San Jose mall makeover OK’d after seven years of planning

Kimco Realty has cleared the final hurdle in San Jose’s project review process for its makeover of the 1950s-era Cambrian Park Plaza strip mall, a milestone that caps seven years of planning.

Robert Manford, San Jose’s deputy planning director, unilaterally approved the 18-acre project’s site development permit and tentative map at a Wednesday public hearing. The decision was expected after the City Council unanimously approved in August the project’s environmental impact report and “pre-zoning” application, which proposed creating a zoning district for what was at the time an unincorporated swath of Santa Clara County land. Council members unanimously voted in September to annex the site into the city, a move that the Local Agency Formation Commission — a state-mandated agency that oversees the county’s city and special district boundaries — certified last month.

Those decisions set the stage for Wednesday’s public hearing, the outcome of which means Kimco’s plans have received full planning approval.

The team overseeing Cambrian Park’s redevelopment hasn’t set a construction start date or crafted a construction plan yet, team member Sean Morley wrote in an email. It will take at least a year to design infrastructure improvement plans and obtain approvals for them before demolition work can begin, Morley said. The team didn’t have a total construction cost estimate to share at this time.

Kimco acquired Cambrian Park last year as part of its merger with Weingarten Realty. The New York-based shopping center REIT retained the Weingarten team overseeing its redevelopment, San Jose City Council member Pam Foley, whose district includes Cambrian Park, wrote in an August 2021 blog post.

The team still needs to obtain grading, demolition and building permits before it can break ground, but Wednesday’s approval is the biggest yet for a project city planners envision as anchoring future development in southwest San Jose.

Plans call for demolishing the existing, 171,000-square-foot shopping center at the southeast corner of Camden and Union avenues and building six different types of homes, a rarity in terms of the number of residential uses for a San Jose mixed-use project. Those homes are spread between 305 apartments, an assisted living facility, 50 senior independent living units, 25 townhomes and 48 single-family homes that include 27 granny units.

That mix of units on its own would make Kimco’s plans truly mixed-use, but the project takes it a step further by including a 229-room hotel, 4 acres of privately owned public open space and more than 55,000 square feet of room for shops and restaurants on the hotel’s and apartment building’s ground floors.

Kimco agreed to make 50 apartments affordable to those earning up to the area median income, or about $118,000 a person, according to California Department of Housing and Community Development data.

And as a condition of the project’s approval, Kimco must provide relocation assistance to any of Cambrian Park’s tenants that have been there since 2015 or earlier and also offer those businesses space within the redeveloped mall upon completion, according to past reporting by San Jose Spotlight. The center is anchored by Dollar Tree, BevMo! and Round Table Pizza, and serves more than 180,000 consumers within a three-mile radius that spans San Jose, Campbell and Los Gatos, according to the project’s website.

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