A conceptual rendering of downtown San Jose after redevelopment. | Google / Downtown West Mixed-use Plan
A plan by Google to redevelop an 80-acre portion of downtown San Jose is no longer moving forward, leaving the area, where some buildings have already been demolished, vacant. As Julia Prodis Sulek reports in The Mercury News, Google paused the project three years ago, “leaving much of the site as flattened slabs of concrete and empty asphalt parking lots.”
The project could have been “everything that urbanists dream of,” a mixed-use hub of offices, retail, recreation, and housing for as many as 25,000 Google employees and other residents. Now, San Jose, which sold Google 16 city-owned parcels for the project, has little legal recourse for forcing Google to build anything on the site…