Office to Inpatient Care Facility Unanimously Approved for Willow Glen San Jose

An office building at 913 Willow Street in the Willow Glenn area of San Jose has closed and is slated for redevelopment as an inpatient care facility. The LGTC Group filed for a conditional use permit at the site, allowing them to operate a 24-hour residential care facility serving up to 48 patients. The new facility will combine the existing 7,369-square-foot office building and a 2,548 nearby garage.

The medical group has indicated the facility will be used to treat those with mild but persistent pathologies, such as eating disorders, depression, or anxiety. It will be an in-house-only facility, only treating transferred mid-term patients and not accepting walk-ins or providing outpatient services.

San Jose has struggled to combat office vacancy since the pandemic, and the proposed conversion is only one of several recent office-to-residential, medical, or other usages. In December 2023, the Planning Commission approved a similar project in Japantown, also by LGTC Group. That project was in a three-story building formerly occupied by an insurance agency, with a similar square footage to the two-story facility currently being proposed.

Several neighbors and other neighborhood advocates have opposed the conversion, citing, at times, unsubstantiated claims of an increased security risk for the neighborhood. Against this, LGTC Group has stated that the facility will be treating only mild cases and that because of its status as a locked facility, the property will maintain a constant security system to monitor the perimeter.

The proposal passed the San Jose Planning Commission unanimously, with commissioners rebuffing neighborhood criticism of the project. Per the East Bay Times’s reporting, Commissioner Lardnois can be quoted saying, “If we let every neighborhood say we don’t want this here, we wouldn’t have these facilities anywhere in our city. In a city of almost a million people, a facility that serves less than 50 people is very small, and we need a lot of them throughout our community.”

913 Willow Street Location Map, image via Google Earth

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