Google’s Once Grand Vision for Downtown West in San José Still on Hold (Apparently)

Nearly a decade has passed since San José agreed to sell more than $110 million worth of land to Google, to support the tech giant’s plans to transform a flagging industrial area of downtown into a vibrant village filled with gleaming new offices, apartments, hotels, shops and parks.

To date, almost none of the grand development plans — which city and business leaders praised at the time as a once-in-a-generation economic opportunity for the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley — have come to fruition.

Google has instead laid a thick coat of varnish, both literal and metaphorical, over portions of roughly 80 acres near Diridon Station and the SAP Center, a swath of land it dubbed Downtown West. But the Mountain View-based company has shared scant details publicly about its current timeline or strategy for the collection of land and buildings.

The void has left those living, working or investing here in limbo — without a clear idea of whether a full-blown mixed-use neighborhood will materialize and unable to bank on it when making personal and business decisions.

“It seems, quite frankly, pretty long ago where we were promised all of this,” said Alan “Gumby” Marques, the past board president and interim CEO of the San José Downtown Association. “As much as I would like to see that happen, I’ve kind of moved on. I don’t have any dependency on Google coming in and building the campus that they had planned.”

Google declined a phone interview request from KQED.

In emailed comments, a Google spokesperson did not clearly answer questions about whether it still intends to move forward with the development plans in San José, signaling that it is still evaluating the company’s real estate needs as a whole.

The company said it has already brought new social activities and gathering spaces to the long-overlooked area.

Large endeavors like Downtown West can take multiple decades to complete, and can ebb and flow over the years, Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont said, adding that the company still communicates with developers to evaluate potential future work.

Some business advocates and residents say they still believe Google intends to eventually build out the area, noting the company hasn’t sold any of the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land it purchased from the city and private owners.

“I think at some point in time in history, they plan on following through,” said Walter Wilson, a co-founder of the Minority Business Consortium and longtime civil rights advocate. His organization was part of a now-inactive group that provided input to Google about its plans for the area.

“It was really going. And then all of a sudden it just didn’t,” Wilson said of the development momentum. “I’ve talked to some people at Google, and they say that this is a process that they’re still committed to. It’s not a matter of if, but when.”

What’s clear to anyone familiar with the area is that the project has been pushed far beyond its original timeline.

The San José City Council agreed to sell Google nearly a dozen acres of land in 2018, and the company later indicated some of the first buildings could be completed as soon as 2023 or 2024.

Colorful renderings presented by the company featured an “urban destination” touting more than 7 million square feet of office space, and at least 4,000 new homes in an area in desperate need of housing.

It also envisioned 500,000 square feet of mixed uses, such as retail shops, cultural and art spaces and hotels, along with 15 acres of parks and plazas. Between 2022 and 2024, the company demolished older structures, including the remnants of an old hardware store and a longtime neighborhood bar called Patty’s Inn that slung beer and other beverages for nearly 90 years, to make way for what was to come.

But with the lack of any new construction following those demolition efforts, some people have lost hope for a drastically reshaped neighborhood.

“To be honest, I’m not counting on it, you know?” said Jay Meduri, the owner of Poor House Bistro, a Cajun- and Italian-inspired restaurant that operated for years on the corner of Barack Obama Boulevard and San Fernando Street, before he sold the site to Google.

The company helped him relocate the restaurant to a new location in Little Italy in 2022, where he formally reopened in 2023 after operating temporarily out of food trucks and cloud kitchens. He said most of the people he used to communicate with at Google have moved on or been laid off.

Meduri said he has no hard feelings toward Google, but he does get a bit wistful sometimes.

“I have to say it’s bittersweet when I drive by there every day, and I used to see where we were located and now that’s completely dug out and getting leveled out. And then Patty’s Inn, which was across the street and kind of a historic staple to San José — now they have containers,” he said.

“Who knows when Google Downtown West is going to be completed. But hopefully it’s while I’m still operating the restaurant and can enjoy all these visions that I saw of making this Downtown West a hopping spot, right? So, it remains to be seen when that’s gonna happen or if it happens,” Meduri said.

Despite the lack of action, project supporters, including current and former city officials and business boosters, say they’re confident Google is still committed to the city.

Congressman Sam Liccardo, who spearheaded San José’s deals with Google when he was mayor from 2015 through 2022, said the city has already gained “enormous benefit” from the tech giant’s presence and its land-buying spree, which some estimates have pegged at several hundred million dollars.

The properties the company bought have significantly increased in assessed value, boosting the tax base for the city and county. Google also donated $12.5 million to nonprofits and community-serving organizations and programs, out of a plan to eventually pour $200 million into such efforts, and is bringing in new tenants to give life to the area, Liccardo said.

“A whole host of things [are] bringing people into a part of downtown where a few years ago, you could shoot a cannon down the street and not hit anybody,” Liccardo said. “You’re now starting to see activity and that will make, obviously, that part of the downtown much more attractive for future office tenants.”

Google, through a subcontractor, has boosted what it calls the Creekside area with the recent opening of a beer garden run by local favorite Hapa’s Brewing Company. It has also repurposed a parking lot where Patty’s Inn once stood for events centered around food trucks, including art, fitness, cultural gatherings and hockey watch parties.

Preservation Action Council of San José, which pushes for historic preservation, education and appreciation in the city, is opening a rummage and reuse hub soon in a former warehouse, and has plans for a racket sport facility where Poor House Bistro once stood.

Liccardo said it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google is not putting shovels in the ground for new offices in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended work culture and contributed to massive office space vacancies. At the end of the third quarter of 2025, national vacancy rates were nearly 19%, according to commercial real estate firm CBRE. While the Silicon Valley office market was about 17%, in San José’s downtown core, it was 32%.

“Google has tried to do something and ran headfirst into a global pandemic. And like virtually every other entity that planned to build offices or office expansion, they put the brakes on their plan. And I expect those brakes will be in place for several years,” Liccardo said.

Liccardo said he thinks Google is “going to act like any landowner would at a time of great economic uncertainty,” and may simply sit on the land until it’s clear they need more office space.

“And that’s certainly not now, and it’s probably not going to be next year either,” he said.

While the potential expansion of the artificial intelligence-driven economy could push Google’s original development plans into reality, it’s also possible the company may need to “reimagine” uses for the land to skew more toward housing, Liccardo said.

Bert Weaver, a board member of the Delmas Park Neighborhood Association, representing residents whose homes abut Google’s planned village, said he thinks the company has been a good neighbor.

He said the company listened to input from residents and local organizations, maintains and secures the parking lots and buildings it owns, and puts on events at the Creekside area that are “very well attended.”

Even if the development has stalled for now, Weaver said he’s “cautiously optimistic” the plans will eventually shape up.

“I mean, I hear occasional comments from neighbors that ‘No, Google is never going to come here,’ and all that. But I really don’t feel that way. And a number of my friends, a number of leaders of our group, feel the same way, that one day they will. As business improves, things will begin to happen,” Weaver said.

He said the neighborhood association leaders had a meeting with a Google representative in October, where no timelines were shared, but the company “sort of tried to assuage our fears and remind us that the bad rumors are not necessarily true, but, you know, they’re still there.”

At Hannah Coffee, a cafe across from SAP Center, customers are mostly neighborhood residents and people who work nearby at local businesses or for the San José Sharks, according to Andrew Harms, a manager at the shop.

Harms said that since he moved to the area about three years ago, he has heard a lot about the Google development.

“The privatization of any amount of space here is always, I think, a concerning thing to people, whether or not it affects their day-to-day lives, because it’ll change the landscape of the city forever, potentially,” Harms said. When the project was moving through the city approval process years ago, many residents and community organizations expressed concerns about gentrification and whether the development would benefit some while hurting others. But more jobs, housing, liveliness and gathering spaces would be a net benefit for the area, he said.

Still, the lack of substantial progress on the plans has been noticeable, he said.

“It’s strange to hand the golden keys, so to speak, to Google and have them do basically nothing with the space,” he said.

Jen Baker, San José’s director of economic development, who came to the city last summer from the Pacific Northwest, sees the area with fresh eyes. She expressed optimism about the potential of not only Downtown West, but the broader 250-acre Diridon Station area, where the city has envisioned millions more square feet of office space and up to 12,000 homes, including Google’s original plans.

“It’s really a unique and amazing site and space. How many West Coast cities have potentially developable acreage that is in downtown or downtown adjacent to really accomplish a major vision?” Baker said.

The pandemic’s effects on the economy and office markets have meant that projects didn’t move at the pace many were hoping for, Baker said, but she sees “an amazing canvas of opportunity” there.

“I realize that the timeline for people is not what was anticipated,” Baker said, “but I’m very bullish that something amazing will be realized.”