North Sunnyvale residents will be able to access the city’s library resources closer to home by next year.
The Sunnyvale City Council on May 21 unanimously awarded Bobo Constructions a $23 million contract to build the Lakewood Branch Library and Learning Center, the city’s first expansion of its main library services. While it will have the programs expected of a library, such as story time for children, it will offer others focused on language learning, cultural events and creation spaces. The library will be about 22,000 square feet and construction is slated to begin this summer, with a projected opening in late 2025.
The new library will be next to Lakewood Park in North Sunnyvale, a historically underserved, low-income community. The Sunnyvale Public Library — the city’s only library — can be up to 30 minutes away by car.
Garrett Kuramoto, superintendent of libraries for the city, said the number of North Sunnyvale residents holding a library card has more than tripled since 2020, showing a growing interest for library services.
“It’s been very clear to us for a long time that services are difficult to access for residents in North Sunnyvale,” Kuramoto told San José Spotlight. “It’s core to our vision and mission in the city, but particularly the library, to increase access and remove barriers so everyone in the community can get the resources and information they need.”
About half of the library’s square footage will be a traditional library and the other half will be community spaces, Kuramoto said, some of which can be adapted for multiple uses.
The city signed an agreement in 2020 with the Sunnyvale School District — which owns the land — and Fremont Union High School District to help fund the project for dedicated elementary and high school space. It’s taken 10 years since the location was selected to get the project off the ground.
Sunnyvale School District Trustee Eileen Le said the lengthy delay was due in part to getting the city, two school districts and other organizations to coordinate.
Le, a Lakewood resident, said she often went to public libraries with her 9-year-old son, including the Milpitas Public Library, which was easier to get to than Sunnyvale’s. She’s excited to soon have a library in her neighborhood where she can take her second son, who is 7 months old.
“Right now, we have a community that’s a little disconnected from the rest of Sunnyvale,” she told San José Spotlight.
Cortney Jansen, vice president of the Lakewood Village Neighborhood Association, said the neighborhood lacks community programs. She said when she was looking for summer camps last year, she found most options were south of Highway 101. The distance made it too difficult to bring her children to camp and commute to work on time.
Longtime Lakewood resident Mar Junge said she and other North Sunnyvale residents have felt disconnected from the rest of the city, but that organizing is bringing more city resources into the neighborhood.
“The library represents a lot of what we’ve been fighting for all these years, something beautiful, something functional, something that is just as good as everything on the south side of the city,” Junge told San José Spotlight.
