Why isn't downtown San Jose better? (San Francisco, Oakland: universities, to live in, dangerous)

[JohnSoCal]

Originally Posted by foo cities

Look at Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto have very active and competitive suburban scene, but their downtowns still magnets. They still have very strong and vibrant downtowns despite a lot of cool surrounding suburban communities.

That is true but you also have Canadian cities like Calgary with a population over a million and doesn't have much of a downtown.

[roadwarrior101]

Originally Posted by JohnSoCal

That is true but you also have Canadian cities like Calgary with a population over a million and doesn't have much of a downtown.

Calgary also doesn't have a world class city called San Francisco, which is the downtown hub of the Bay Area and probably helps to make San Jose less spectacular than it would otherwise be if no world class city were in the same metropolitan area.

[bigdumbgod]

Originally Posted by bentobox34

The fact is that San Jose was a very small city all the way up until the period of mass car ownership in US history (1950s onward). It has grown tenfold from 100k to 1m entirely based on that form of transportation. Compare that to San Francisco which was 775k in 1950 and 805k in 2010. Practically the entire city was built based on the assumption that people would be getting around without cars.

There aren't any examples in the US of a large city with a strong downtown that saw most of its growth after 1950.

Ding Ding Ding! ^^^This!

SF went vertical a long time ago (before cars). SJ has expanded almost entirely horizontally along with the postwar car culture, until quite recently with a few highrises, which are limited in height due to their very close proximity to the airport whose runway necessitates passenger jets making their final descent right over downtown.

[JohnSoCal]

Originally Posted by roadwarrior101

Calgary also doesn't have a world class city called San Francisco, which is the downtown hub of the Bay Area and probably helps to make San Jose less spectacular than it would otherwise be if no world class city were in the same metropolitan area.

You are absolutely correct. We lived in San Jose, Los Gatos, Sunnyvale, and Livermore. We loved iiving in San Jose and being able to visit San Francisco when we wanted the city fix.

We used to go to downtown San Jose just about every weekend in the 70's. We certainly didn't feel unsafe at all. Downtown was pretty sleepy except for Friday/Saturday night when the young people cruised up and down in their cars however that didn't bother us at all. We left San Jose in 1977 and returned back in 1997 and were shocked by the change in the downtown and not for the better.

[chessgeek]

I used to live in south San Jose. A lot of people there will just go to Los Gatos (which has a very nice downtown area and a bunch of free parking available) on the weekends. I know I often did although I also spent time downtown. There was a much smaller chance of coming across rowdy, potentially dangerous people (avoiding that controversial G-word as requested!) there, too. The exception would be the hockey fans when the Sharks are playing at home. On those days/evenings San Pedro Square can be active.

I do think downtown San Jose has made some strides in the last thirty years. When I went to college at San Jose State in the early eighties, it was lackluster for the most part (maybe a little activity in San Pedro Square back then for Last Laugh comedy club/Old Spaghetti Factory and people still like Original Joe's to this day). That was before HP Pavilion and the Sharks/major concerts, though. The majority of the population lives in outlying neighborhoods/suburbs. There are just too many destinations in the region on weekends such as San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc...under the circumstances it probably does as well as is possible given the "competition". Denver only has to compete with Boulder and Portland has northern Oregon to itself basically.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by foo cities

I take it that San Jose didn't do a good job of revitalizing its downtown. To have a vibrant downtown requires two things: a change in pattern of people preferring living their lives in the suburbs and lots of highrises. Density and good transportation are the way out of downtown doldrums, look at NY, Toronto and Seattle. Couldn't San Jose been smart enough to know this?

Where have you been? I wonder if you even live here with that kind of comment???Downtown SJ has densified in the last few decades. They built large 10 story apartment buildings on the edge of the SJ State campus about a decade ago to house students, faculty, & staff..making the school less cummerter-ish. They've also built 4 high rises downtown right before the real estate crash. Those high rises were slow to sell. One was converted into an apartment building and filled up quickly. The others are finally getting close to being sold out. If the economy hadn't tanked, there probably would have been more projects.

Light rail has also expanded downtown and elsewhere over the years, but transit here is still lousy and in desperate need of an upgrade...so I'll agree with you on that.

[foo cities]

Originally Posted by mysticaltyger

Where have you been? I wonder if you even live here with that kind of comment???Downtown SJ has densified in the last few decades. They built large 10 story apartment buildings on the edge of the SJ State campus about a decade ago to house students, faculty, & staff..making the school less cummerter-ish. They've also built 4 high rises downtown right before the real estate crash. Those high rises were slow to sell. One was converted into an apartment building and filled up quickly. The others are finally getting close to being sold out. If the economy hadn't tanked, there probably would have been more projects.

Light rail has also expanded downtown and elsewhere over the years, but transit here is still lousy and in desperate need of an upgrade...so I'll agree with you on that.

No no, I've never even been to San Jose. It's all from reading all the city data bloggers and from some other media sources. I just conclude from all those. I may be wrong, but it seems like there's issue with downtown, and the easy way out of it is more density. more People and businesses mean more businesses.

[bigdumbgod]

Originally Posted by foo cities

No no, I've never even been to San Jose. It's all from reading all the city data bloggers and from some other media sources. I just conclude from all those.

Don't draw conclusions about places you've never been to, based solely on opinions and data of an often dubious nature on a net forum about it. Discussions like this always invite trolls trying to disrupt the proceedings with nonsense and hatespeak, even in the somewhat flame-retardant C-D.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by foo cities

No no, I've never even been to San Jose. It's all from reading all the city data bloggers and from some other media sources. I just conclude from all those. I may be wrong, but it seems like there's issue with downtown, and the easy way out of it is more density. more People and businesses mean more businesses.

I think bigdumbgod's response was very apt. Anyone who's lived here the past 5 or 6 years has seen the 4 high rises go up, and I believe there are plans for more. There are always a few idiots on every forum who literally just make stuff up that isn't true or who distort things badly.

[crescent22]

LoDo came up out of nowhere by downtown Denver. The area around the arena in SJ had that shot if the Redevelopment Agency would have gotten it right.