Local governments continue to exacerbate the housing crisis while blaming NIMBYs — and making it easier for Wiener World legislators to push bills that destroy our quality of life.
Huge office complexes are being actively pursued in downtown San Jose
Google is planning a transit-oriented village near the Diridon train station consisting of office buildings, homes, restaurants, shops, and parks where 25,000 people would work, including 15,000 to 20,000 of the search giant’s employees.
Millions of square feet of office space, enough to nearly double the size of downtown San Jose’s office inventory, is in the development pipeline, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said Friday.
“We have more than 7 million square feet of office space in the pipeline,” Liccardo said during an update of the San Jose Downtown Association. “And that doesn’t count anything that Google winds up building.”
“Downtown San Jose has a pretty diminutive footprint,” Liccardo said. “Clearly the downtown boundaries are starting to expand.”
Downtown San Jose now contains 10 million square feet of office space, and the addition of 7 million square feet would usher in dramatic changes in the city center.
“We’re looking at more than doubling the size of the city’s downtown core when you include Google,” said Mark Ritchie, president of Ritchie Commercial, a real estate firm.
The addition of 7 million square feet would be enough room for potentially 40,000 workers, or even more — which would roughly equal the population of Campbell or Danville.
So that’s at least 65,000 new workers. And not one bit of proposed legislation calling for a moratorium on office buildings.
