444 Apartments Proposed on Campbell's South Bascom Ave

There is a koi pond at 1475 South Bascom Avenue. It sits in the landscaped atrium of Creekside Business Mall, a two-story office park built in 1978 and wrapped by 230 surface parking spaces, with six suites sitting empty right now at $2.65 a square foot. On September 9, 2026, The Registry reported that Pacific Development had filed plans to replace all of it with 444 apartments in an eight-story building.

That is the largest housing proposal the Campbell stretch of South Bascom has ever carried. It is also, almost precisely, what Campbell's own city council voted unanimously to invite two years ago.

A koi pond, 3.55 acres and a commercial zoning designation

The site is one parcel, APN 282-24-011, on South Bascom Avenue between Hamilton Avenue and the Pruneyard. What stands there is 55,680 square feet of two-story office space built in 1978, held by an entity called Creekside Business Mall LLC, with 230 surface stalls around it. The leasing sheet leads with the atrium and the koi pond, which tells you roughly how much else there is to sell.

The parcel is zoned C-2. That is a commercial designation, and nothing in it contemplates 444 homes. Hold onto that, because it is the entire entitlement story.

Whole Foods is a short walk north. The Pruneyard, Campbell's shopping and dining anchor, is a short walk south. Highway 17 is right there. Those are the reasons an office park landed here in 1978, and they are the same reasons 444 households would want to be here in 2030.

The specs, and the one line the project sheet leaves blank

Pacific Development publishes its own numbers for this site, which is unusual and useful. Here is the building.

• 444 apartments: 64 studios, 268 one-bedrooms and 112 two-bedrooms
• Eight stories, described as five stories of wood frame over a three-story concrete podium
• 629,789 gross square feet on 3.55 acres, which works out to 125 homes per acre
• 480 residential parking spaces, or 1.08 per home
• Architect: BDE Architecture
• Not stated anywhere: how many of the 444 would be below market rate

Eight stories on Bascom is a genuine jump, and the corridor's own record makes that clear.

Cedar Glen at 2275 South Bascom is the current unit-count leader with 260 apartments, and it does that across two stories and a large garden footprint from 1986. The newest thing on the street, 23 Fifty Bascom, opened this year with 123 homes in five stories. Pacific Development's own Revere Campbell at 1725 South Bascom has held 168 homes since 2015. So 444 units in eight stories is not an incremental step up the corridor. It is a different building type arriving on a street that has been filling in 120 to 260 homes at a time.

Campbell already voted for this, and the vote was unanimous

On April 2, 2024, the Campbell City Council voted unanimously to rezone 122 sites for housing as part of implementing its 2023-2031 housing element. Roughly 17 of those sites sit along South Bascom Avenue and South Winchester Boulevard. The stated goal was 3,870 new homes by 2031, including 1,542 affordable ones.

That 3,870 figure is deliberately larger than Campbell's actual state obligation of 2,977 homes, because cities are expected to zone a buffer above their target rather than exactly to it. Which is a technical way of saying the city planned for more capacity than it strictly needed, on the specific corridor where this application just landed.

This is the part worth sitting with. A city of 42,490 people, down 3.4 percent since 2020 by the Census Bureau's July 2025 estimate, told the state it would find room for nearly 4,000 homes and named Bascom as one of the places to find them. A developer read the rezoning and filed. The system worked the way it is drawn on paper, which happens rarely enough in the Bay Area to be worth saying out loud.

47 homes. That is the number to hold in your head

Campbell's problem is not that it has built nothing. It is what it has built.

Through December 2024, Campbell had permitted 928 homes toward a 2,977-unit target, which is 31.2 percent of the way through roughly a quarter of the cycle. Respectable. But 791 of those 928 were market rate, against a market-rate target of 1,292. That is 61.2 percent done.

At the other end, Campbell has permitted 47 very-low-income homes against a target of 752, and 43 low-income homes against 434. Six percent and ten percent. Four years into an eight-year cycle.

So when a 444-unit building arrives, the honest question is not whether Campbell needs housing. It obviously does. The question is which column those units land in. If this project carries a 10 percent very-low-income component, that is 44 homes, which would nearly double everything Campbell has permitted at that income level in the entire cycle. In one building. If it carries zero, it moves a number that was already the healthiest one on the board.

Which law is doing the work here

Neither the trade coverage nor the developer's project sheet says what legal path this application is taking, and that omission is doing a lot of quiet work.

Two candidates. The first is California's density bonus law, the standard tool for exceeding local zoning in exchange for deed-restricted affordable units. The second is SB 79, which took effect in Santa Clara County on July 1, 2026, two months before this filing. SB 79 upzones land near qualifying transit stops, and Campbell sits on VTA's Green Line, with Bascom station on Southwest Expressway and Hamilton station at 850 East Hamilton Avenue both in the neighborhood.

Here is the tell. SB 79 grants a light rail site 100 homes per acre within a quarter mile of a stop, and 140 homes per acre immediately adjacent to one. This project asks for 125. That number sits above the quarter-mile allowance and below the adjacent one, which points toward a density bonus stacked on top of a state baseline rather than either tool used alone. SB 79 also requires that projects of 11 units or more set aside 7 percent extremely-low, 10 percent very-low, or 13 percent lower-income homes for 55 years. If SB 79 is in play, the floor is not zero.

But that is reading tea leaves off a density figure, and Campbell's planning file will answer it in a sentence. Anyone tracking this project should be asking the city for that sentence.

Where the 444 households would actually live

The site sits in the Pruneyard district, which is the lowest-ranked of the 20 Campbell neighborhoods we score at 2.8 out of 5 overall. That headline number misleads in a specific way, and unpacking it beats repeating it.

Pruneyard scores 3.4 on amenities and 2.3 on safety. Those two figures describe the same street. A commercial district with a cinema, a grocery store, restaurants and a freeway ramp generates foot traffic, night activity and the incident counts that come with a busy retail core, and it is scored against quiet residential tracts. It is the standard trade a dense commercial corridor makes anywhere in the South Bay.

Cross the street into Pruneyard Dry Creek, the 1950s ranch neighborhood backing onto the same shopping district, and the picture flips: 3.5 overall, 3.9 on safety, ninth of Campbell's 20. Median sale price there was about $2.04 million recently. That is the actual neighborhood most of these 444 renters would walk into on a Saturday, and it is one of the better ones in the city.

Citywide, Campbell scores 3.5 overall, 4.2 on schools, 2.9 on safety and 3.4 on amenities, and its median sale price was about $1.95 million in August 2026. The schools number is the one that makes Campbell expensive. Adding 444 rental homes does not change a 4.2 school score, and nobody should tell you it will.

What Campbell money buys against the rest of the West Valley

Campbell is the cheapest serious address in the West Valley, and it is not close.

Read the school column against the price column and the West Valley premium stops being mysterious. Saratoga scores 4.8 on schools and clears $4.3 million. Los Gatos scores 4.6 and sits around $2.6 million. Campbell scores 4.2, which is within striking distance of both, at less than half of Saratoga's price. Campbell buyers have known this for twenty years.

The comparison that matters for renters, though, is east. Willow Glen scores 4.2 on amenities and 4.0 on safety, both better than Campbell citywide, with San Jose's median running about $1.63 million in August 2026. Willow Glen's own school score is 3.2. So the real West Valley choice for a household that rents on Bascom and eventually wants to buy is Campbell schools against Willow Glen walkability, at a price gap of a few hundred thousand dollars.

That is a genuine decision, and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets lost when people shop listings before they shop neighborhoods. It is the habit Houseberry is built around.

Three objections, ranked by how good they are

People will show up to the hearing, and they should. Not every argument they bring is equally strong.

The best one is traffic on Bascom between Hamilton and Campbell Avenue. That stretch already backs up at commute hours and around the Pruneyard on weekends, and 444 households with 480 cars will be felt. This is a real cost, it will land on people who live nearby, and the city should be made to publish the intersection analysis rather than wave at it.

The second is parking, and it cuts the other way from how it usually gets argued. At 1.08 spaces per home, this project is parked generously by 2026 standards. Compare it to 1099 South Bascom on the San Jose side of the line, where a 474-unit all-affordable proposal carries 191 spaces, about 0.4 per home, and 457 bike stalls. Whatever else this building is, it is not trying to force anybody out of a car.

The weakest one is height. Eight stories is tall for Campbell, and it will look tall from Bascom for a few years. But the thing being replaced is a half-empty 1978 office park behind a parking lot, and calling that the character of South Bascom Avenue is a stretch. The corridor's character is a six-lane arterial. This proposal puts people on it.

What happens next, and what to ask for

The next real document is Campbell's planning file for the application, and it is where the affordable count, the actual legal pathway, the parking ratio and the ground-floor treatment stop being guesses. Preliminary applications under state law lock in the rules that apply, so the filing date matters more than the hearing date for what this project is allowed to be.

Two things worth watching. First, whether the below-market number comes in at 10 percent or better, because 44 very-low-income homes would move Campbell's worst number more than anything else in its pipeline. Second, whether this is a one-off or the first of the 17 Bascom and Winchester sites to actually get filed on. Campbell rezoned that corridor in 2024 and got 117 homes built for its trouble in the year that followed. A single 444-unit application does not prove the rezoning worked. Three of them would.

Sources

• The Registry, "Pacific Development Files Plans for 444-Unit Apartment Tower on Campbell's South Bascom Avenue," September 9, 2026
• Pacific Development, South Bascom project sheet, 1475 South Bascom Avenue, Campbell
• LoopNet property record, 1475 S. Bascom Avenue, Campbell, APN 282-24-011, Creekside Business Mall
• San Jose Spotlight, "Campbell plans housing along major roadways," April 2024
• SV@Home, City of Campbell RHNA 2023-2031 allocation and permitting progress
• Housing Readiness Report, City of Campbell housing element certification status
• Association of Bay Area Governments, SB 79 summary, April 2026
• SF YIMBY, "New 474 Unit Affordable Housing Project Proposed on South Bascom Avenue, San Jose," April 2025
• U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Campbell city, California, July 2025 population estimate
• Houseberry neighborhood and city data for Campbell, Los Gatos, Saratoga and San Jose