A sprawling office park across El Camino Real from Santa Clara University is on track to become 408 new homes, after the Santa Clara Planning Commission approved the University Station project on September 2. The vote covered certification of the development's Environmental Impact Report, a General Plan pre-designation, pre-zoning, and a vesting tentative subdivision map — but the project still cannot break ground until officials in a second city, San Jose, and Santa Clara County weigh in.
Four Office Buildings, Two Garages Coming Down
The plan, filed on behalf of property owner Bixby Land Company, calls for demolishing four existing office buildings along with two parking structures, according to the City of Santa Clara. Bixby Land Company, based in Newport Beach, originally acquired the 10.96-acre site at 451-475 El Camino Real back in 2007, and an adjacent retail strip center and hotel will stay operational through the redevelopment. The property owner has one other development in the Bay Area, and separately holds a roughly 106,057-square-foot industrial building in San Jose.
Designed by KTGY, the project includes a five-story podium apartment building wrapped around two open courtyards and a parking garage, holding 297 apartments that will be mostly studios and one-bedroom units, per San Francisco YIMBY. Another 111 townhomes are planned across 26 three-story structures finished in brick veneer, lap-siding cement, and stucco. Of the 408 total homes, 62 are income-restricted affordable units, with the project leaning on Senate Bill 330 and California's Builder's Remedy provisions to streamline what would otherwise be a lengthier entitlement process, the outlet reports.
A Site Split Between Two Cities
What makes University Station unusually complicated is geography: a roughly 0.94-acre sliver of the 11-acre site, enough to hold 13 of the 111 planned townhomes, currently sits inside San Jose city limits rather than Santa Clara's. As Houseberry details, that San Jose parcel can only be reached through the Santa Clara side of the property, which forces a multi-jurisdictional approval sequence — Santa Clara must pre-zone and pre-designate the land, the applicant must file a detachment request with San Jose, and the Santa Clara County Local Agency Formation Commission makes the final call before that portion can be built. The City of San Jose and the Santa Clara County Local Agency Formation Commission are both expected to take up the annexation question, according to The Real Deal. Even with the Planning Commission's recommendation in hand, the project still needs additional reviews before it reaches the Santa Clara City Council for a final vote, the outlet notes.
The site sits directly across El Camino Real from Santa Clara University and next to the Santa Clara Caltrain station, which is also slated as the terminus of the planned six-mile VTA BART Silicon Valley Phase II extension linking Berryessa through downtown San Jose, according to GlobeSt. The planned development would put dense housing near those transit connections.
Development Team's Silicon Valley Track Record
The applications were filed on behalf of Bixby Land by Morley Brothers, a Los Gatos-based developer whose commercial résumé includes co-developing Netflix's corporate campus in Los Gatos with The Sobrato Organization and building Apple Park in Cupertino. On the residential side, the firm's portfolio includes 304 townhomes in San Jose, 72 townhomes in Sunnyvale, 54 townhomes in Fremont, and 24 single-family homes in Campbell, per the same Real Deal report.
Housing Pressure Across the Region
University Station arrives as Santa Clara faces steep state housing mandates. Under California's sixth-cycle Regional Housing Needs Allocation covering 2023 to 2031, Santa Clara is subject to state housing-planning requirements, according to SV@Home, which noted Santa Clara had permitted less than 5% of its lower-income target through late 2024. Neighboring San Jose faces an even steeper climb, needing to plan for 62,200 new housing units by 2031, including 23,775 affordable units, per The Real Deal.
Despite that gap, Santa Clara was Silicon Valley's top housing producer last year, completing 2,685 of the region's more than 9,000 newly built residential units, according to 2025 data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development cited by the same outlet. University Station is also part of a broader wave of redevelopment along the corridor, alongside an El Camino corridor rezoning effort, and a separate proposal has floated replacing the Moonlite Center with 601 homes elsewhere on El Camino Real.
