Publication Date

Spring 2003

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Urban Planning (MUP)

Department

Urban and Regional Planning

Abstract

I went through several topics for this Planning Report before finally settling on a case study of Santana Row. Santana Row is a 42-acre mixed-use development in San Jose, California that opened in November of 2002. As I spent almost three years as the Project Manager reviewing and processing land use applications to implement the approved General Development Plan for Santana Row, I was extremely excited about the eventual grand opening of this unique mixed-use development; I could not wait to see how people reacted to Santana Row. In the beginning, I was not sure what specifically I was going to write about the topic. However, I knew that I wanted to focus on a planning aspect that was not only interesting to me, but also one which I was willing to spend a lot of time researching and writing about. As I hear about "smart growth" frequently in my job as a planner for the City of San Jose and read about the smart growth trends nation-wide in various planning magazines and journals, I decided to analyze Santana Row from a smart growth perspective. Then the word "Greyfield came across my radar last summer when I saw a notice for the Grei/fields 2002 Community Reneuml & Redevelopment Through Adaptive Reuse workshop in West Palm Beach, Florida. When I read the definition of greyfields - old, obsolete. and non-profitable retail and commercial sites -1 immediately thought of Town and Country Village and knew I had to find out more about this topic. Town and Country Village (T&C), a former low-intensity suburban commercial center. was constructed in 1960 on a 33-acre site less than 4 miles from Downtown San Jose. When it became available for purchase in 1997, T&C had been functionally obsolete for two decades, yet the land it sat on was not only valuable but of a size that could support the mixed-use development that would become Santana Row.

Fortunately, there are wonderful and plentiful resources in the planning world. and researching smart growth principles and greyfield redevelopments did not prove difficult. In fact, I probably gathered more information than I knew what to do with. In the end, my approach to this case study was to examine Santana Row from the new urbanism perspective utilizing the list of techniques created by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) for evaluating the redevelopment of a greyfield mall combined with additional smart growth principles. I also looked at how local government participated in the redevelopment of the Town and Country Village site, and how ultimately this project met the City of San Jose's goals for smart development.

I have many people to thank for helping me not only gather information, but to understand what it was that I was researching and evaluating. Of those that were generous with their time and knowledge, I would most like to thank Anthony Flanagan, former Development Director for Santana Row, and Linda Gallon of Berliner Cohen, local counsel for Federal Realty and Santana Row. I would also like to give special thanks to Laurel Prevetti, Deputy Director, Planning Services, and Susan Walton, Principal Planner in the Plan Implementation Division, for sharing their experiences with the project from the early stages and for sharing their thoughts on the end result. Special thanks to the Retail Marketing Group at Santana Row, and Bovis Lend Lease for providing illustrations for this paper. In addition, Elena Lee and David Ayers have been most supportive, encouraging me to "get it done." Except as noted, all photographs by David Ayers.

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