Site preparation is officially underway on a project that will replace the Santa Clara golf course across from Levi’s Stadium with an urban village that could bring up to 25,000 new jobs—but only 1,700 new homes. If all goes according to plan, the 9.2 million-square-foot City Place development will break ground by 2020.
Though the project will force David’s Restaurant, a restaurant and wedding venue on the golf course, to close, it will make way for a host of new dining establishments—including a food hall similar to the San Francisco Ferry Building—as part of a commercial hub that could replace downtown as the center of gravity in Santa Clara.
At build-out, the $8 billion project by Related Companies—a firm perhaps best known for building the 28 million-square-foot Hudson Yards in Manhattan—will include everything from clusters of condos, an open-air market and a million square feet of shops, eateries and entertainment venues at 5155 Stars and Stripes Drive. The first phase of construction comprises a 440,000-square-foot office building, a 430-room hotel and some homes.
All that, atop an old landfill.
“The central part of the development will feature the project’s restaurant, retail, and entertainment space, and will serve as the main gathering area for visitors, shoppers, and workers,” Related Companies explained in a summary of the development.
Mayor Lisa Gillmor said she has high hopes for the project. “We loved the ambition of Related, especially considering their past work,” she said.
The proposal has prompted considerable pushback from neighboring San Jose, which expressed concern about the development inducing a massive influx of car traffic around and along the already congested Highway 101 and State Route 237. And though accessible by light rail, the 240-acre property lies far enough away from BART and Caltrain stations to make it inconvenient enough to encourage car traffic.
San Jose also criticized its neighboring municipality for approving yet another development with far more jobs than homes to accommodate the expanded workforce.
Related Companies has been planning City Place for the past six years, and formally pitched it to city officials in 2016 as a way to revitalize the area around the golf course.
Architectural firm Foster + Partners, which worked on the Apple “spaceship” in Cupertino, has been hired to draft designs for the development alongside Gensler. Newmark Knight Frank’s Executive Vice Chairman Phil Mahoney will look for prospective office tenants.
Though Related will foot the bill for the preliminary work on the development, the company partnered with Oxford Properties Group to garner enough additional investment to bring it across the finish line.
The project is on track to open its first phase by 2023 and expected to eventually generate $17 million in ongoing annual tax revenue for the city.
“We’re a medium-sized city, but we’re doing it big,” Gillmor said. “We have developments such as [Levi’s] Stadium and tech companies that are on the level of larger cities.”
Oh great — the City of Santa Clara, once again, bites off more than they can chew! Our LITTLE city sure is “All hat and NO COWBOY” … only 1700 homes? NO traffic improvements! No BART connection! Proves that the City is run by a bunch of Yahoos who don’t walk their own walk — what about the housing shortage? What about the homeless? What about all the things you keep shoving down the citizens’ throats? Those must all be solved and no longer important because you sure aren’t dealing with them … or did Related donate enough to your campaigns agai that they aren’t THAT important after all. Don’t the politicians and staff ever learn from their mistakes? Another half-baked project brought into town by a bunch of east coasters … the Niners haven’t cleaned your clock enough yet? CIty Hall IS really as STUPID as they seem … REALLY, really STUPID!!
Santa Clara … Home to the best politicians money can buy; where long term, loyal companies don’t mean a damn thing … like David’s Restaurant … who have been thrown under and dragged by the City Hall bus, Loyalty — we don’t need no stinkin’ loyalty. We are available For Sale on the DUMP!
Careful Santa Clara voters and citizens … another fleecing is coming in our future — wonder how much in lawsuits this one is gonna cost us?? How about voting in a Sunshine Law so they are required to expose all their shenanigans and the cost to us. They spend our money soooo foolishly and here it goes again …
> What about the homeless?
San Jose stands ready to assist the City of Santa Clara with its homeless needs.
How many can we ship you?
The small cities around San Jose continue to exacerbate San Jose’s jobs-housing imbalance with projects like this. They gain the revenues and San Jose takes on the problems of housing the workforce, housing the unhoused, and providing services to residents like parks, libraries, community centers without the revenues to do it. These projects also exacerbate gridlock. Taking on jobs without approving adequate housing in cities already jobs-rich and housing poor needs to be disincentivized or we need a mechanism for these smaller neighbors to compensate San Jose when they create externalities and further upset the jobs-housing imbalance.
Well Santa Clara is acting like Santa Clara always does.You can’t blame them cause it works for them. Spend your energies going after San Jose City Council who should not cave to pressure from developers and keep its zoning for business,industrial and retail use. That gives us the tax dollars needed to fund a full service city.
Related and its executives are also strongly tied to the trump organization, including being its top financier. You can google various combinations of the terms Related Company, Related Group, Ross, Perez, Trump, Ladder Capital Finance, Deutsche Bank, to read about it. I wonder if santa clara realizes who it is getting involved with…
> Related and its executives are also strongly tied to the trump organization, , , , You can google various combinations of the terms . . . .
Put “Trump” in any Google search and you will get a trillion, gazillion hits. It’s a Trump universe.
What a brilliant Idea, build it on top of an old land fill, that sounds more like the infamous Love Canal, New York to me.
Go ahead build, it just see what happens when all that methane start migrating up with all the toxic chemicals early Silicon Valley dumped there in the 70’s and 80’s. The Lawyers are going to be so rich we can then tax them to death.
Will it blow up or kill everyone living there with cancer first?
Lots of jobs but no where to live.
Great.
Yes, with all the jobs/housing imbalace in the valley building something this massive will greatly exacerbate it. Seems particularly tone-deaf. Sure, things are by many measures going well economically (obviously nothing to do with the council) but what happens with this project when things aren’t booming?