SAN JOSE — Two new towers proposed for downtown San Jose would add about 650 residential units to the city’s skyline, a project that is located near other efforts to add housing in the city’s urban core.

Proposals for the residential high rises first emerged in 2016, when developer DAL Properties told this news organization that the company had entered discussions with San Jose officials about the feasibility of two housing towers at 255 W. Julian St. DAL said that several hundred units could comprise each tower. The project is being built by the developers Mark Lazzarini and Tony Arreola.

“We know there’s a market for this,” Lazzarini said Monday. “These urban areas like San Jose are in high demand. People want to live in a walk-able community that’s close to transit, entertainment and restaurants that have an urban lifestyle.”

Silicon Valley’s dire lack of housing for its burgeoning workforce of tech and non-tech employees has only intensified the need for residential units and made the project more feasible.

“There continues to be a scarcity of housing relative to employment growth,” Lazzarini said. “The challenge will be getting to market. We will reevaluate as we go in terms of construction and the project’s feasibility.”

The DAL firm, operating as Terrascape Ventures for this development, recently submitted specific proposals for the complex.

The project will included 653 residential units in the towers, as well as residence and amenity lobbies, and commercial spaces, Terrascape Ventures wrote in a submission to San Jose planners. The ground-floor retail will total 10,000 square feet, Lazzarini said.

Each tower will be 18 stories high. The project is dubbed Davidson Plaza Towers.

“This project is in a great location and it has the best of all situations,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land use and planning consultancy.

The Davidson Plaza residential complex would be located a short distance from the Diridon transit station and a proposed Google transit-oriented community of offices and other facilities where potentially 15,000 to 20,000 of the tech giant’s employees might work. The Google proposal would add 6 million to 8 million square feet of offices to downtown San Jose.

“It is in a thriving downtown area, near San Pedro Square Market, near trails and two new parks, it’s not too far from Diridon Station and it will be right next to the freeway,” Staedler said. “This is still a community where people still need cars.”

The proposed housing towers also would be adjacent to sites where at least 1,500 residential units are planned on or near several vacant lots. Developers are pushing forward with multiple projects that would transform blighted blocks, decaying buildings and vacant lots in the city’s urban heart into a vibrant community.

The Diridon transportation hub is slated to become a major nexus for an array of transit lines, including BART, high-speed rail, light rail, Catrain, Amtrak and the ACE Train, along with buses.

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“Davidson Plaza will be a winner,” Staedler said. “It’s going to be a residential project that people can reach from anywhere in the Bay Area, either through transit or in their car.”