SAN JOSE — City officials are poised to crack down on a site of blight in downtown San Jose where a housing tower was once proposed but never built, a stalled process that led to a foreclosure of what the owner called a rat-infested property.
In the wake of the foreclosure in October 2025, San Mateo-based TDA Investment Group now owns the building at 27 South First St. through an affiliate. Blight, graffiti, and a rodent invasion plague the property, documents on file with the city show.
Commercial building at 27 South First Street in downtown San Jose, seen on Oct. 27, 2025. (George Avalos/Bay Area News Group)
“The situation at 27 South First St. shows the city has a blight enforcement problem, not a planning problem,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use consultancy. “This property has sat vacant for years with ongoing graffiti and violations, despite repeated citations and oversight.”
San Jose officials previously approved the development of a 24-story, 374-unit housing tower on the parcel, which has frontages on South First Street and Lightston Alley. The tower never broke ground.
Blight woes began to appear on the city’s radar in 2022, city documents show.
TDA Investment now faces sanctions and fines from San Jose code enforcement officers due to what the city believes is worsening blight.
“Blight conditions exist, such as graffiti,” Wayne Cirone, a city code enforcement inspector, stated in a March 10 report regarding the property. “All blight conditions are visible from the public right of way.”
In May 2022, code enforcement opened a complaint against the site after reports of graffiti.
“A pre-citation warning letter was sent to the property owner for the blighted conditions” in May 2022, Cirone wrote in his report.
City officials in August 2022 placed the property into the “vacant building monitoring program,” the report stated. Code enforcement officers continued to monitor the property through October 2025 on a monthly basis.
The city issued five citations against the owner.
Code inspectors in November 2025 discovered that the building’s rear door was in disrepair, which could allow unauthorized entry.
Now, the foreclosure has complicated anti-blight efforts, executives with TDA Investment said.
TDA Investment blames the blight conditions on the prior owners, a group led by Alterra Worldwide and real estate executives Tony Bader and Mike Sarimsakci.
“Shortly after the legal acquisition, we became aware of a significant rodent infestation that limited safe access to portions of the building,” TDA Investment Group wrote to city officials in February. “Since November 2025, we have been actively engaging in rodent remediation.”
TDA Investment hopes to make improvements both inside and outside the building, the property owner told city officials. It said the building is fully secured and a professional property manager is supervising the site.
The new property owner also asked the city to reverse its prior decision to place the site into the vacant building monitoring program.
“We look forward to our role as a good current property owner in San Jose,” TDA Investment Group stated in its Feb. 3 letter to the city.
San Jose has embarked on a “stitching districts” program aimed at creating a more lively urban core by connecting the vibrant islands of downtown activity.
Staedler believes San Jose should focus on more pressing issues first.
“Before talking about stitching districts, the city needs to fix the basics,” Staedler said. “Blight drags down surrounding property values and discourages real investment. The return on removing blight is immediate, visible, and far more impactful than any planning slogan.”