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North San Jose Revitalization

North San Jose is home to more than 1,200 of the world’s best-known technology companies, including eBay. But North San Jose is showing its age, with an outdated land-use pattern that does not reflect the innovation and creativity one might expect from Silicon Valley. Instead, North San Jose is full of two- and three-story campus industrial buildings surrounded by vast surface parking lots, connected by wide streets that are built for speeding cars.

North San Jose is a pedestrian nightmare, but it is also ripe for a change. North San Jose has a reliable light-rail system that offers a great opportunity for new, better, development.

In 2005, San Jose’s City Council approved the North San Jose Area Development Policy in an attempt to revive the city’s business district. The policy targets the area west of Interstate 880, south of Route 237, and east of the Guadalupe River. North San Jose will embrace a mix of uses and more compact development, will include many more homes so people have the option to live near where they work, and will allow for pedestrians, bicyclists and transit riders to get around more safely and easily.

The redevelopment of North San Jose was stalled for over a year with lawsuits (see Campaign Update below), but after a December 2006 ruling will now be able to move forward.

The redevelopment will:

• Allow for an additional 27 million square feet of new research and development and office space for businesses.
• Include up to 32,000 new high-density residential units in close proximity to employment centers.
• Bring up to 83,000 new jobs to San Jose, helping to balance the city's proportions of jobs and housing.
• Make improvements to the transportation system to encourage more use of the Valley’s light rail system.

North San Jose can become a place that residents enjoy, that is inviting, vibrant, safe and walkable. But to do that, certain amenities should be a part of the plan. These include:

• Parks, plazas and other open space attractions that are accessible to the people who live and work there.
• More bicycle lanes to offer people more options for getting around, so they don't have depend entirely on cars.
• Wider sidewalks to make walking a pleasant, safe experience.
• A new school site to accommodate students who live in the new homes in the area.   

What's At Stake

As San Jose—the Bay Area's largest city—continues to grow, the redevelopment of North San Jose has the potential to be a model of smart growth that the city and the region could emulate.

North San Jose already has good infrastructure in place, and is an ideal place to direct new development, instead of paving natural areas and farmlands outside the city and having to create entirely new infrastructure as well.

Now it is important to ensure that North San Jose lives up to its promise. 

What You Can Do

• Find out more about North San Jose’s redevelopment at the City's website.
  
  
• Show your support for smart growth in North San Jose by writing a letter to the editor of the San Jose Mercury News at letters@mercurynews.com. (The Mercury News asks that letters be 125 words or less if possible.)
  
  
• The North First Street Area is a Great Communities Collaborative site. To find out more about this effort, go to their website.