A Smart & Final grocery store will be built on the old Mel Cotton’s site in Midtown San Jose, developers announced last week at a community meeting. The 29,580-square-foot store will go up on the two-acre lot at the corner of West San Carlos and Race streets, directly across the street from Safeway. Until it closed for good last year, Mel Cotton’s Sporting Goods had stood there for more than 60 years. Some residents at the April 20 meeting held at the Westminster Presbyterian

An application has been submitted to rezone the site of the historic Midtown building that housed iconic sporting goods store Mel Cotton’s for more than 60 years before it closed last month. Applicant Terry Pries filed for a permit in late October to rezone the 2-acre site at the corner of West San Carlos and Race streets from light industrial to combined industrial/commercial. Representatives for developer HMH Inc. could not be reached for comment about its plans or to addre

The San Jose City Council continues to grapple with housing development proposals in conflict with the need to build a tax base the way well-financed cities with fully staffed police departments do: by nurturing job growth. Tuesday it faces a test of its resolve with a proposal for housing on commercial-industrial zoned land. The proposed general plan change for a stretch along San Carlos Street was one of three that city staff recommended for early denial — that is, the prop

You can tell when a topic gets really, really heated at San Jose City Hall, incandescent white in a world of gray. A council member will put out a memo that attacks not only an opposing position, but the Mercury News, demanding that the council be given room to make its own decision. That’s what happened over the weekend with Councilman Don Rocha, who has probably set the record for bristling and unpleasant memos in his four-years-plus on the council. All of this has to do wi

San Jose’s land-use battle over industrial-to-residential conversions reaches a climax today as the city council takes up a controversial proposal to rezone the longtime home of O.C. McDonald Co. Inc. and Mel Cotton’s Sporting Goods in Midtown. The proposal, from developer Michael R. Van Every’s Republic Urban Properties, is the last conversion request standing after a slew of others ran into a buzzsaw of opposition in recent weeks and withdrew. On its own, the 4.6-acre devel