Dillabough's Urban Community Pitches 850K SF Office High-Rise
San Jose's six-story Charles Davidson Building at 255 West Julian St. could give way to an 850K SF, 14-story office tower in the latest big proposal to reach the city's planning commission.
Last week, Gary Dillabough and Jeff Arrillaga of Urban Community LLC and Tony Arreola and Mark Lazzarini of Terrascape Ventures LLC filed a site development permit for the newly conceived Davidson Plaza Tower, which the team says would have the capacity for up to 3,800 tech workers.
The new proposal comes almost two years after Terrascape filed designs for twin 18-story residential towers on the same downtown site. Now, it and Urban Community will join forces on both the tower and 313 units of housing on an adjacent parcel that Urban Community is under contract to buy, Dillabough told Bisnow.
"There's a really high concentration of residential in the area," he said. "We began talking with [Arreola and Lazzarini] and thought it would be great to have an office building there."
Designed by Miami-based Arquitectonica, Davidson Plaza Tower would include large floor plates, as well as amenities like an urban plaza, a sky garden and indoor atriums, though design details will evolve through the planning review process, the companies said.
Their goal is to break ground next year on the already-entitled residential portion, which is being designed by San Francisco-based BDE Architecture, according to Dillabough.
As far as commercial tenancy, the joint venture is open to both a single tenant and multiple tenants.
"The easier option is certainly for a single tenant, but I also think the market here really needs [a mix with] more multi-tenant," Dillabough said. "There are a lot of large campuses taking up a fair amount of space in the Valley, creating a situation where midsized tenants are having less options.
"We're designing the building in a way where it can be broken into neighborhoods for different companies. And if it were a single tenant, they might have different user groups in that space," he said.
The proposal for 255 West Julian is one of many projects Urban Community has in the works in San Jose. Since 2017, the company has spent $225M on downtown properties, including its purchase of the historic Bank of Italy building, which it is extensively renovating now. As of late August, it had several more properties under contract, Dillabough told Bisnow at the time.
Terrascape Ventures formed out of DAL Properties LLC, a development partnership composed of Arreola, Lazzarini and developer Charles W. Davidson. Davidson currently owns both 255 West Julian St. and the adjacent parcel, according to real estate data site Reonomy.
"The design is keenly focused on bringing as much natural light as possible to its users by having a North-South Building Orientation, narrow floor plates, fully glazed facades and multiple story atriums," Arreola said in a prepared statement.
