Los Gatos Weekly-Times

The town's building boom reflects economy in region

Commercial projects have increased

By Jeff Kearns

Somewhat isolated and nestled in a soft green corner of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Los Gatos may enjoy a slight separation from the rest of Silicon Valley's cramped morass of jammed malls and crammed freeways, but the town still can't escape the symptoms of a regional economic boom. Despite the obvious lack of sprawling mazes of tract housing, construction levels here are the highest they've been in years.

Preliminary Building Department tallies for 1997 are showing a 150 percent increase in annual totals from three years ago. Monthly reports for November 1997 show twice as much work being done as in November 1996, by dollar value of work performed, and totals for December 1997 were almost four times higher than December 1996.

"Things have really taken off in the last few years," Building Director Scott Baker said. "There were spurts of building after the quake in '89, and immediately after that, from about 1990 to 1995, it was a lackluster economy and there wasn't much going on. But over the last three years there's been a substantial increase. Other building officials are saying the same thing, that it's been double and triple the amount of work being done three years ago. It's a Bay Area phenomenon."

In Los Gatos, a recent rise in large commercial projects is partially responsible for the increase. Such projects include the Old Town remodeling and expansion, a 60,000-square-foot office and research and development building at 750 University Ave., another office building at 973 University Ave. and a new retail building at Los Gatos Boulevard and Blossom Hill Road.

And Baker says there are also many smaller projects in the works.

"It's across the board, in every category. We're seeing a lot of room additions and remodeling, but also new single-family homes, as well as the commercial projects," Baker said. "People are confident in the economy."

But Baker said that building levels in Los Gatos will likely plateau before those in the rest of the region. "We're running out of developable space, unless you look at the Yuki properties on the north end of town," he added.

Unlike other cities--such as San Jose, where relatively wide-open areas are still available for development--Los Gatos is almost entirely built out, and most construction projects are on in-fill spaces that fit into leftover pockets of land that have so far gone undeveloped.

In-fill projects have become increasingly common in recent years. By keeping new development in areas where the necessary infrastructure--such as roads and utilities--has already been installed, in-fill projects create less of a strain on transportation and land use issues, and costs are reduced because the infrastructure already exists.

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