Category: San Mateo, H’borough & Millbrae

  • San Mateo Safeway: Going Big

    The SF Comicle and the Daily Journal both had articles about the proposed redevelopment of the San Mateo Safeway into an EssEff-like commercial-residential hybrid like the one near Oracle Park. From the Chron:

    A Safeway store along El Camino Real in San Mateo is slated for a dramatic transformation, with a San Francisco developer pitching to replace the low-rise building with a dense housing complex.

    Align Real Estate on Tuesday filed an application to bring 396 new homes to 1655 S. El Camino Real, a nearly 3-acre site close to the Hayward Park Caltrain Station. The proposal involves razing the existing grocery store at the site and replacing it with a larger Safeway, topped by the planned housing, in a building that would rise seven stories. Roughly 55 of the proposed units will be income-restricted, and secured parking for both future residents and shoppers will be added to the site. 

    The piece rehashes the controversy over the giant Safeway store proposed in the Marina and refers to the state laws that are effectively gutting local control over development, but here is the real kicker in bold text

    Unlike some of the San Francisco neighborhoods targeted by Align, San Mateo has seen a notable uptick in housing development in recent years, driven largely by transit‑oriented infill and a push to address the region’s housing shortage — though affordability remains a major challenge. The most significant completed project is the Bay Meadows master plan, which has transformed the former racetrack into a mixed‑use neighborhood with about 1,100 new homes alongside offices, retail and parks, centered on access to Caltrain.

    That’s right. 1,100 new homes at the racetrack site near “access to Caltrain” and affordability is still considered “unaffordable” in San Mateo.  The fiction that we can outbuild the demand to live on the mid-Peninsula lives on. In the meantime, cities up and down the Peninsula approve more tech/biotech office space. Then they wonder why residential redevelopment doesn’t do what they thought it would do. And the infrastructure and school costs continue to spiral.

  • 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”.

  • Save OSH: SFPUC threat

    One of the most missed businesses in our area was the Orchard Supply Hardware in Millbrae that closed in 2018. Our little Ace in downtown is awesome, but there is no replacement for square footage in that business. Outdoor Supply Hardware stepped into the breach a few years ago and it’s a perfect replica of the old OSH. When you need something, they have it. I’m mostly done rehabbing two old B’game homes, but maintenance never ends. So this news in the DJ was concerning:

    The Millbrae community is voicing concerns about an SFPUC proposal to oust its tenant, Outdoor Supply Hardware, to expand its Millbrae operations facility because of seismic concerns at a nearby location.

    The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission oversees the Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System, providing water supply for around 2.7 million Northern California residents, Steve Ritchie, Water Enterprise assistant general manager, said during a Millbrae City Council meeting Jan. 13.

    Its Millbrae operations center already hosts almost 500 division employees, Ritchie said, but seismic concerns at the existing SFPUC Burlingame facility means around 100 more employees and assorted equipment will need to move to the Millbrae location.

    Can’t we find a spot for these employees that is not right in the heart of the Millbrae commercial district and providing a key service to the public? Please.

  • CSM: “Free college” and new housing

    I’ve been taking a class at CSM one day a week for the last six or seven semesters. It’s a beautiful campus with a lot of open space, top notch facilities and not a lot of students. I’m paying a modest tuition for a two-hour, non-degree class and happy to do so. For some degree-seeking students, tuition is “free”. Of course, it’s not free but rather taxpayer subsidized. The freebie has been given to about 5,000 students over the last three years and yet the campus often feels empty on a Tuesday afternoon except for the athletic facility. Now our state senator, Josh Becker, wants to double down on “free” per the DJ:

    Following the success of the San Mateo County Community College District’s Free College pilot, a bill making the initiative a permanent program will be introduced to the California Legislature in the new year.

    The district covers the costs that are waived for qualified students, which Moreno described as a necessary investment. For the 2025-26 school year, the Board of Trustees approved allocating $12.5 million for the Free College expenses.

    The freebies for select students doesn’t give me a lot of heartburn but calling it “free” does. The $12.5M per year comes from somewhere and everyone–students, administrators and taxpayers–should remember that. The next move up on the hill in San Mateo is a big change from a community college to one with on-campus housing. Per the DJ 

    Districtwide student housing at College of San Mateo is inching closer to becoming a reality after the community college district’s Board of Trustees approved a $61.85 million contract with developers who intend to break ground in the spring. 

    The proposed housing facility will provide 316 beds to first-generation, low-income and housing-insecure students attending any of the three colleges within the San Mateo County Community College District.

    As I said, there is a lot of land up there and that makes it possible to do this sort of project at about $200K per bed. The land is also not “free” – it has opportunity costs as well as infrastructure costs to accommodate the intensified usage. Let’s hope this major project is run on the up and up and doesn’t result in another big trial of anyone involved like what is going on down in RWC right now. It would also be nice if the county’s cities got a bit of a RHNA credit for the new housing. Everyone but the YIMBYs knows the RHNA numbers are way off and should be redone. Here’s one chance to do so.

  • Natural Gas Gets a Reprieve?

    This is an interesting month in the climate wars with Bill Gates issuing a statement that basically said “nevermind” after years of haranguing us, eight miles of rainforest cut down for a climate conference in Brazil and some of our local governments trying to keep their all-electric “reach codes” on life support. Per the DJ:

    After some legal hiccups, cities throughout the region, including San Mateo, are revisiting policies that incentivize use of electric appliances and penalize reliance on gas infrastructure in homes and buildings.

    That “legal hiccup” was the Ninth Circuit eviscerating Berkeley’s overreach on natural gas. Our neighboring city to the south is reacting with a revision that

    Would require single-family homes, duplexes, townhomes and commercial buildings to install either a heat pump or higher-efficiency air conditioner at the time the original AC unit needs replacement.  The potential reach code would also require the addition of electric infrastructure when certain types of renovations are already underway.

    Then San Mateo broached a “scoring” system to award points to homeowners for choosing various electric-only options. You would not be wrong to compare that to the CCP’s Social Credit system. At least one councilor has a glimmer of understanding about complexity (i.e. staff time) and costs although it apparently didn’t deter her from plunging ahead.

    This is already going to be really complicated to understand, but it’s also an opportunity to really bring our community along because with a number of the other reach codes, there have been real cost issues associated with them, where people thinking the cost was going to be X, and the cost ends up being X plus 50%,” Councilmember Lisa Diaz Nash said.

    Here are a few of the costs that get us to X + 50% —or way more–2X, 3X?. Things have gotten even more expensive than when I wrote that five years ago. Some day I would love to see the DJ or the Daily Post survey council members up and down the Peninsula (and County supes) to see if any of them are all-electric. Aside from new construction, I’ll be it’s very very few.

  • Interfaith choirs ring true

    Although I am a huge music fan I don’t listen to much choral music outside of church. Upon hearing that there would be an interfaith choir concert at St. Catherine’s on Sunday, I was intrigued and had nothing else to do during our second rainfall of the Fall. What a pleasant surprise the concert proved to be! It was a delight from the opening, somewhat atonal (in a good way) organ solo emanating from the big pipes in St. Cat’s choir loft to the four-choir rendition of Oh Happy Days as the closer.

    I learned that this was the 16th annual concert by the North Peninsula Interfaith Choir. They underestimated how many people would show up such that they were out of programs when I entered so pardon the inexact names of the choirs. St. Paul’s Episcopal church and St. Catherine’s Catholic church represented B’game. San Mateo was represented by the Congregationalist church and the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ choirs. Here’s what it looked like when they all combined for the closer.

  • Peninsula Ave. Upgrade$$$?

    I often scratch my head at the amount of money thrown around by various levels of our government. Dan Walters at Calmatters.org had a piece in yesterday’s DJ about the state’s “$165 billion error in revenue projections in 2022 that fueled Newsom’s boast of having a $97.5 billion surplus”. That led to our “structural deficit” that gets papered over every year. Closer to home, I was struck by the amount of money being requested to improve Peninsula Ave.

    San Mateo and Burlingame are applying for a $1.25 million San Mateo County Transportation Authority grant, largely bolstered by Measure A and W funds. The funds, which would require a 25% local match, would fund a study — including community outreach and preliminary engineering work — and not the construction of the project itself. San Mateo and Burlingame propose sharing the local match portion, with the former contributing San Mateo providing $245,000 and Burlingame providing $130,000, as San Mateo owns and operates a longer portion of the Peninsula Avenue corridor.

    That 25% local match brings the total to $1.563 million dollars–for designing (not building) what is likely to be minimal changes to a 15 block long section of a local street. There is no new space available so any changes will either be minimal or they may try to replicate the disaster that is California Drive.

    Elsewhere around the streets of B’game, I heard on Friday that the California Transportation Commission voted to approve $100 million for the ECR Little Big Dig. We should get word soon from the city about what is likely to be a three- or four-year massive disruption to traffic through town. Buckle up.

  • Local real estate: High water marks set

    Hot on the heels of the highest-priced B'game house to ever sell, the Bing Crosby estate has finally sold.  Alex Buljan is having a good year–selling both properties:

    It took less than a day to sell an 8,200-square-foot Burlingame home for a record $17 million, at $3.5 million above the asking price.  Jennifer Colvin and Eric Klein sold their century-old home with a modern addition at 133 Pepper Avenue, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The buyer was undisclosed.  “We were on the market for less than 24 hours,” Compass’ Alex Buljan, who held the listing, told the newspaper.  The sale far surpassed Burlingame’s previous highest sale in February last year at 121 Pepper Avenue, two doors down the street, for just shy of $9 million.  They took a historically designated 1924 Tudor home and mated it with a modern addition, on a half acre.

    The Comicle piece on the Crosby estate notes:

    A historic Hillsborough estate once owned by Bing Crosby has sold for $25 million, more than a third below its original asking price but still one of the most expensive residential sales in the town’s history.

    The property at 1200 Jackling Drive, a 14,000-square-foot French chateau-style mansion on 5 acres, was listed in January for $40 million following the death of Crosby’s widow, Kathryn Grant, in 2024. The deal closed Thursday, according to Compass agents Alex and Pierre Buljan, who represented the buyer.  “This property is one of Hillsborough’s legacy estates with an extremely storied background and impeccable vintage craftsmanship,” Alex Buljan said in a statement. “The buyer is a Hillsborough local with an appreciation for classic properties, adamant about maintaining the character and history into the next generation.”

    That intent is a relief since H'borough has been looking around at big pieces of land in town to find ways to meet the ridiculous housing requirements from Sacramento.  Five acres would cause some developers to drool especially with all the new free-for-all rules if you can jam a bit of subsidized housing in there.  The bet is when H'borough finally has to come up with more units, they will be as close to ECR–and B'game–as possible.  And this won't be the end of 8-digit houses in B'game even without multiple acres of land to work with.

  • Memorial Day 2025: Parading through H’borough

    Just like two years ago as noted here, the light drizzle cleared, and the sun popped out right at 10am as the parade started.  The BHS band lead the way, but let's give equal time to the San Mateo Bearcat band and especially the kid who lugged the baritone sax the distance.  It's not like carrying the Sousaphone on one's shoulder.

    SMHS Band

    It was nice to see the World Champion Iron Panthers robotics team and the robot in the parade.  You can read up on the win on the "B" here.  They came away with gold in a field of 601 teams from all over the world.

    BHS robot

    The procession was light on politicians compared to some years and unfortunately very light on veterans' groups.  But police and fire were well represented.  The BPD California Special Mustang cruiser was out as well as a very cool BPD horseless carriage that I haven't seen in a long time.

    Vintage BPD car

    The County sheriff soap opera took another turn during the parade.  When the sheriff's department vehicle rolled by the sheriff was nowhere to be seen.  I might be mistaken, but I thought I spied her driving an all-black, unmarked SUV as the very last vehicle in the procession.  There without really being there? 

  • Hillsborough shooting: Reward goes up

    The Hillsborough PD are still looking for the shooter that hit an officer in their parking lot on Feb. 22nd.  We're a month in.  The state has stepped in with an additional $50K of reward money to add to the H'borough $100K.  Oddly enough the Comicle didn't mention the first $100K but did run the drawing of the suspect.  Here it is

    Hborough shooter

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