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Yeah, I lived there in the 90's and visited occasionally after and it was struggling then - they opened up a big outdoor mall with a large movie theater... that
by happycube 5y ago
Yeah, I lived there in the 90's and visited occasionally after and it was struggling then - they opened up a big outdoor mall with a large movie theater... that failed.
It was much easier to build a fake downtown a few miles out (Santana Row) than gentrify^Wdevelop the real one into something successful. And in the noughts it had a Borders while pretty much all that was left of the mall was office space and a Waldenbooks, IIRC...
- anamax 5y agoSan Jose's malls are far more successful than its downtown. (San Jose has a range of malls, from high-end to strip malls with actual strippers.) I don't know whether it's the business selection (a many of the customers will be San Jose state students), the crappy parking (which means that much of the rest of the customers are the relatively few not-students who live downtown and the lunch crowd, which are relatively few because there aren't that many jobs downtown), or what, but downtown SJ is never going to be what the redevelopment district has 100s of millions to try to make. However, I am confident that they'll spend even more in the decades to come.
- Apocryphon 5y agoFor whatever reason, it's one of the things that makes San Jose far more common to Los Angeles and general SoCal urban topography, compared to San Francisco.