The project was expected to generate about $79 million annually in property taxes.
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.
According to Sulek, “A nearly 700-page development agreement approved unanimously by the City Council in 2021 included no penalties if the project never moves forward. Google pledged as much as $200 million for community programs, with most of that money released as construction milestones are reached. If Google never builds anything, it would be required to contribute only about half of that amount.”
The stalled project is now becoming “a chokehold on the city,” says David Mulvehill, a partner in several restaurants in the area. Google has leased some warehouses and lots on the site to businesses, but much of it remains empty and closed-off. When a local bike shop that was leasing a warehouse on the property offered to buy it, Google declined.
Read the full story: San Jose bet its future on a Google megacampus downtown. Now the land sits mostly empty.
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