Monday, August 25, 2014

Boston Properties Moving Forward on Huge Office Project

There are so many projects in the queue for North San Jose that it is difficult to keep track of them all. You have the mysterious Peery-Arrillaga project that would encompass one huge Fortune 100 tech tenant and up to 2 million SQFT. Then you have n1 Campus with up to 2.8 million SQFT. Over on Zanker Road you have Innovation Place with 540,000 SQFT. Now there is talk of another huge office project moving forward in the area.

Boston Properties owns a 24.5-acre business park on North First Street with five buildings totaling 190,000 SQFT that were all built in 1981. They want to tear down all of these buildings and create up to 1.55 million SQFT of new office space along with some retail. Most buildings would be 5-6 stories tall with one up to 10 stories (perhaps taking a note from Samsung).

It is still not clear if Boston Properties is going to wait for some anchor tenants to build or start the project speculatively, but they are applying for entitlements which could be approved by the city as soon as the end of the year. One thing is certain, North First could look dramatically different in a few years than it does today.

Source: SVBJ


6 comments:

  1. North First and what cross street(s)?

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  2. I could be wrong but I think this is north of Trimble and south of Montague...and the site is the entire block between First and Zanker (i.e. it's a pretty big site but for 1.5M sq ft you would expect so!).

    Lots of proposals but no shovels in the ground...these 3 projects (Peery, n1 Campus and this one) would be over 6 million sq ft along a one mile stretch of North First street. That would be amazing.

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  3. Why such secrecy over the location? And the project has no name?....are we called it the "Huge Office Project".

    A huge 24 acre project like this should trigger its own CEQA review vs falling back on the default North SJ EIR. When is the planning commission hearing?

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    1. The location isn't a secret, its the collection of office buildings east of 1st street between Plumeria and Daggett. And I'm sure if there's a hearing you can find the planning commission website, though I couldn't imagine anyone would be against more office space here, outside of the usual "don't build anything ever" crowd...

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  4. Few are against building, but many I would expect would like to see the building done correctly and in-line with the needs of the area. Decades of rubber stamped construction have not left a good feeling that future construction will be done correctly.

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    1. Basically, what we need is a mirror image of what we have today along North First Street. Replace aging low-rise buildings that are completely surrounded by massive parking lots with medium/high-rise buildings that come up to the street with parking underground or at lease in structures. Encourage and/or incentivize people to use public transit.

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