CUPERTINO — City officials have approved a revamped plan for a new neighborhood of homes, stores, restaurants and offices that could sprout atop an old Cupertino shopping mall and begin construction this year.
The Rise, as the new project is called, would be built on the site of the former Vallco Shopping Mall at the corner of North Wolfe Road and Stevens Creek Boulevard, a short distance from Interstate 280 in Cupertino.
The number of residential units in The Rise will increase while the overall square footage of the buildings in the mixed-use project will shrink, according to the plans that were approved last week by city staffers. The neighborhood’s height also will be reduced.
“The market forces that have continued to impact projects across the Bay Area over the past 18 months have pushed us all to new levels of creativity and adaptability,” said Reed Moulds, managing director with Sand Hill Properties, a veteran real estate firm that is developing The Rise.
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One huge challenge: The Rise and countless other commercial and residential projects in the Bay Area and nationwide must scout for construction financing in a forbidding landscape of sky-high interest rates, costly labor and expensive materials at a time of elevated inflation.
Real estate firms in some instances have decided to delay or scrap other projects until more favorable circumstances materialize.
At other times, developers have been forced to tweak their projects to make them more palatable to construction lenders.
The Rise is being tweaked to transform, in part, into a project with significantly more housing units compared with the original version of the neighborhood.
Here are some key components that city staffers have approved, and how they differ from prior versions of the development:
— Housing: 2,669 residential units, an increase of 11.1% from the 2,402 homes that were previously proposed.
— Offices: 1.95 million square feet of space, a decline of 1.4% from the prior version.
— Retail and entertainment spaces: 226,400 square feet, a 53.4% decline from the previous proposal.
“The plan will provide Cupertino with a vibrant downtown district and dynamic retail environment along with acres of trails and open space, blurring the boundary between urban and natural environments as well as serving as a new social heart of the city,” Sand Hill Property stated in an email the real estate firm sent to this news organization.
The city approval of the project clears the way for permits to be issued and for construction to begin in the “coming months,” Sand Hill Property stated in the email.
“With this approval, the project will be moving forward,” Cupertino City Manager Pamela Wu said.
The more than 2,600 residential units that are included in The Rise would provide more than half of Cupertino’s housing obligations for a state-mandated planning cycle covering the period 2023 through 2031, Sand Hill Property stated.
“This is an important milestone that reflects the collaboration and shared commitment to addressing the housing needs of our community,” Wu said.
In the latest version of the neighborhood, most of the project’s towers will be 85 feet in height, and only very few towers will reach 240 feet in height.
Where height is necessary, those taller buildings will be concentrated along Wolfe Road and Interstate 280 and be separated from the existing residential neighborhoods nearby.
“This will be the vibrant downtown district that Cupertino has always wanted,” Moulds said in an interview in December with this news organization. “This will create the housing that the community needs. This will produce the dynamic retail environment that we’ve craved in this city.”
