What's getting built in the Bay Area, told by people who build it.
Urbe News No. 1 · San José: $474 million in construction in 30 days
in declared work across 2,399 permits. Three of every four dollars went to commercial and industrial.
The information is public. Nobody reads it.
Those of us behind Urbe News come from the job site, and we kept seeing the same story: you hear about the project after someone else already landed it. Not because the information is secret. Every permit the city issues is public. The problem is that nobody has time to sit down and read two thousand records a month.
That's why Urbe News exists. Every Tuesday we read the permits for you and tell you what's getting built, where, and who's building it. And, most important, what you can do with that information. No filler, nothing copied.
We start with San José. More cities are coming, and you decide which ones.
The Urbe News Newsroom
Ten projects, $380 million
| 1 | R&D lab “Project Logos” | $130.0M | |
| 2 | 272 affordable apartments, Block A | Swenson Builders | $80.8M |
| 3 | MiTAC R&D lab | Megawatt Construction | $76.8M |
| 4 | New school, phase I | Devcon Construction | $28.6M |
| 5 | Cisco offices, 2nd floor | Novo Construction | $15.0M |
| 6 | SJ Self Storage | P.B. Brown LLC | $14.6M |
| 7 | Equinix data center | JTM Construction Group | $14.5M |
| 8 | Senior day care center | Tilton Pacific | $7.5M |
| 9 | Kaiser: battery storage (BESS) | Ameresco | $6.4M |
| 10 | Kaiser: parking-garage solar | Ameresco | $6.2M |
The big money is in interiors: labs, data centers and server rooms.
Signals of jobs that haven't started
Downtown demolitions, blocks apart: 100 W San Fernando St, 115, 121 & 125 S Market St and 130 Almaden Blvd. No permit yet for what comes next.
Commercial buildings coming down at 3806 Stevens Creek Blvd, the same corridor as the Gap and Old Navy remodels and a new Chick-fil-A.
Temporary power poles, the earliest sign a job is starting.
New ADUs out of 59 new-construction permits.
Contractor of the week
Gray West Construction
Why we picked them: the busiest commercial-remodel GC in San José this month. Picked on permit activity, not a quality rating. This title is never for sale.
What they pulled this month
Gap ($1.7M) and Old Navy ($1.4M) at 2855 Stevens Creek Blvd, plus Old Navy's interior demo, and Walmart ($3.6M) at 5095 Almaden Expy. All between Sep 14 and 18, and all three remodels carry electrical, mechanical and plumbing scope.
Who they are
Founded in 1988 as an industrial builder in Southern California, headquartered in Santa Ana. Part of Gray, a national builder founded in 1960. A Sacramento office has served Northern California since 2018. Specialties: retail and restaurant buildouts. Past clients include Gap, Old Navy, Starbucks, Costco, ALDI, Taco Bell, Panda Express, Petco and Sephora. In 2020 they ranked 2nd for both retail and restaurants in Commercial Construction & Renovation's contractor rankings.
What this tells you
- They work national chains. A store they remodel in San José tends to repeat in other cities.
- Contracts run $1M–$10M, per their Procore profile. That's a size mid-sized subs can handle.
- They've used Procore since 2019. If you work for them, you need to know Procore: RFIs, submittals, photos.
How to approach them
- Call the main line, (714) 491-1317, and ask for Northern California estimating.
- Ask to join their bid list for retail and restaurant TIs.
- Have your license, insurance, three retail references and your Procore account ready.
Sources: San José permits; graywestconstruction.com; Gray press releases (2018, 2020, 2021); Procore Network profile.
Want to be the next Contractor of the Week?
Show up in the data
Always pull permits under your exact company name and license number. In city records the same contractor shows up spelled five different ways, and if you can't be found, you don't exist.
Get Procore-certified, free
Procore offers a free subcontractor certification, about 2 hours, also available in Spanish. Big GCs live in it every day.
Go to certification →Keep your prequal package ready
License, certificate of insurance, W-9, three references and your safety record, all in one PDF. When a GC asks, send it the same day.
Specialize
Gray West doesn't do everything: they own retail and restaurants, so chains keep coming back. Pick a type of work and become the best at it.
Tell us about your job
Reply with a job you finished, with photos and what made it hard. The best ones get featured in "Featured Job."
Who pulls the permit on a commercial job?
“BEPM 100%” means Building, Electrical, Plumbing and Mechanical: the GC pulls one permit for every trade. Of this month's 128 commercial tenant improvements, 104 include electrical review under that permit.
If you're a sub, you work under the GC's permit and the inspector reviews your scope. By the time the permit shows as issued, the GC has usually picked its subs. So the list is for the next job, not this one. Rules vary by city; check with the local building department.
Solar: almost everything now has a battery
Only 34 permits were panels alone. Top installers by permit count: Sunrun (63), Tesla Energy (29) and Richard Heath & Associates (24). The city also issued 188 electrical service-change permits up to 400 A.
What to do with this information
Commercial electrical, retail buildouts, solar, batteries and EV chargers across the Bay Area.
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