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Comment by kochikame | Hacker News Reader

Downtown San Jose is a curious place. There are almost no stores and only a few big companies (like Adobe) clustered together. It seems like bars and restaurants are the only things really thriving there.

If you compare the experience of walking around downtown San Francisco or any other larger US city during a weekday or on a weekend, San Jose seems very, very quiet and lacking that "bustle" that big cities have the world over.

This Google development has the potential to give the downtown area some much needed balance and revitalization.

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Downtown San Jose business / office space is owned by a few agencies who aren't interested in working with the local business to build a better downtown, but instead are interested in kicking them out as much as possible from their leases to renovate and bring in all the other random non-local-built conglomerates into downtown.

I know this as I have a friend who owns a local business in downtown SJ who is being kicked off their lease, as well as every other club, restaurants, and businesses who's buildings were bought last year buy a single agency.

Not everything needs some big company to come in to make everything better, all that actually does is bring in a whole new wave of business to benefit off of what was built by others who were crushed before them.

I emphasize with the general sentiment, but this doesn't appear to be applicable to this particular deal, which seems to involve parking lots and disused government buildings.

There's a spot right across the street from Original Joe's. I'm not sure exactly how much of the building has been sitting empty for the past 10+ years, but the only time I've seen the corner retail space occupied was for a [temporary] pop-up store for SuperBowl 50's memorabilia while that was going on. This makes sense for somebody, and at the moment that's not me.

If the property has low prop13 taxes, then there's not much cost to keeping it empty. Lots of older california real estate like that... entire shopping malls are empty and "appreciating in value".

Prop13 on commercial property really needs to be balanced with heavy vacancy taxes.

Prop. 13 on commercial property needs to be terminated.

I don't understand this. If you are not receiving rent, that's a huge opportunity cost regardless of what you are paying in property taxes.

I went there for the first time last year for a conference and noted the same thing. I've never been to texas, but it was like what I imagined texas would be like. Everything was new, nice, and gigantic. Blocks were massive, sidewalks were massive, everything. But there were barely any people. Coming from NYC, it was kind of surreal.

If you go to Austin you will see that it has a much more vibrant downtown than San Jose.

...and downtown San Jose is actually a lot more vibrant now than it was ten-fifteen years ago

  bars and restaurants are the only things really thriving there

Not even. Downtown is replete with failed restaurants in recent years, even Los Gatos Brewing and Amicis. Even longstanding fast food options like the McDonald's and Ben & Jerry's on San Carlos and the Carl's Jr on 3rd are long gone.

You're right. Even on a warm Friday night, the city center couldn't be said to be crowded. You can get a seat at a bar or a table pretty much anywhere you want, in my experience.

LGBC also went under in Los Gatos, it was an awful restaurant that also had crappy "microbrew"

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