Category: Bayfront Development

  • Sobering up in Burlingame instead of San Mateo

    We have not had a Guest Author on the Voice in quite awhile, but when San Matean David Long asked me why I had not weighed in on the “sobering center” controversy I asked him to pen his perspective for us. I wasn’t really paying attention to the issue when it was in San Mateo and he has, as you will read here. The DJ had a piece two days ago that noted

    San Mateo County will purchase a $13 million Burlingame property to hopefully open up a sobering station as soon as possible, house the Pride Center and provide an option for a treatment facility, with supervisor approval Tuesday. The property of more than 2 acres at 818-828 Mahler Road was the former site of First Chance, a 14-bed sobering center operated by since-closed nonprofit StarVista.

    Since First Chance closed, individuals who get arrested for driving under the influence are brought to county jail, rather than a station that promotes wellness and provides offenders with resources and opportunities to rehabilitate. It costs double the amount to house a DUI offender in a county correctional facility than a sobering center.

    Here is David’s perspective on the switch from central San Mateo to Mahler Rd.:

    San Mateo County’s proposed sobering and treatment center at 101 N. El Camino Real has felt like an experiment in how many bad land-use decisions could be shoe-horned into an already congested corridor. 

    • Dense residential neighborhood? Check. 
    • Multiple schools and daycares nearby? Check. 
    • Dense senior housing within walking distance? Check. 
    • Breakneck traffic at a pockmarked El Camino intersection seemingly designed by bumper-car enthusiasts? Absolutely. 

    And yet somehow, this was presented as the “best” location for a large detox and treatment facility projected to generate up to 17,000 annual client trips with 24/7 intake activity?  Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.

    On Tuesday, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to purchase the former sobering center property on Mahler Road in Burlingame for $13 million. Only a single speaker opposed the purchase. Even the Burlingame City Council – never mistaken for a drum circle – gave Mahler Road unusually ‘high’ marks at its 4/20 meeting. Why? Because Mahler Road makes sense. 

    At two acres, it’s a large parcel in a light industrial and emerging biotech corridor with sparse nearby housing. It sits just one mile from Highway 101 and three miles from Mills-Peninsula Medical Center. Most importantly, it has a long, proven history as a sobering center serving San Mateo County. The Mahler sobering component is expected to open within six months. By comparison, the 101 ECR proposal likely faced a three-to-five-year runway filled with entitlement battles, lawsuits, redesigns, and enough public hostility to power a small city. 

    Burlingame’s Supervisor Jackie Speier deserves enormous credit for recognizing the broader potential of the Mahler site. In addition to treatment services, discussions have included a future home for the San Mateo County Pride Center – which has been without a permanent location since 2024 – as well as possible housing for essential service workers increasingly priced out of the communities they serve.

    Which makes San Mateo’s Supervisor Noelia Corzo’s continued attachment to the 101 ECR location all the more puzzling. This debacle echoes her divisive performance during COVID while serving as SMFCSD’s school board President, where her stubbornness and delays reopening San Mateo public schools were epic. Her tone-deaf obstinacy has triggered a June primary write-in candidate (Taso Zografos) and a recall effort (you heard it here first). 

    At some point, leadership means recognizing when a better option has emerged. Corzo’s four Supervisor colleagues did exactly that. They listened to residents, looked at operational realities, and pivoted toward a faster, cheaper, and far less divisive solution. 

    These are important services that our families, friends and neighbors need ASAP. The Mahler location delivers services quickly and in a location that is well suited for this use. Only time will tell, but San Mateo County appears to be getting this right. 

    David Long is a San Mateo Park resident who continues to view the failed 1909 Burlingame annexation effort of his neighborhood as one of local history’s great missed opportunities.

    —————

    With all the fuss about commercial properties not turning over and thus never being revalued per Prop. 13, my hope is that even if the County did get a deal at $13 million, I hope they are paying full property taxes on the purchase. We shall see how the Broadway overpass handles another 17,000 trips per year. And yes, San Mateo Park would have made a great addition to South B’game. Thanks, David.  I happened by 818 Mahler and snapped this photo. The building really looks like it needs some love.

  • Coyote Point: A B’gamer returns

    The Chronicle’s local sightseeing tour guide/reporter, Peter Hartlaub, who grew up in B’game journeyed back to our little burg for a piece on Coyote Point. He has some fun little quips that we can enjoy here or you can click through for the whole article. It sounds like he grew up in Lyon-Hoag.

    Coyote Point’s geography is similar to other Bay Area parks, a 670-acre shoreline promontory with a tree-covered hill, laid out a lot like Oyster Bay Regional Shoreline in San Leandro and the East Bay’s Albany Bulb. But the overall vibes are one of a kind, with the airplanes, massive picnic areas, tide pools, a colorful playground, a hidden zoo, oh, and bursts of audible gunfire.

    It’s also a lesson for me: How the Bay Area things we grew up with that once felt routine, seem wild and mystical when you return with perspective. I was raised in Burlingame six blocks from Coyote Point, and thought this strange and versatile park was the norm. Biking through the entire thing for the first time in decades, I’m struck by how close I once lived to an open space unicorn.

    From (Caltrain) I bike slowly east through a town I barely recognize, retracing most of my old 1980s Chronicle paper route and passing my childhood home — bought by my parents for $35,000 in 1970 — now mostly unrecognizable after a recent modern makeover.

    After recapping the landfill in the 1880s that connected the island to the shoreline and the Pacific City fiasco, he mentions another long-gone landmark that we all miss as he bikes up the hill

    I power up the first hill and sadly find no sign of the Castaway, a tiki-themed fancy restaurant with airport views, where we gathered for graduations and Mother’s Day. (It was bulldozed in 2007.)

    As I’m leaving, I marvel at how much better this went than I feared. So much of my middle-class childhood on the Peninsula — every movie theater, drive-in, record store and favorite sandwich spot — has been swallowed by Silicon Valley. But this park is both preserved and objectively better than when I visited as a kid.

    I bike back through my old neighborhood slowly, wishing I had a few more Chronicles to deliver. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Especially when it’s a half-century later and a special place still has some magic left.

    Let’s see if we can keep as much of “the magic” as possible. It’s very tough to do, but as some city council woman said more than once, “You’ll miss it when it’s gone”.

  • Top Three B’game restaurants by sales

    I won’t bemoan the dearth of fine dining in B’game again–I just did that here. Instead let’s look on the bright side. The city posts a quarterly sales tax analysis on its website here. The Top 20 sales tax generators are called out each quarter, and three restaurants made the cut back in Q1.

    Working alphabetically, Benihana, HL Peninsula Pearl and New England Lobster are our busiest restaurants. All three being out on the Bayfront means tourists are propping up our tax revenues although I love the lobstah place. Restaurants and hotels are the third largest contributors at around $600K that quarter with the Hyatt and the Marriott making the Top 20.

    This list has been pretty stable over the years, but if I can get the latest figures from Finance, I’ll add them as a comment. In the meantime, Dine Burlingame and let’s see if we can get a couple more restaurants on the list. Rumors around one of the largest downtown spaces changing hands to a high-profile Peninsula chain that is always packed might make it happen.

  • EV market struggles continue

    There is a steady drumbeat of bad news for the EV market as manufacturer after manufacturer cuts forecasts, lays off workers, idles battery and car plants while discounting the inventory to offset the loss of the $7,500 taxpayer subsidy. Couple that with half of the country dissing the owner of the most popular EV company and the on-going struggles with keeping chargers in working order and it seems like Waymo is the only real growth in the EV world. Here are some snippets from the news:

    The growth rate for new EV sales in the U.S. dropped from 40% in 2023 to about 10% in 2024. In the second quarter of 2025, U.S. sales declined 6.3% year-on-year. 

    GM plans to lay off more than 3,300 hourly workers at plants across Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee starting in January. Of those, more than 1,700 are being laid off indefinitely, while more than 1,500 are expected to be called back in mid-2026. Ford is moving workers from the plant that makes the electric F-150 Lightning to a nearby factory that makes the more popular—and profitable—gasoline-burning version. Nissan has decided not to offer its Ariya EV as a 2026 model and Honda has halted orders of the electric Acura ZDX, which is manufactured by GM.

    Porshe is facing financial decline due to a strategic shift away from rapid EV adoption, resulting in a recent quarterly loss, a profit plunge, and significant one-time costs of about $3.1 billion. This “EV reset” involves pausing new electric models, delaying some launches, and re-evaluating the strategy, driven by cooling EV demand, especially in the luxury segment.

    Here in B’game my main interest is in making sure the goofy EV parking rules we see in places like Top Golf don’t proliferate. The whole row of spaces near the front entrance (probably 40 or so) are EV-only as is the front row of the lower parking lot. Why? Who knows? It’s not because of chargers because there ain’t no chargers for many of the spaces. Check it out. Parking discrimination!

  • Don’t “Miami” Burlingame

    I feel for the people on the west side of EssEff. The (over)development pressure from various state laws and codes has them on edge. Close the Great Highway? Sure. Let the voters on the east side disrupt your daily life. Miami styled high rises blocking the sunset in the Sunset? Too bad. Now with Scott Weiner’s SB79 signed into law, we are all at risk of being Miami-ized. SB 79 does this:

    • Overriding local limits: SB 79 supersedes certain local zoning restrictions to permit greater density and building height for housing projects located within a half-mile of qualifying transit stops.
    • Target areas: It primarily applies to urban counties with significant transit infrastructure, such as those in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.
    • Affordability: The law includes requirements for a portion of the new units to be set aside for lower-income households.
    • Local flexibility: Local governments can adopt alternative development plans that must be approved by the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD).

    The bill looked like it was headed to defeat, but the Sacramento sausage-making took center stage as

    The chair, Sen. Aisha Wahab of Fremont, opposed the bill on the grounds that it tilted too heavily toward developers without requiring enough affordable housing. In Sacramento, a chair’s word usually decides a bill’s fate. But Weiner went above Wahab’s head, calling Senate Pro Tem Mike McGuire, the Dem. Majority leader, asking him to give the other Senators on the committee to vote against the chair, a maneuver known in the Capitol as “rolling the chair” and is often seen as a breach of decorum and defiance of leadership.

    There was more sausage-making to come including

    Amendments made in the 11th hour got the bill through the State Building and Construction Trades Council, when the bill was amended to require union labor on any building taller than 85 feet, and tenant groups got some protections for low-income neighorhoods. In the end, Wahab and Durazo flipped to support the bill.”  Lucky for Newsom, the bill’s reach was narrowed to counties with over 15 major passenger rail stations, leaving out Contra Costa, and Marin, where Newsom recently purchased a mansion in Kentfield for $9 million.

    How nice. Marin gets the status quo while EssEff, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties get the intense development pressure. With B’game’s central location between the city and Silicon Valley and the lovely amenities, schools and weather, I’m feeling a bit like the bullseye on the developers’ dartboard. Will our council get creative? Will they muster support from other similarly situated Peninsula cities? Or even go farther afield like Huntington Beach? I’m not seeing that sort of backbone. Will the parking lot across ECR from Walgreen’s be the Miami beachhead in town?

  • Fire Station 36 reopens

    With all of the overdevelopment near 101 and in the North End, emergency response and fire response has been a growing concern–for those that think pragmatically.  Denser housing, especially where there has traditionally been no housing, brings more need.  So, it was good news that a big Federal grant has allowed the station on Rollins that has been closed for 15 years to reopen with newly hired firefighters.  The Daily Journal grabbed the photo op "Burlingame, Hillsborough and Millbrae councilmembers complete the engine push-in tradition alongside fire department personnel."

    Central County Fire — which serves Burlingame, Hillsborough and Millbrae — originally shut down operations at the station as a cost-cutting measure. But the department was recently awarded a substantial $8 million grant from the federal government, allowing it to hire 12 additional firefighters and reopen Station 36.  The $8.1 million Staffing For Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grant was originally awarded to CCFD in November 2024 and is to be used over a three-year period. The department will be tasked with providing an additional half-million dollars in funding, per a staff report from the CCFD board.

    Reopening the station will provide up to a four-minute improvement in response times to the Bayside area of CCFD’s jurisdiction, Fire Chief David Pucci said.

    When you need serious help, four minutes is a looong time to wait.  Test it.  Set your phone timer to four minutes and sit totally still, silent and sort of meditate.  Good stuff.

  • Travis AFB: Hypocrisy meter hits 100

    My hypocrisy meter pegged at 100 yesterday reading the SF Comicle article about possibly using Travis AFB near Sacramento as an ICE detention center.  Forget about the proposed use, who proposed it or where it is and all the other stuff that people will endlessly disagree about in the political realm without changing anyone's mind.  My H-meter spiked because of this:

    Federal officials have been looking for months for detention facilities in Northern California and other Western states that could have 850 to 950 detention beds.  Reps. John Garamendi, D-Fairfield, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Mike Thompson, D-Napa, told Hegseth in a May 5 letter that they were “deeply frustrated” and “gravely concerned” about using Travis as a migrant detention center.

    Why might you ask?

    They want the Pentagon to explain how building a detention center would affect Travis’ water and energy infrastructure.

    Sure, filling 950 beds in an established major facility that has housed people since 1942 kicks off concerns about water and electricity.  But building thousands of units that have 2-4 beds in every city and town up and down the state?  Don't worry, there will be plenty of water, sewer capacity, electricity, parking, school capacity, police and fire–fergettaboutit.  Just don't use natural gas.  If you are a big-time Federal politician, you can just throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.  Try that as a regular resident and you are a NIMBY using zoning codes and CEQA as a weapon.  Want to avoid big residential construction on the B'game Bayfront because it lacks said infrastructure?  Too bad.  From the DJ:

    New and proposed state housing laws could mean housing on the Bayfront without specific city standards, despite the city’s intent to limit such development there in its general plan.  New housing was zoned for the north end of Burlingame, near Bay Area Rapid Transit, not on the Bayfront — though proposals for changing zoning there have been floated several times over the years.  The Burlingame City Council and Planning Commission, meeting April 29, in a joint session expressed that the laws will severely undermine the city’s ability to effectively plan its own new housing and undercut its environmental and safety goals.

    Councilmembers expressed frustration that the state was continuing to remove local control from the city’s development process, citing its recent endeavors to meet its state-mandated housing requirements by building out housing in the North Rollins Road area.

    The hypocrisy needle is pinned to the top of the meter.

  • Top Golf: First impressions

    Six years after we got the preview of the Top Golf plans (as described here), I finally made it out to the Bayfront for some swings and refreshments.  We went with a large group and booked two stations for two hours on a busy Saturday afternoon.  The facility is impressive and expansive.  There are 36 hitting stations on each of three levels.  We were on the middle level, and I got a bit of the agoraphobic feeling I had when I did the special event at Oracle Park hitting golf balls on to the baseball field from stations in the stands.  There are nets in front.

    The sports bar in the lobby is likely to draw a good crowd of all ages with the giant screen shown below, a full bar, pub fare, foosball and shuffleboard.  I could see going out there without hitting any balls.  With the soccer field a short walk away, there were plenty of kids kicking back after games.  For the uninitiated, the gamification of the golf shots is not exactly intuitive.  The idea is to set up teams and rack up points similar to pinball by hitting targets.  If I were Top Golf, I would offer some coaching to newbies on how to set it up and perhaps explain why an additional $5 charge per player for "membership" kicked in above the station rental fee.

    The stations are set up for hitting and socializing.  Some have high-tops and all appeared to have couches.  We had a few tag-alongs who didn't hit a single ball and still had fun.  The food appeared to be pretty average.  There were no complaints about the chicken sandwich and fries, but a local hack I will tip you off to is the Mexican restaurant (Gabriel's & Daniel's) in the old driving range building across the parking lot is still operating albeit on limited hours–they closed at 5pm on Saturday.  The food is excellent–probably the best Mexican between Millbrae and San Mateo.

    Another oddity is the drink menu doesn't have any prices on it!  The Angel's Envy Old Fashioneds are $17.75.  A Hendricks Martini is $19.75 while good ole Grey Goose goes off at $12.25.  You don't find that out until the bill arrives.  Those aren't usurious prices, but why not print them?

    We shall see if the business turns out to be the sales tax gusher the city is hoping for.  Other Top Golf sites that are older and perhaps not as cool were reported to be under plan as we noted here last September.  With 108 stations and a fun bar, I hope they do well so we can do well.

    Top Golf bar

  • Pushing back on the YIMBYs

    From the "broken clock is right twice a day" file comes this Letter to the Editor of the SF Comicle.  Somehow the editors let this one slip through the cracks and into print.  I don't know the woman or the organization, but she hits pretty much every button right on the nose:

    YIMBY housing fantasies won’t work in California. Here’s the reality

    Regarding “There’s no protecting California values without building more housing” (Open Forum, SFChronicle.com, Dec 13): The steady drumbeat of op-ed pieces from SPUR and YIMBY housing advocates is tiresome. Many Californians disagree with them.  Urban density and infill housing are supposed to remedy suburban sprawl. But urban density, in practice, simply creates overcrowded streets, with motorists circling in search of rare parking.   Infill comes at the expense of historic buildings and districts, which are often demolished. A classic example is the enormous apartment buildings planned for the former California College of the Arts campus in Oakland.

    Transit-oriented development? This fantasy assumes that public transportation is a fixed utility. Many bus lines that once served our communities have been cut.  How many voters will oppose a tax to support BART because of the agency’s plans to put apartments in its parking lots? How many people have quit taking BART because there is no secure place to park near the stations?

    The SPUR and YIMBY people want Soviet-style apartment blocks wherever they can be crammed in, extinguishing every vestige of charm from neighborhoods.  It’s time for the state to stop forcing draconian “density bonus” and “builder’s remedy” laws on neighborhoods that want to retain some breathing room.

    Amelia Marshall

    Board member, Oakland Heritage Alliance

    Amen, Amelia.  Look no further than our latest Cellblock at One Adrian Ct.  It may not extinguish any charm in the neighborhood since it sits next to a Public Storage business, but you can bet it will raise traffic thru the Worst Intersection in the State and put pressure on all sorts of public services.  Did the grid get any major upgrade?  School capacity?  Did we hire another police officer for traffic enforcement?  Anything thing else listed here?  Keep up the good work, Ms. Marshall.  You are far from alone.

  • The Tsunami that wasn’t: Lessons learned

    It was an exciting morning.  I just happened to be outside talking to a buddy whose tsunami knowledge was unknown to me when his phone went off about 10:45 am.  I got nothing on my phone, but he started making a plan since he knew a "warning" is the highest level of four notices that are issued.  Listening to him, I was concerned for the coastal areas covered in the warning; from the area of the 7.0 undersea earthquake off Ferndale down to Davenport on the PCH.  I was skeptical that it would be an issue here on the west side of B'game.  Nonetheless it was time to turn on the local TV news station that was in Breaking News mode.  There was a second quake north of Sacramento that registered a 6.0, the BART tube was shut down and SFO was landing flights as normal while noting the runways are only 13 feet above sea level.

    The warning was in effect until 11:49 am– an hour after the quake hit.  My knowledgeable buddy took off–I didn't ask where, but he mumbled something about "uphill".  The TV experts from SFFD, National Weather Service and some quake center were talking Go-Bag and getting up to 100 feet of elevation.  Traffic on eastbound 92 was bumper to bumper.  I was still skeptical of any tsunami squeezing through the Golden Gate, wrapping around the Bay and pushing water past maybe our Bayfront.  There's a reason Laguna Ave. is named Laguna Ave.  After watching the YouTube documentary on the Japan tsunami of 2011 my friend recommended, a second thought or two has crept in.

    I have to wonder why the SMC Alert didn't hit my phone until 11:49 am, an hour after the quake and then was deemed not a danger at 12:10 pm?  It turns out that a 7.0 quake, while big in town, isn't considered to be big enough to cause a major tsunami.  Is there such a thing as a minor tsunami?  Let's hope SMC alert and the quake shake apps are working as designed.  

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