It's two weeks before Scott Knies is set to leave a job he's had for the last 34 years. But even though he's been planning his succession at the San Jose Downtown Association for about three years, his office looks like a time capsule.
As Knies prepares to say goodbye — Friday, Nov. 4, is his last day — I sat down to talk with him about the last three decades and what he thinks about the future of San Jose's development. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. One of the biggest regrets of my career is what happened with the Pavilion, when redevelopment decided to flip that project. It was definitely ahead of the market as far as a retail center, but then it turned into a web farm. And we stood to the side. We didn't say anything to convert this prime real estate to a building for machines instead of people. That was a turning point for me in how we viewed redevelopment in the way it was working.The deck was stacked against downtown.
What is different, dramatically different this time is, almost all of those projects are private-sector driven. And there's a broader mix of uses. You've got commercial, you have residential, you have hotel, you have kind of a master plan, Downtown West, with this incredible mix of uses in a street grid. Not a spaceship walling off from the community, but integrating the community.
We've tried in the downtown to do as much streamlining as possible, to have the most liberal zoning in the city. Look at the , basically anything goes in the DC zone, to have master EIRs . So with Google’s Downtown West, I think we cleared, like 10 million , 7 million of it for commercial. And then you had Caltrain jump in there with their 1 million because they don't want to have to do their own EIR because that's expensive. The whole CEQA stuff plays into it too.