Office Redo Plans Housing Next to Santa Clara Caltrain Station
University Station project to replace 227K SF campus with for 409 homes.
A 227K SF office campus that sits on the city line between San Jose and Santa Clara will be demolished to make way for apartments and townhomes.
Los Gatos-based developer Morley Brothers has filed plans to redevelop University Station, a campus of four two-story office buildings located at 451, 469, and 471 El Camino Real. The property is owned by Bixby Land, based in Newport Beach.
The 11-acre office campus, which is located across from Santa Clara University and next to the Santa Clara Caltrain Station, will be replaced with 298 apartments and 111 townhomes, with 62 apartment units designated as affordable housing for low-income households, according to a report in SF YIMBY.
A small retail shopping center adjacent to the site is not part of the project and will remain open, the report said. The site also is in proximity to San Jose Mineta International Airport.
Most of the new housing in the development will be located within a four-story apartment building encompassing 298 units with a density of 70 units per acre.
The project application has been filed under California’s SB 330, which expedites approvals and allows the developer to use the State Density Bonus program, increase residential capacity and apply for zoning waivers.
The project, designed by Los Angeles-based KTGY, will require approvals from the planning commissions in Santa Clara and San Jose. About an acre of the property sits in San Jose.
A new BART station is planned by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) next to the Santa Clara Caltrain Station as the end-of-the-line station for VTA’s BART Silicon Valley Phase II extension project.
The six-mile extension, which according to VTA’s website is the largest single public infrastructure project ever constructed, connects the Berryessa Transit Center to downtown San Jose and ends just across the Santa Clara line at Santa Clara Station.
California had close to 14,000 commercial-to-residential projects in 2023, 31% of which were office conversions, according to Rentcafe’s annual Adaptive Reuse Report, based on data from Yardi Matrix. The office-to-resi conversions encompassed 4,306 apartment units.