San Jose State is expanding its presence in the downtown area with a new workforce housing project dedicated to faculty, staff and graduate students. The project is predicted to be complete by 2027.
The construction site is the Alfred E. Alquist State Office Building located at 100 Paseo de San Antonio, across from the Hammer Theatre Center and a two-minute walk from SJSU.
The Alquist site is 130,000 square feet and is currently a minimally used office building, according to a Facilities Development and Operations pamphlet.
The project is projected to be 300 feet tall with 24 floors, according to the same pamphlet.
Charlie Faas, SJSU Chief Financial Officer and leader of the project, said rent prices for the SJSU community will be below market rate, which is a standardized rental rate as determined by property size, type of facility and location.
Faas said roughly half of the housing units will be available to anyone and the other half will be dedicated to SJSU faculty and staff.
“It’s not so much today’s people, right, because today’s people kind of figured it out . . . people who have been here 10-15 years have figured out how to live in San Jose,” he said. “Anybody new that we’re recruiting are looking at us going, ‘OK, where’s my rent check?’ ”
Faas said when construction is finished, the project will aim to have a minimum of 1,000 units.
He said his main inspiration for redeveloping the Alquist building was based on its underutilized nature.
A year after first being denied ownership of the building by the California Department of Government Services, Faas was able to gain control of the building. He said the initiative to transform the space into affordable housing for the SJSU community has been maintained since its inception.
The average rent price in San Jose is $2,420, the fifth highest in the country, according to an article by fortunebuilders.com.
Robert Wood, professor of strategic management and chairman of the SJSU chapter of the California Faculty Association, said the committee he’s a part of felt inclined to get involved in the Alquist project because of the city’s slow housing development.
“Because of the radical underperformance of construction and permitting in San Jose generally, many faculty, like many students, have to cope with very high rents and house prices,” Wood said. “It’s simply because the city has not permitted the level of housing construction that other comparable cities permit.”
Faas said the expensive nature of San Jose’s housing market, paired with the average starting salary for faculty, forced them to move places far away from campus.
“Most of them [faculty] are choosing to live in Tracy or living down south of Gilroy and they’re making these long-ass commutes, hour and a half, two-hour commutes to get here, it’s ridiculous,” Faas said. “And when they do those long commutes, what’s the quality of life they have?”
The cost of living in San Jose has made retention and acquiring new faculty more challenging for the university, according to an SJSU Alquist Redevelopment project webpage.
“And so that’s why [Alquist] is going to address that,” Faas said. “So people, at least on today’s faculty and staff, are looking to their future because, you know, they’re saying, ‘My replacement needs a place to live.’ So we want to keep that quality of education for our students.”
Kelly Snider, SJSU urban and regional planning director, shared a similar sentiment regarding the work commutes current staff and faculty face
“Let’s say you’re a parent or community member, [and] you live an hour away, it takes you two hours to get home on a Tuesday afternoon,” Snider said. “By the time you get home, you don’t have time to go to the local Chamber of Commerce meeting or attend the city council meeting in your hometown because you just spent two hours [commuting], so it reduces the ability to be members of their own community when they live so far away, so everybody suffers.”
She said some of the negative consequences of long commute times include childcare arrangement, distracted driving and elevated cortisol levels.
Cortisol is the human body’s main stress hormone, and an excess of this internal secretion can lead to a multitude of physical health problems, including headaches and heart disease, according to a Dec. 13, 2022 WebMD webpage.
Snider said raising a family in downtown San Jose provides opportunities to gain support from the surrounding community.
“Is living in a downtown neighborhood, you know, on second street in downtown San Jose a good place to raise a family? Unequivocally, yes,” Snider said. “We know that families get more support when they can walk to the local school and walk to the health centers and walk to the grocery stores.”
San Jose ranks as the second best place to raise a family, according to a May 19, 2022 U.S. News article.
Wood said San Jose’s struggles with housing development started about 15 years ago.
In 2008, San Jose saw its largest annual drop in home prices in about 20 years, according to a Jan. 21, 2009 Mercury News article.
Wood said former mayor Chuck Reed tried to mitigate the losses faced by the city by reducing the number of housing spaces.
He said he believes the Alquist project could be the catalyst for a broader housing proposal.
“[Alquist] needs to be the start of a project, it needs to be the start of a project for a program of the university’s,” Wood said. “And the city needs to step up and realize that it’s not okay for them to build [and] permit so much less [housing] than other cities of comparable size.”
Snider said a large benefit of the Alquist project is the vibrancy it will bring to the downtown area.
“So [in] urban planning, vibrancy is usually measured in number of people doing something,” Snider said. “So if you have a park in the middle of town like Cesar Chavez Plaza, and then if the park is empty, then you would say it’s not vibrant.”
She said any sort of interaction between those living in the Paseo de San Antonio area and the businesses within that community would be in line with SJSU’s broader vision to intersect these neighboring communities.
Faas said generating more activity around the Alquist building area was taken into consideration when planning the project.
“You want to have the first floor or two activated in the building,” Faas said. “And what I mean by that is retail activation so whether that’s stores that are selling coffee or donuts, poke or wherever you might want to have or it’s exhibition space.”
One of the drawbacks the Alquist project may have on nearby businesses is the intensive construction of the building itself.
“There are some businesses that are going to have an awfully big construction project in their backyard for several years,” Snider said. “There’s the movie theater, and there’s little businesses behind the movie theater.”
Faas said while noise and dust are a potential inconvenience, the construction of the new building is in line with what the future of downtown San Jose will look like in terms of edifices.
He said previous projects similar to Alquist have been able to come to fruition, making him confident that there will be no problem with the California Environmental Quality Act.
The act aims to inform governmental figures on the possible negative environmental effects of proposed activities to prevent notable damage, according to the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research website.
“This is the largest project that San Jose State will probably ever do,” Faas said. “That’s the magnitude of it, and it’s probably one of the most important projects that we’ll ever do.”
