The San Jose Mercury News, which has sold its longtime home at I-880 and Brokaw Road, announced Thursday that it has leased two floors of a downtown San Jose office building for its news, advertising and executive offices.

The Merc said a “deal-closer” for the move was the parking incentive the city is offering to businesses moving downtown — the paper will get 200 parking places in a city garage, 160 of them free of charge for four years and half price for the fifth year. The deal with the Merc was approved by City Council.

The Merc will occupy the seventh and eighth floors of the 13-story Legacy Civic Towers at 4 N. Second Street, two blocks from San Jose City Hall. The building is a few blocks from the building at 51 N. San Pedro St. that it left in 1967 when it moved to its current location.

The newspaper said it will occupy 33,186 square feet of the building. Loopnet, a commercial property website, said space in the building was leasing at $1.25/square foot/month.

The move is expected to happen in September. The Merc’s owner, First Digital, sold its current 36-acre campus to Supermicro Computer for $30.5 million last fall.

The Merc last year moved its printing to company plants in Hayward and Concord, but the paper was arriving late in San Jose. So now the Merc is printed on a contract basis at Southwest Offset on Charcot Avenue in San Jose, less than a half mile from the newspaper’s home at I-880 and Brokaw.