New downtown San Jose tower to begin construction this fall

SAN JOSE — A new downtown San Jose office tower is expected to begin construction in autumn, marking the beginning of a mega-campus envisioned by developer Jay Paul Co. for the urban core of the Bay Area’s largest city.

The office tower is expected to total 800,000 square feet and would sprout at 200 Park Ave. near the corner of South Almaden Boulevard in downtown San Jose, according to Jay Paul and a principal marketing agent for the project, Phil Mahoney, executive vice chairman with Newmark Knight Frank, a commercial real estate firm.

“This will be unlike anything ever built before in downtown San Jose,” Mahoney said Tuesday.

In two transactions on June 7, Jay Paul Co. paid $100 million for 200 Park Ave. and an adjacent site at 282 S. Almaden Blvd., plunking down $50 million on each parcel. Mark Schmidt, senior managing director with the San Jose office of commercial real estate firm CBRE, and Mahoney arranged the property purchases.

Those deals were conducted 11 months after Jay Paul Co. paid $283.5 million in July 2018 for nearly all of Cityview Plaza, a vast mixed-use complex right across Park Avenue that’s ripe for a massive redevelopment and creation of a dramatic new office campus geared towards tech titans.

“It will probably be in the early fall when we start construction” on the office tower at 200 Park Ave., Mahoney said.

Jay Paul Co. believes the Cityview Plaza redevelopment and the upcoming tower at Park Avenue and South Almaden Boulevard across the street would work in synergy with each other.

“This is going to be a single development,” Matt Lituchy, chief investment officer with Jay Paul Co., said in a recent interview about the company’s latest purchases in downtown San Jose.

Jay Paul’s ambitions for a coordinated campus could be enhanced by the city of San Jose’s plans to create and nurture a pedestrian-friendly boulevard that would encourage people to meander along Park Avenue.

The new tower would be the first office high rise in downtown San Jose built on a speculative basis since the completion in 2010 of the Riverpark 2 tower a few blocks away on West San Carlos Street.

“It will be great to see Jay Paul get underway and start to unleash the potential of downtown,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land use and planning consultancy.

Adobe, a cloud services tech titan, might wind up launching the first office tower in the city’s urban center since Riverpark 2 if it breaks ground by the end of July, as expected, on a new high rise to greatly expand its downtown San Jose headquarters campus. But the Adobe tower would be built specifically for the tech company, and wouldn’t fall into the speculative development category.

Starting in the summer of 2018, Jay Paul Co. has struck deals to buy five key downtown San Jose properties for a head-spinning $659.5 million.

Cityview Plaza would potentially contain 3.4 million square feet of office space, enough room for 17,000 to 23,000 workers, once it’s redeveloped as a new tech campus. An 800,000-square-foot tower across the street at 200 Park Ave. would mean Jay Paul intends to develop 4.2 million square feet on the two sides of the street.

“We are getting a new generation of office buildings in downtown San Jose, and this tower will reflect that,” Mahoney said, referring to the project at 200 Park Ave.

Share this: Print

View more on The Mercury News