San Jose owns more than 1,250 properties including City Hall, parks and revenue generators like the San Jose International Airport. But there’s no consolidated inventory which makes management and maintenance difficult, a recent city audit revealed. Whenever a question about a city-owned property comes up, officials have to do extensive research across departments and use...

The high costs of building in San Jose, among the highest in the state, imperil the supply of a crucial source of financing for affordable housing: state tax credits. “Each year, these programs change their funding requirements,” Michael Lane, state policy director at urban planning think tank SPUR, told San José Spotlight. “It takes multiple years to put...

Zack Anderson only pays about $350 a month in rent thanks to housing subsidies from a local nonprofit—but not for the past eight months. He said he’s been holding off on payments because his South San Jose apartment is infested with bedbugs, mildew and needs urgent maintenance. The apartment is managed by Downtown Streets Team,...

Google is coming to downtown San Jose and it’s bringing 4,000 housing units with it. But making sure that a quarter of those units are affordable will be difficult. The biggest obstacle to building affordable housing, city leaders say, is the high cost of land. “The great thing about the Google model is that they’re not...

In the 1950s, youngsters bopped to doo-wop, folks dined at drive-in burger joints and architects dreamed of homes in outer space. It was in this decade that the “Googie” style of architecture flourished, eventually bearing the construction of what would become Bo Town restaurant in downtown San Jose. Now developers aim to erect a 29-story residential tower at...

Two years after the sale of Hayes Mansion, San Jose has finally rid itself of the property’s massive debt—and it’s actually getting some money back. San Jose bought the historic mansion in 1985 for $2.5 million and turned it into a conference center with a dining room, 214 guest rooms, a pool and a fitness...

San Jose is lagging behind its 2017 promise to build 25,000 units of new housing—10,000 of them affordable—by 2022. Now, officials are looking for solutions to the shortfall and hoping to jumpstart construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs). To meet its goal of 25,000 new units in five years, the city needed to build about...

More than three years after Google set its sights on San Jose, a major milestone occurred Wednesday for its plan to build a massive campus in the city’s urban core. The San Jose Planning Commission unanimously approved Google’s proposed 80-acre campus at its evening meeting—moving the city’s largest land use project another step forward. “I...