The bare dirt at El Paseo de Saratoga is finally giving way to concrete and steel. Heavy equipment and cranes are now reshaping the long-planned West San Jose site, and after months of demolition and excavation, the first towers and retail boxes are poking above the fence line along Saratoga Avenue.
Groundbreaking Ushers In Vertical Work
Yesterday, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported that Sand Hill Property Company and city officials held a ceremonial groundbreaking and that crews are now shifting from excavation into above-ground construction, marking the project’s official move into its vertical phase. City planning records list the master-plan parcel at about 10.76 acres and detail the permits and amendments that cleared the development to proceed.
What’s Being Built
Sand Hill, working with Holland Partners and Sunrise Senior Living, is putting up a mixed-use urban village that will combine apartments, a senior care facility and ground-floor retail, with a proposed Whole Foods box store in the mix, according to SF YIMBY. The current program calls for roughly 772 apartments and a 263-bed assisted-living building. The tallest residential tower is planned at 12 stories with about 398 homes and roughly 14,000 square feet of retail space.
The layout also threads in public plazas, paseos and about 3.5 acres of open space, intended to link the new buildings back to Saratoga Avenue instead of leaving them as an isolated island of density in a sea of parking lots.
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