Although our Key Projects List doesn’t list every project under review, approved, or under construction, but it does reflect 22,984 residential units, 3.2 million sf of commercial retail space, 32 million sf of commercial office space, and 2,600 hotel rooms. Of this, construction is underway on 4,000 residential units, 1.3 million sf of commercial retail space, 8.6 million sf of commercial office, and 465 hotel rooms.  

Downtown development continues to remain strong: the Cityview project was approved by Council in June and 200 Park and Miro are well underway with construction. In July, 200 Park pulled their foundation permit and Miro was able to celebrate topping out of the building. Several new downtown towers have been submitted over the past few months including DiNapoli's Almaden Boulevard Tower (500K+ office space), Westbank's Park Habitat tower (1.2M+ office, commercial, and Tech Interactive expansion) and Urban Catalyst's The Mark (222 residential units), and we anticipate more projects are preparing to submit Planning permits.  

The North San Pedro area in northern downtown is well underway with construction: with First Community Housing's North San Pedro Studios, Z&L's 188 West Saint James, and Intracorp's The Julian, we're anticipating completion of 1,126 residential units and 20,000 sf of commercial space within the next 18 months in this 20.5-acre area.  

 Also of note downtown is the opening of The Grad residential high-rise in August. Not only was this 260-unit, 19-story tower completed just shy of four years from the date they submitted their Planning application, it was completed by the target completion date that was set at the beginning of construction. We are happy to see the transformation of this collection of vacant lots, under-utilized buildings, and a vacant McDonald's into a vibrant home for our student population. Work continues on the ground-floor commercial spaces (storefront glass has been in short supply in the past few months) and we look forward to completion with several new commercial tenant spaces and a south-façade mural. 

Much of the City’s focus since the shelter-in-place order in March was to ensure that construction would get back on track, by continuing to issue permits, prioritizing key inspections, and coordinating priorities with PG&E.  Fortunately, only a limited number of construction sites had to pause construction due to pandemic-related financial issues.  We anticipated that we would see how the pandemic affected the real estate development pipeline in San Jose in the third quarter of the year, as it was likely that financial issues would be identified at milestone stages of a project. For instance, when a project makes a decision whether or not to move from Planning to Building permits or from Building permits to construction, rather than at mid-entitlements or mid-process of securing Building permits (when work has already been funded). 

A handful of hotel projects (approximating about 900 hotel rooms) have not made substantial progress on entitlements. Building permits and Planning submittals do not indicate many hotels queuing for development.  

Although progress on a few of the larger housing projects has slowed, the current Key Projects List does not show an overall slowing of projects.  Planning is still receiving many applications for housing projects including more than 1,000 residential units in the key development projects and even more in numerous smaller projects. We are viewing this as a sign of interim insecurity in funding potential, hoping that funding will still be available to support pipeline projects relatively soon. We anticipate developers will see value in starting entitlements in the near term with the expectation that funding will be available to support the more costly construction phase in the future. In OED, we will be working closely with any projects whose progress may be slowed to understand the contributing factors and support them through to occupancy.  

Additionally, over the past four months, several approved key development projects (representing 293 units, 24,876 sf of retail space and 91,079 sf of office space) have submitted for Building and Public Works permits and two others (Samaritan Court medical office and 1605 Industrial warehousing) kick off construction demonstrating that we are continuing to see large projects move forward.