Jamestown exploring urban farm in empty Concord office building

Forget trying to fill vacant offices with workers. Jamestown hopes to fill a 300,000-square-foot empty office building in Concord with fruits and vegetables.

The Atlanta-based investor has approached the East Bay city about using the entire nine-story building at 2000 Clayton Street for vertical farming, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The landlord asked on behalf of an unidentified vertical farming firm. No office-to-farm conversion application has been filed. The varieties of crops being considered were not disclosed.

Bank of America, which built the 15-acre office campus in the mid 1980s, vacated the building early this year and plans to let its lease expire this summer. The campus also includes a six-story office building at 2001 Clayton, home to Wells Fargo Bank and Swinerton

In April, Jamestown had weighed its options about converting its vacant building to research labs or homes, after not landing an office tenant.

Bank of America sold its four-building campus in 2011 and leased back parts of it. Jamestown bought the two buildings in 2018 for $117 million

Finding a replacement for Bank of America would be tough.

The pandemic depressed demand for offices in Concord, a city of 125,000 about 30 miles east of San Francisco. Its 4.5 million square feet of offices were more than 17-percent vacant in the first quarter, with few new leases.

Its plan to fill the building with vertical crops could be fruitful.

While the city bars crop production in its downtown, vertical farming has plants grown in upright stacks, generally without soil.

City planning staff told Jamestown in June the investor could apply for a zoning text amendment to accommodate the vertical farming company, according to the Business Times. It would require City Council approval, and could take six months to a year. 

But the city, which said it has not received any other inquiries about vertical farming, is open to the idea of Downtown fruits and veggies.  

Canada-based AgriPlay Ventures last spring discussed offers to convert more than 1 million square feet of office space in Calgary, Alberta..

FarmZero, a farming nonprofit using Agriplay’s vertical farming technology, was in talks to lease 70,000 square feet in a 22-story office tower across from Chicago City Hall.

Jamestown has not struck a deal with the unidentified vertical farming company, which is also looking at space in Fairfield and Silicon Valley, an unidentified source told the Business Times.

In December 2021, a vertical farm in Newark — among the largest in the world and the 65,500-square-foot headquarters of AeroFarms  — sold for $21 million.

— Dana Bartholomew

Read more

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Jamestown ponders converting Concord office complex to homes or labs

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