SAN JOSE — Amazon.com Services, a delivery and commerce unit of the high-tech behemoth, has bought a site near downtown San Jose where a huge industrial center has been proposed.
In an unexpected deal welcomed by city leaders, the e-commerce leviathan bought a 17.8-acre site at 1605 S. Seventh St. near the corner of East Alma Avenue, a short distance from the city’s downtown and Happy Hollow Zoo, Santa Clara County property documents show.
“What’s clear is that this won’t just be robots in a warehouse,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said Tuesday. “Amazon is hiring San Jose residents now, including helping displaced workers in the city get hired through our Work2Future program.”
Amazon’s deal represents a potential feather in the cap for San Jose, which in recent years has attracted a number of high-profile digital giants to the Bay Area’s largest city.
Seattle-based Amazon paid $59.3 million for the property, according to public records filed on Oct. 9.
“This is going to be a great location for jobs,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use consultancy. “Amazon is proceeding to implement a master plan in Silicon Valley.”
Local sources believe hundreds of Amazon workers could be employed at the site, but firm numbers weren’t immediately available.
The Amazon.com Services is an Amazon commerce and delivery unit.
“This is unquestionably good news at a time of widespread unemployment and one of many remedies that we will need to provide the antidote to recession,” Liccardo said.
The seller in the transaction was an affiliate headed by William Ryan, an executive with Swenson, a veteran real estate developer headquartered in San Jose, state business documents show. Other significant partners in the selling group include San Jose-based logistics and moving company executive David Bartels and Swenson chief executive officer Case Swenson, the documents show. Brian Matteoni, a senior vice president with CBRE, a commercial real estate firm, represented the seller.
Through leases and property purchases, Amazon units have dramatically expanded their respective footprints in the Bay Area in recent years.
The deals are aimed at creating hubs for Amazon to innovate and create new products, services and technologies, and to make the company more efficient in terms of distributing merchandise and filling orders.
In August, a different Amazon unit, Amazon Data Services, paid $31.3 million to purchase roughly 66 acres of Gilroy farmland.
At one point, the sellers of the San Jose site had crafted plans for a huge development at Seventh and Alma. Swenson had proposed, according to a CBRE brochure, a giant industrial center totaling about 365,000 square feet. CBRE described the industrial center as a “high-identity” building in the “expanding Monterey Road corridor.”
It’s unknown if Amazon will pursue a building that size or a different endeavor.
The San Jose deal at South Seventh Street and East Alma Avenue gives the Amazon subsidiary control of a site that is proximate to three major freeways: Interstate 280, U.S. Highway 101, and State Route 87.
Plus, the mayor said, the creation of a big-time employment hub in that location with well-paying tech positions can bring these kinds of jobs closer to residential centers in San Jose — and potentially chop down brutal commutes to Silicon Valley’s more distant tech complexes.
“This can provide better jobs for so many of our residents in south San Jose who dread the long trek northward every morning,” Liccardo said.
