How Google Can Help San Jose Become a Model of Inclusive Urbanism

San Jose is blessed with fantastic weather, beautiful natural surroundings, proximity to the world’s most successful companies, and perhaps the most urban, walkable environment of any Bay Area community south of San Francisco. Home to more than 1 million people, it is the third-largest city in California, behind only Los Angeles and San Diego, and the 10th largest in the entire United States. As tech companies have become increasingly interested in urban locations as a way to attract talent, San Jose has seen its locational stock rise, with companies like Adobe and Samsung undergoing major expansions there.

While all urbanist eyes have been trained on Amazon’s much-talked-about second headquarters, another tech giant, Google, has quietly proposed to build a massive new campus in downtown San Jose. It will be located in the largely vacant lands near Diridon Station and will host up to 20,000 Google employees in as much as 8 million square feet of office space. For context, the company’s current headquarters, the “Googleplex” in Mountain View, contains just 3.1 million square feet of office space.