue to the city. But unlike a generation ago, when Adobe built its first towers in downtown San Jose, urban planning has shifted its focus from the buildings themselves to “the spaces in between,” Walesh says, a switch intended to enliven city streetscapes.
As Google makes its plans to build a new campus that is expected to bring upward of 20,000 workers to the edge of downtown San Jose over the next two decades, as well as housing and retail around a revamped Diridon train station, Walesh is making sure Google’s vision melds with the city’s mission.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
QHow has San Jose changed since you took over as economic development director in 2011, a time when the city’s redevelopment agency was phasing out?
AFirst of all, the Vision 2040 general plan had been adopted and I don’t know if everyone appreciates what an affirmation that was, that San Jose’s future is going to be urban, not suburban, and that we’re going to lead the way in developing and making this transition from a suburban to an urban model. That really started changing the importance of the pedestrian experience. And we started to think about how do we create not just a great downtown but great places all over San Jose that
“It’s one of the most important next-generation development projects happening in the U.S. if not the world right now.” — Kim Walesh, San Jose’s economic development director, on expectations for Google’s downtown village
works for people who are walking or biking, not just people driving in their cars. And that’s a pretty radical notion. Q
What is the legacy of the redevelopment agency and how has that affected planning decisions now?
A Redevelopment had invested probably close to $3 billion in downtown, which was a really important base for where we are today. Great bones to the downtown — trees, the street grid, infrastructure and institutions that wouldn’t be here but for redevelopment like the Convention Center and SAP Center and hotels and the Tech Museum. So luckily we have a lot of great public spaces, but they’re underutilized spaces. So a lot of what we tried to do in the city is talk about the importance of public life.
Q And how would you think San Jose is doing, right now, today, on that people-centered vision?
A There’s been a sea change in the last five years in City Hall — in terms of valuing the better design of the spaces between buildings. You see, for example, movie nights in parks and yoga in the parks. You see Viva Calle — an open streets movement that started in Bogota and in Central America and South America and spread to the U.S. It’s all about taking back public spaces. Q Adobe is just breaking ground on its fourth tower downtown. What was your role in that project and how will it exemplify the new urban vision? A A number of us worked with them to sort of iterate and set expectations about what it’s going to feel like for the pedestrian who walks along San Fernando there. It’s going to be a more major pedestrian bike corridor connecting the downtown core to Diridon, so you’ll see some things that they did, including being able to see through the first floor glass there. There’s space potentially for a store — design features of that fourth tower that are very different from what is in the first three towers.
Secondly, we needed to figure out whether and how to allow Adobe to do something that had never been done before in our community and rarely done in California — and that is creating a pedestrian bridge that connects the existing three towers over what’s called public right of way, literally over the street.
Q
What was your role in attracting Google to build in San Jose?
A
As a matter of course we have a business development team that reaches out to companies in our city that are expanding and to companies throughout the Bay Area. So in the case of Google, I was really just involved with one meeting where we met with (Google VP) Mark Golan because we knew him when he was at Cisco and he ended up in real estate in Google. We were in communication with him about, “Hey, if Google ever is thinking of expanding, come look at San Jose, anywhere in San Jose.” They said, “Thank you, we really appreciate the information.” But at that time, coming to San Jose and looking at places south of Mountain View weren’t part of their real estate strategy.
Then something changed on the Google side, which I don’t know. But they became interested in early 2017 in learning about the Diridon station area. They reached out first to the mayor and then my colleague (deputy economic development director) Nanci Klein was brought into some conversations to share information . ... We were, quite frankly, thrilled that it was a company of Google’s quality, that wasn’t just an investor in real estate, but was a company that actually wanted to be part of our community for a very long time and be part of us. Q With all the big development projects underway with developers Jay Paul Co. and Gary Dillabough and Google, are you worried that if they build it, they won’t come? A I’m not worried that they won’t come. Not now. San Jose has a vision of being a city that is going to be fundamentally welcome of growth — both residential growth and job growth — a city that is going to be at the center of the transportation network in the Bay Area and one of the most important transportation nodes in the whole Western U.S. and a city that’s embracing of urbanism. Those are fundamentally where the investors know the future is, especially in the Bay Area. So it’s not a matter to me of whether they’ll come or not. It’s a matter of timing: How many of these projects can we get underway now in this economic cycle? And what other ones are we teeing up for the next economic cycle?