Snippets from articles about Google expansion to Diridon Station

a collection of land and former industrial lots in downtown San Jose, just 10 miles east of Apple’s glittering new campus, has attracted so much attention. Google, the new owner, has plans for something transformative.

The tech giant’s desire to continue its aggressive expansion in the area and build a new corporate village adjacent to Diridon Station, a decades-old rail station, isn’t important because of cutting-edge design: 

it may end up stretching over 50 acres and being twice as large as Apple’s new HQ, accommodating 15,000 to 20,000 employees.

Rather, its location is what’s important: the developing urban core of the largest city in Silicon Valley, a region stuck in a mostly suburban mindset, adjacent to what will be the confluence of seven different rail and bus lines.

Google’s plans may turn Diridon Station—an expanding transit hub with a high-speed rail stop in the works—into the Grand Central of the west. The move could catalyze an even more urbanized San Jose, and signal that density transit-oriented development is part of the Valley’s future

engineers with six-figure salaries ride company buses to suburban offices every day, Google and Diridon represent a big shift (and an accelerant for the affordability crisis).

“This is a chance to do something world-class,” says Benjamin Grant, a Bay Area urban planner and designer with SPUR, a regional civic planning nonprofit. “We need to think Hamburg, Tokyo, and Copenhagen, not Palo Alto, Mountain View, or Sunnyvale.”

adjacent real estate is already exploding in value due to the Google effect,