SAN JOSE — Demolition crews have cleared away fire-torched piles of rubble that after have been outdated Victorian properties on a downtown San Jose website that for a number of years has been a blighted native property.
For seven years, a property on the nook of North Fourth Avenue and East St. John Avenue in downtown San Jose has been the positioning of one of many metropolis’s most high-profile websites of blight.
September 2024: Fireplace-scorched particles and wooden at 100 North Fourth Avenue, a vacant lot in downtown San Jose. (George Avalos/Bay Space Information Group)
Fires partially broken after which totally destroyed two Victorian-era properties. Fires hit the positioning within the spring and summer season of 2024.
The blazes left behind piles of rubble and a scenario that prompted some observers to criticize the efforts of San Jose officers and political leaders to cope with blighted properties that hang-out quite a few places within the Bay Space’s largest metropolis.
Demolition gear is seen on a bulldozed empty lot at 100 North Fourth Avenue close to East San John Avenue in downtown San Jose, seen on Feb. 15, 2025. (George Avalos/Bay Space Information Group)
The issue grew to become such a public nuisance the pile of lumber and particles left from earlier blazes caught hearth but once more in August 2024, a conflagration that lastly spurred metropolis officers to take some concrete motion to treatment the blight.
The hearth final August pressured residents of an adjoining condo constructing to flee their properties, a blaze that despatched a teenage woman to the hospital. The incident additionally scorched the neighboring construction.
It additionally seems that the two-unit condo constructing subsequent door at 160 North Fourth Avenue has been repainted and the outside injury repaired.
Bob Staedler, principal government with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use consultancy, embraced phrase that the property’s rubble and particles was eliminated.
“It’s really important for the city of San Jose to place a larger emphasis on eliminating blight,” Staedler mentioned.
In September 2024, a decide appointed a receiver to take management of the cleanup of the empty lot. The court docket order granted town of San Jose’s request to put in a receiver to wash up and safe blighted downtown properties.
It’s additionally potential that the receiver will take steps to promote the property.
A bunch headed up by Saratoga enterprise government Brent Lee has owned the now-vacant lot for greater than a decade. When Lee’s group purchased the properties the 2 Victorian properties have been nonetheless standing on the positioning.
The properties have been on a portion of a website the place the Brent Lee-managed group had proposed the event of a 23-story scholar housing tower that will have produced 298 residential models, metropolis planning information present.
The Lee-led group purchased the event website on the nook of North Fourth Avenue and East St. John Avenue in 2013, county data present. The worth wasn’t disclosed. Lee’s group by no means broke floor on the tower challenge.
Sunding Brothers, an entity that owns the small condo constructing at 160 North Fourth Avenue, filed a lawsuit in September 2024 towards Lee and the group he heads over the fires, injury and blight on the empty lot.
“I can’t say anything beyond the court record,” Lee mentioned at the moment. “I have an attorney.”
With essential sporting occasions on faucet for 2026, together with the Tremendous Bowl, a number of matches of the World Cup, and a number of video games for the NCAA males’s basketball match, San Jose political leaders face strain to wash up the blight to make the downtown district extra enticing.
