SAN JOSE — A housing highrise that could produce hundreds of apartments could sprout in downtown San Jose now that a key city panel has endorsed the residential project.
The 25-story tower — if built — would bring 210 residential units to downtown San Jose, documents on file with the city’s Planning Department show.
The highrise, proposed for a parcel with addresses of 439-451 South Fourth Street in San Jose, would spring 274 feet into the air as envisioned in the project plans.
“Its primary focus,” said Salvatore Caruso, the principal architect for the project, is “student and faculty housing.”
The housing tower development site is within a block of the southwest corner of the San Jose State University main campus.
At present, the site consists of a 30-unit apartment building and a single-family house that had previously been converted to commercial uses such as a photo store, city officials told the San Jose Planning Commission at its meeting on Feb. 14.
The San Jose Planning Commission approved the proposed housing tower unanimously and recommended that the City Council give the development plans final municipal approval.
The proposed development would contain an array of features that could help entice residents, the planning documents show.
“Amenities include study rooms, a dog park, a gym, pool, community rooms and rooftop amenities,” the planning documents state.
Rooftop amenities should increasingly become a feature of residential and office towers in downtown San Jose once these projects are built, Sal Caruso, the housing highrise’s architect, stated during the Planning Commission meeting.
“We need to activate our rooftops to make them viable and liveable,” Caruso said during a presentation to the city panel. “We can have a skyline that is interesting and activated.”
Lively rooftops could become a vibrant companion to the ongoing efforts to activate the street-level sections of the downtown.
“Active rooftops will create places for people to come together,” Caruso said.
But the big problem, at present, is whether this housing tower — even with the demand for housing in the Bay Area as well as San Jose — can be built anytime soon.
That’s because sky-high interest rates, expensive labor and costly building materials have made it increasingly tricky for highrises to be financed and constructed, according to real estate experts.
“I just hope the financing comes through at some point,” Planning Commissioner Pierluigi Oliverio said before the panel’s vote to approve the project.