Tall & Urban News

Two new office towers are being eyed in downtown San Jose near the Children’s Discovery Museum, a project proposed by a veteran developer with a knack for finding choice development sites in the city’s urban core.

Woz Way Offices is the name of the proposed mixed-use development, which would total 1.8 million square feet (167,225 square meters) and consist of two office towers connected by a skybridge and ground-floor retail.

“The confluence of transit infrastructure in San Jose, BART, light rail, Rapid Bus Service, highways, which all converge downtown, is unparalleled,” said Shawn Milligan, partner at KT Urban, a Cupertino-based development firm.

The two towers would be 20 stories high and be located at 280 Woz Way near the Children’s Discovery Museum, San Jose Convention Center, and several light rail stations.

The development would be a five-minute drive or a brief walk away from the Diridon train station, currently a hub for Caltrain, the ACE Train, Amtrak, the Capitol Corridor, light rail, and buses. Diridon Station also is slated to be a future BART stop.

The increasingly busy Diridon Station has spurred rising interest in downtown San Jose from an array of developers as well as tech titans.

Next to and near Diridon Station, Google has proposed a mixed-use transit village called Downtown West consisting of office buildings, hotels, shops, restaurants, cultural centers, entertainment hubs, and housing where the search giant could employ 25,000 people.

San Jose-based Adobe Systems has begun construction of a big office tower that would dramatically expand the tech titan’s downtown headquarters campus that currently consists of three office highrises.

Jay Paul Co. has launched the construction of a 19-story office tower totaling 875,000 square feet (81,290 square meters) that would sprout at 200 Park Ave.

Boston Properties has broken ground on a US$1 billion tech campus called Platform 16 near the corner of Autumn Parkway and Julian Street that would total 1.1 million square feet (102,193 square meters) and consist of three modern office buildings, featuring 16 eye-catching terraces.

Mega-developer Westbank has teamed up with development entrepreneur Gary Dillabough to develop or upgrade six key projects in downtown San Jose, including the Bank of Italy Building, potentially supplying a big boost for the urban core of the Bay Area’s largest city.

Up-and-coming developer Urban Catalyst has its sights on the development of several key projects in downtown San Jose.

Woz Way Offices, in addition to the two towers, will feature 30,000 square feet (2,787 square meters) of terraces, and 6,000 square feet (557 square meters) of retail on the ground floor.

“We see the Woz Way project as a great way to activate this area with new opportunities,” Milligan said.

KT Urban executives are well aware of the wide-ranging fallout from the coronavirus. However, they believe plenty of opportunities exist in downtown San Jose once the deadly bug’s shadow has vanished from the economy.

“We recognize what is going on with coronavirus and today’s climate, but our confidence in downtown San Jose is as strong as it ever has been,” said Mark Tersini, a principal executive with KT Urban.

For that reason, the Woz Way Offices groundbreaking isn’t planned until sometime in 2021.

“Our plan is to have this project ready to go after the market comes back,” Tersini said.

For more on this story, go to Mercury News.