SAN JOSE — A group of neighborhood activists has launched an app and website to help people keep track of development and construction in downtown San Jose, where a building boom looms.
The potential construction surge without precedent in San Jose, and one of the largest ever in the Bay Area. Vast new commercial and residential projects — and massive upgrades for infrastructure and transit — are in the works in the city’s downtown.
Google is pushing ahead with Downtown West, a new neighborhood of office buildings, homes, shops, restaurants and hotel facilities. Boston Properties has resumed construction on the Platform 16 tech campus. Jay Paul is finishing up an office tower and could launch more towers. Westbank is eyeing several downtown projects. Other developers are also moving forward with an array of proposals for new highrises.
Plus, major BART construction that would add three new San Jose stations, two downtown and one east of the downtown, will add to the potential burst of construction.
With all of this emerging from the ground or on the main drawing boards, people might find it tough for anyone to keep track of everything that’s being actively planned or is potentially in the works.
Now, a local neighborhood group has initiated a high-tech system to do just that, said Bob Staedler, a spokesperson for the Stakeholders + Neighborhoods Initiative, a nonprofit that is attempting to reshape the way people engage with their community, city leaders and development executives.
“We are facing decades of projects,” said Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use consultancy that is advising the nonprofit. “We created a simple, no-nonsense place to keep people up to date on what is going on with development and construction.”
The nonprofit’s primary community of interest is what’s officially known as the Diridon Station Area, a long and narrow district that includes areas near the SAP Center, Diridon train hub, and stretches south to roughly Interstate 280 on both sides of the local Amtrak and Caltrain lines as well as State Route 87. The Diridon Station Area totals about 250 acres.
The group is also keeping tabs on other parts of the downtown.
“We want this to be a free flow of information,” Staedler said. “We will aggregate the information about what’s going on in the area and keep things very straightforward and simple.”
The new nonprofit’s website specifically lists the Downtown West project, the Gardiner Community Center and the Diridon Station Area as the featured projects for the Stakeholders + Neighborhoods Initiative, also known as S+NI.
By bringing together the neighborhoods with existing and new stakeholders such as Google, the Sharks, San Jose Unified School District, Caltrain, and private developers, we can work together to achieve the best outcomes for all involved,” S+NI states on its website. “We look forward to bringing everyone together on this remarkable journey.”
People can download the app by searching for an app called S+NI that can be used on an iPhone or an Android phone.
“You would be able to check what is going on in your immediate neighborhood, on your street, or in front of your house or where you work,” Staedler said.
The system will work differently than the Nextdoor website. Nextdoor enables threads of comments, along with alerts on an array of activities in a neighborhood. S+NI won’t allow comments.
“We don’t need to add to the current comment ecosystem,” Staedler said. “People can go to Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor, their HOA to comment.
People can still reach the site’s operators through the website or the app to provide a comment or information. But those comments won’t be posted on the S+NI website or the app.
“We want this to be a positive environment to get information out to the public without being bombarded by discourse that is not all that helpful,” Staedler said.
When the development and transit upgrades are viewed in aggregate, downtown San Jose residents, workers businesses and property owners must ponder a staggering amount of construction in downtown San Jose’s future.
“The development activity represents one of the biggest projects ever in the Bay Area,” Staedler said.
