Barry Swenson Hoping to Build a Pair of 14-Story Apartment Towers on North 1st St.

A recent article in the Silicon Valley Business Journal announced Barry's desire to build 440 apartment units near Skyport Drive on First. These units would be spread across 2 towers, and accompanied by 10,000sqft of retail on the ground floor. This would be a great first step in the city's grand vision to build a walkable and transit oriented secondary "downtown" all along North 1st Street. The overall plan would include 32,000 new housing units and a staggering 27 million sqare feet of office space.

The main roadblock to getting Barry's project approved is that he doesn't have the needed building allocations. When the economy was rocking in 2008, the city gave allocations to various developers to kick start the vision for North First. Unfortunately Barry Swenson wasn't able to get the allocations back then because his financing fell through. Now that he has $100m ready to go for this new development, he doesn't have the allocations... ouch. He's now lobbying the city to redistribute the allocations so that developers that are ready to build can get their projects started. I hope he's able to convince the city council!

For the full story, head over to this SVSJBJ article. Unfortunately, you'll need a paid subscription to access this one, but it's a damn good publication so it's worth it.