San Jose: Anticipating Google campus, City Council approves taller buildings

After more than a decade of debate over how tall buildings in the nation’s 10th largest city should stand, San Jose’s notoriously squat skyline is finally set to rise in the coming years.

The ability to build upward will allow companies — particularly Google, which is planning to build a large campus west of Highway 87 — access to real estate in the sky that has previously been off limits.

The City Council set the change in motion when it voted unanimously this week to allow higher buildings downtown and near Diridon Station to the west despite intense opposition from members of the airport commission and critics who worry the city is kowtowing to Google.

“I think that history is going to show that this was a very devastating move for our airport, and I wish that city officials would have taken a little more time to look into this further,” said Dan Connolly, the chair of the airport commission.

Taller buildings are “essential to creating a more vibrant and urban downtown,” said Matt Mahood, the president of the Silicon Valley Organization, a business advocacy group.

Under the new height limits, officially known as Scenario 4, buildings downtown could rise between 5 and 35 feet, or a modest couple of stories. But near the SAP Center, which is 110 feet tall, heights could more than double, going up 70 to 150 feet. That, the city says, could add about 9.5 million more square feet of commercial and residential development. It likely will be years before residents see the taller structures, but the vote signals the coming of a major change in the density of the city’s core.

“I think this is about what kind of city do we want to create,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said. “This is about our vision for the future of the city.”

The city’s airport executives and top economic development officials say allowing taller buildings will bring new jobs, retail and housing to San Jose and inject new life into a long-overlooked industrial area south of the airport.

Scott Knies, the head of the San Jose Downtown Association, said the council has opened the doors for the biggest change in a generation and fixed stifling policy. Downtown where construction costs and the price of land are sky high, Knies continued, a couple of stories could mean the difference between a developer deciding to move forward with a project and calling it off.

And, Knies said, allowing Google and other developers to put office space and housing up in the air clears the way for parks and public art and other amenities residents can enjoy on the ground.

David Bini, the executive director of the local Building and Construction Trades Council, agreed.

“More construction means more construction jobs,” Bini said.

But pilots on the airport commission say it could make flying less safe and relegate San Jose International Airport (SJC) to a middling airport.

“Our conclusion, which the majority of the Airport Commission agreed with when we reconvened on 1/24/19, is that if the council adopts Scenario 4, it will render SJC as a regional airport, putting flights to Asia, European and some transcontinental flights in financial jeopardy,” wrote Ken Pyle, one of the commissioners.

International and other long flights might not be financially worthwhile for airlines under the new rules, they warn, because taller structures could force some airlines to remove passengers or luggage on those flights to make sure planes are light enough to still clear buildings in case of an emergency and they lose an engine.

Liccardo and several council members — including Vice Mayor Chappie Jones, Councilman Raul Peralez and Councilwoman Magdalena Carrasco — have hit back at the allegations, particularly those related to safety.

“We want to emphasize that these recommendations do not in any way pertain to safety,” they wrote in a memo ahead of the vote.

Some commissioners, including Connolly and Cathy Hendrix, have questioned how much influence Google has had in pushing the city toward taller buildings and are outraged that a steering committee put together to consider the issue included Mahood, Bini and Knies but not an active commercial airline pilot. The tech giant has snapped up some 50 acres near Diridon Station and will benefit significantly by being able to build not only out, but up.

“We have a commission system in the city that, honestly, I don’t think is valued by the city or the elected officials,” Connolly said. “I’m not sure why on issues that are so important the airport commission didn’t get the opportunity to be fully engaged” from the start.

Google — whose San Jose development is referred to as Project Spartan in a city contract — and its consultant have been in regular contact with city officials and the consulting firm the city hired to study height limits.

Some of those concerns have been taken up by opponents of Google, like the grassroots group Serve the People, who don’t want to see the tech giant build a campus in San Jose.

“Corruption, negligence, and a lack of concern for SOME of our lives have marked this dirty deal from the start,” the group said in a tweet.

But some other labor groups that have raised concerns about Google in the past and council members who have been receptive to those concerns indicated they were open to working out a compromise that could add affordable housing.

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The labor-backed group Working Partnerships USA endorsed the idea, saying the policy would help protect residents from being displaced.

“By developing an incentive zoning policy, we can ensure that the benefits of the (upzoning) of Diridon Station and the downtown core does not only benefit developers, landowners and corporations like Google,” Jeffrey Buchanan, the organization’s director of public policy, wrote in a letter to the council, “but ultimately benefits the city’s residents by generating community benefits like producing and preserving affordable housing and addressing displacement.”

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