Google Puts Millions Toward San Jose Community Projects

By Jana Kadah, San Jose Spotlight

February 25, 2022

The second allotment of Google’s community benefit funds is coming to San Jose as the tech behemoth gets ready to start expanding into the city.

On Tuesday, the City Council will decide how to spend the remaining $4.5 million of the $7.5 million Google is dispersing before construction on the Downtown West mega campus project begins over the next 12-18 months. By the time the project is completed a decade from now, Google will have doled out $200 million in community benefit funds.

“We’ve come in and really tried to lean into the community and put community first versus our office in this development first,” Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson told San José Spotlight.

The project will span 80 acres near Diridon Station and feature 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 housing units, 15 acres of parks and a 30,000-50,000-square-foot community center. It also boasts 500,000 square feet for retail, cultural, education and arts uses. A quarter of housing units in the area—approximately 1,000—will be affordable.

The first $3 million was allocated last year for anti-displacement efforts, such as preserving the affordable housing that exists already and increasing services and shelter for people experiencing homelessness. Since the land was already purchased by Google, the city was not concerned about residents or businesses being pushed out. Rather, displacement concerns are due to rising costs that will come from living in redeveloped downtown.

The remaining $4.5 million is going toward economic recovery—$3.25 million for education, job training and scholarships, $1 million for strengthening neighborhood-serving programs and $250,000 to start the advisory committee tasked with dispersing the rest of the funds from Google.

The $3.25 million will fund youth and adult job training scholarships, of which $1.5 million will go to SJ Aspires, a program that promotes post-secondary readiness among high-school aged students in East San Jose. The remaining funds will be split three ways: paid work experience and occupational skills training, child care support for workforce program participants and to fund a college and career pathways coordinator for three years. This role, overseen by the city, will help coordinate which city programs are the best fit for youth.

Nanci Klein, the city’s director of economic development, said the money is targeting historically disenfranchised communities in San Jose.

“We’re definitely unapologetically focusing on the people in need,” Klein told San José Spotlight, adding the training will target those in high-risk impacted ZIP codes and people of color.

The $1 million in neighborhood funding will be allocated by city officials after conducting neighborhood focus groups and reviewing door-to-door surveys. These dollars will be used for programs benefiting residents living near Diridon Station.

Klein said in San Jose neighborhoods where redevelopment during the past decades hit the hardest—new freeway construction, railroad lines and other projects—are targeted to receive these funds.

Google’s Downtown West will subject these areas to even more construction, so the intention of the money is to help offset those impacts.

The remaining $250,000 is to set up a new fund aimed to minimize displacement from rising costs.

The governance structure for the fund features a third-party manager and community advisory committee, which includes city oversight and support, representation from local residents, direct service providers and other technical experts.

The fund manager will be tasked with administering the grant-making process and recommending qualified grant recipients to the committee. Klein said the city hopes to have the advisory committee created by the end of 2022.

“One of the coolest parts about this is the advisory committee will be making the decisions and the money expenditures,” Klein said. “Those will be people with lived experience of homelessness or trauma and the technical experts that are working to eliminate (those traumas).”

The council will discuss how to break down the benefits package at its March 1 meeting. Learn how to watch and participate.

Contact Jana Kadah at jana@sanjosespotlight.com or @Jana_Kadah on Twitter.

This story will be updated.

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