This is an exciting moment for downtown San Jose. After years of recession and post-redevelopment malaise, a wave of new development is bringing streets, restaurants and public spaces to life. But new development does not guarantee the kind of active, walkable places long envisioned by residents and city leaders.
These qualities can only flourish where buildings support those pedestrian spaces. This is especially important at the ground floor, where people experience buildings most directly. Consider the Martin Luther King Library, which welcomes patrons at both the busy corner of Fourth and East San Fernando streets and the tree-filled campus of San Jose State.
Unfortunately, new developments still routinely propose to line downtown streets with blank walls, utility boxes and ugly garages. Retail space is often either missing or too cramped to attract tenants. Oversized driveways and garage entrances detract from the comfort and safety of pedestrians, even along critical corridors such as St. James Park. Most city centers would prohibit designs like these with binding codes rather than softer guidelines. But San Jose is still perceived as a place where even the most basic urban design principles are negotiable.
It can be really tricky to get the ground level right, especially in a city in transition. We want to depend less on private cars in San Jose, but public transit remains weak and the market demands parking. We want active street life, but the retail market is soft and foot traffic limited. Under these conditions, it can seem rational to sacrifice a good ground floor for a bigger parking garage, and let the next project worry about walkability. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Thoughtful developers, like those building the Centerra tower near San Pedro Square see a premium in placemaking and have made the effort to create an engaging and people-friendly ground floor. Stores, lobbies and even a bike room screen the garage from the sidewalk, and driveways are as tight as possible. Had its neighboring building across Carlyle Street gone the same direction, the streets around the now popular San Pedro Square Market could be even more lively.
Good urban buildings have ground floors that are generous, active and welcoming. Perhaps most intriguing are new models for a flexible ground floor that allow for many uses where retail demand is weak, such as lobbies, gyms, community spaces and ground-floor residences. A space can open to the street with a roll-up door, for example, and can evolve with the market, serving over time as an office, residence, store or workshop. Stronger controls on building form, coupled with looser rules on land use, can create a ground floor that is both adaptable and people-friendly.
It takes considerable effort from all parties to avoid the utilities, blank walls and exposed parking garages that deaden our sidewalks. SPUR has published numerous reports and studies presenting best practices in urban design, especially at street level. We are compiling good examples on a website (www.designforwalkability.com). We are working with city officials, architects and developers to reform codes and standards — as many cities already have — that get in the way of walkable urban design.
The buildings we build today shape the city we will live in for generations. If we take the path of least resistance, we’ll get yesterday’s city when we need to build tomorrow’s. It’s high time for decision-makers in San Jose to find the courage of their convictions and insist on development of the highest design caliber.
Benjamin Grant is SPUR’s urban design policy director and author of the SPUR report, “Getting to Great Places: How Urban Design Can Strengthen San Jose’s Future.” He wrote this article for this newspaper.
