Urban Catalyst Recaps San Jose Mixed-Use Site
Proceeds will cover pre-construction costs for the two-tower project.
Urban Catalyst has landed financing to recapitalize the land site and pre-construction costs for the Icon/Echo, the mixed-use redevelopment project planned for downtown San Jose, Calif. Gantry provided the $10.5 million bridge loan.
After the demolition of the existing buildings and a parking lot on the approximately 2.1-acre site is complete, Urban Catalyst can get underway on Icon/Echo’s two towers. The developer’s current plans are for a 21-story office tower with street-level retail and a 27-story multifamily residential tower. The two will be connected by a shared podium on floors one through four.
The project will also feature one level of below-grade parking and about 1,000 parking spaces. Construction is scheduled to begin over the next 12 to 24 months.
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Gantry Principals Jeff Wilcox and Robert Slatt, of the firm’s San Francisco production office, represented the borrower in securing the short-term, interest-only financing through a private real estate investment company.
Urban Catalyst will use the financing to recapitalize the project’s land acquisition and entitlement costs while providing additional proceeds to support final technical programming and site preparation, according to a company statement.
Perhaps understandably, the Icon/Echo project has not been racing forward. It was in November 2022 that the San Jose Planning Commission approved the development by unanimous vote.
Still, the transit-oriented project is indeed a major undertaking. Sited at Santa Clara Street at Fourth Street, it’s directly across from San Jose’s city hall and very close to a planned BART station.
According to local media, the architect for both towers is BDE Architecture.
Deliveries vs. layoffs
Another outsized project is planned for San Jose: Berkeley Space Center at NASA Research Park, a $2 billion master-planned innovation hub across 36 acres within NASA’s Ames Research Center. It’s planned to total about 1.4 million square feet of Class A office and R&D space. As of last fall, it was going through the environmental entitlement process, with construction expected to start in 2026.
Silicon Valley’s office market saw overall availability rise from 19.7 percent to 21.2 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of 2023, according to a report from Kidder Mathews. Vacancy too climbed, by a similar amount, following both mass layoffs in the tech sector and continued work-from-home policies.
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