The Feb. 6 sale ended months of negotiations and threatened legal actions by stake holders in the redevelopment. And it gave a green light to plans to re-establish Sunnyvale's old street grid downtown.

According to Bill Brown, managing member of the Forum Development Group, the acquisition is key to reestablishing the street grid because the entire Town Center Mall is now available for development by Forum. Harvest Partners—the Dallas company that sold JCPenney's building to Lehman Ali Inc—had their own plans to sell the space to outside clients, which would have prevented the demolition of the entire mall.

"This is an important property because it's the final piece of the puzzle," Mike Myers, a spokesman representing the partners in the sale.

With the sale, the Forum Development Group can now go forward with the entire redevelopment, which will include the transformation of the mall land into an open-air shopping area, with Murphy Street running down the middle, rather than dead-ending at the mall's parking lot as it does now.

The sale came less than a week after the Sunnyvale City Council and Redevelopment Agency entered into a standstill agreement with the other stakeholders in the mall, agreeing not to take any actions against one another until the sale was complete. The parties also agreed to drop legal actions against each other—including threatened actions by Harvest Partners against the city—once the sale was complete.

The sale also alleviates concerns that some partners—especially Harvest Partners—held about the city reinstating eminent domain powers for the city council. Some feared that eminent domain—which would allow the council to force one party to sell commercial property to another—would be used to forcefully obtain the JCPenney's building.

Details on the specific terms of the agreement are unavailable, because both parties signed a non-disclosure agreement.

According to Brown, there are also plans to purchase the WHL Architects building, which sits on about a third of an acre of land next to the Town Center Mall. Brown said redevelopment on the mall could be completed by late 2005 or early 2006.