A Bright Idea for Old GE Plant
By Jon Ann Steinmetz, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
Apr. 4–San Jose’s old General Electric plant will be reborn as a shopping haven called simply “The Plant.”
In little more than a year, developer Westrust Ventures expects to open the doors to a $137 million retail “power center” anchored by a Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, Staples and PetSmart.
Westrust purchased the 55-acre property at Curtner Avenue and Monterey Highway from GE for an undisclosed price. The sale closed last week. For decades, workers at the site, which once employed 3,000, produced motors for agricultural pumps and components for nuclear power plants.
Seven more large tenants have signed letters of intent to move into the 646,000-square-foot center, according to Westrust.
“We think the southern San Jose market is one of the shortest in supply in retail space in the western United States,” said Ricardo Capretta, co-managing partner for Westrust in San Francisco. “That’s an area that has a lot of demand for retail space.”
Retailers appear eager to fill the void — 75 percent of the space is pre-leased, and Westrust expects it to be 90 percent leased by its expected opening in July 2007. Groundbreaking will be in September.
Councilwoman Madison Nguyen, whose district includes the site, said she and residents she’s talked to are “very excited” about the project.
“It’s definitely going to generate revenue for the city and potential jobs for our residents in District 7,” Nguyen said.
One of her preferences for the center — a full-service grocery store — is not in the works at the moment. Capretta said there may be a small one eventually, but not a large one.
Nguyen said her district doesn’t have a mainstream grocery store.
“We have roughly 96,000 people, yet when we need to go to the grocery store, we have to drive out of the district,” she said.
Planning for “The Plant” has been in the works for two years. Before approving such a large shopping center — almost twice as large as the new MarketCenter on Coleman near downtown — the city council outlined the amenities it wanted: The center had to be pedestrian-friendly, with a lot of trees, community space, outdoor dining and the like.
Another key consideration was that the developer save the two-story, 1948 office building that’s the only structure remaining on the now-flattened property.
Capretta said Westrust will renovate the 17,000-square-foot building and lease the top floor for offices and the bottom for four or five retail tenants.
The city is pleased with the plan, San Jose senior planner Mike Enderby said. “Much of the architecture of the shopping center overall matches the art moderne style of the existing building,” he said. Plans also call for about 2,000 feet of community meeting space and a “town square” park area that will be almost an acre.
The Plant is Westrust’s second Northern California project; the first is the Nut Tree Village in Vacaville. In all, it has six projects under way in California totaling $491 million, according to a company statement.
In December 2003, when the city council redesignated the GE site from “heavy industrial” to “combined industrial commercial” to allow retail uses, critics worried that the council had scrapped one of San Jose’s largest tracts of industrial land.
The planning commission had rejected the plan, but GE’s approval for commercial zoning benefited from an economic development study that concluded the city had too few places to shop, and could do without some 200 acres of industrial land.
The city cited the same study in the development of the recently opened MarketCenter, which also has a Target and a PetSmart.
That shopping center is four miles away from “The Plant” and draws residents from a different geographic area.
“The market is dense enough to support those tenancies in each area,” Capretta said.
Contact Mercury News real estate reporters at realestate@mercurynews.com or call (408) 278-3489.
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Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
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