February 2016 Downtown Dimension Highlights

Here are my notes from the latest edition of Downtown Dimension:

• Super Bowl 50
• 400,000 of the 1 million visitors coming to the Bay Area for the Super Bowl likely visited San Jose.
• Several Groundwerx ambassadors volunteered to staff the information booth at Plaza de Cesar Chavez as well as helping with Downtown Super Bowl activities.
• The special event zone Downtown prohibited peddlers, drones, and people giving out handouts.
• Barry Swenson Builder has begun setting up infrastructure for what will be a 1,100 home development in the North San Pedro area. Part of the project will realign Julian to become a traditional street grid.
• Leasing has begun for 27 North (also known as the Symphony project), a new 119 unit project for student housing. The leasing office is at 96 E. San Fernando.
• UserZoom is a user experience optimization company that has moved from Cupertino to 10 Almaden Downtown.
• Downtown Ice has broken attendance records with over 55,000 skaters by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
• Cinequest 2016--voted the best film festival by USA Today readers--is coming to Downtown from March 1-13. Over 100,000 attendees are expected.
• The sixth annual San Jose Jazz Winter Fest will run from Feb 25th to March 8th.
• VTA rolled out 29 new 60-foot clean-energy buses that will serve the new Bus Rapid Transit corridor from Santa Clara Street to Eastridge and El Camino Real. The new hybrid buses have WiFi and capacity for six bikes.
• The City Council is discussing building a seven-field soccer complex in Guadalupe River Park off Coleman Avenue. Four fields would be publicly accessible and have lighting for use at night.

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