I maintain a spreadsheet of all the significant development projects going on in and around Redwood City, and every once in a great while I go through the city’s Development Projects webpage to make sure that my spreadsheet is in sync — and that I haven’t missed anything significant. This week I did just that, and because things have been relatively quiet on the development front lately (compared with the pre-COVID years, that is) before I compared the two I assumed that I’d discover that a lot of projects had fallen off the city’s list. Although there were indeed two or three, I was pretty surprised to see just how many projects remain “active” — although these days for a lot of them “active” means foot dragging on the part of the developers, hoping for better economic conditions (both lower interest rates, and more companies looking for office space).

With continuing demand for living space — in particular, affordable housing, both for-rent and for-sale — on the residential side of things, pretty much every residential project that I’d been tracking remains on the list. One or two have been on that list for a very long time, though. For instance, 150 Charter Street, a 72-unit condominium complex (11 of which would be priced for those earning at the Moderate income level) that is to be built on the north side of Redwood City’s Target store (and thus replacing the Mi Rancho Supermarket that is there today), was approved by the city’s Planning Commission on May 4, 2021. The developer appears to have applied for a construction permit in July of 2022, but that permit has yet to be granted, more than two years later.

On the commercial side of things, a number of projects were approved in late 2022 or in 2023; the developers of those are likely still drawing up their final construction plans, working with the city to obtain permits, and doing whatever they need in order to obtain the necessary financing to see the project through the construction phase. Stand-outs in this category include the large, multi-building Harbor View office complex planned for the handful of parcels just east of Highway 101 and north of Seaport Boulevard (including the old Lyngso Garden Materials and Malibu Grand Prix properties), and the project to almost completely rebuild and expand the Hotel Sequoia (while preserving its historic Broadway and Main Street facades). As for projects that have fallen off the list entirely, I see three, plus one that is still on the city’s list but for which I have reason to believe will never get built. This last is the 112-room Hyatt Place Hotel planned for the corner of Broadway and Beech Street (currently, the site of the Garden Motel). Until it officially disappears from the city’s list, I’m keeping it on mine, but with a big red flag.

As for the ones that really are gone, the clear standout is the massive project that had been proposed for the site of the Sequoia Station shopping center. While someday a project along the lines of what had been proposed may actually happen, for now the project is dead: the former owner/developer sold the project to another development company, one that has expressed their intention to run the center pretty much as-is for the next half-dozen years or so (while sprucing the center up a bit and trying to lease out the currently empty spaces). Anything could happen here: the site is a particularly attractive one and is underutilized (for one thing, a very large percentage of the parcel is being used as a surface parking lot), and redevelopment could result in a far more profitable center that is also more attractive to the general public. But the developer understandably needs to see a clear future demand for the office and/or residential space that would be built there, or else risk having a very expensive white elephant on their hands. Thus the withdrawal of the previous project.

The two other commercial projects that have fallen off the city’s list are smaller projects that the general public may not be aware of. One was for a three-story office and lab building planned for 1200 Marsh Rd.:

As you can probably see, this building would have been located right at the Highway 101 southbound offramp to Marsh Road (on the northwest corner of the interchange). My post Putt’n Around Redwood City contained description of what is there today and what would have been built.

The second small project that no longer seems to be on the city’s Development Projects page is the five-story, 80,579-square-foot office building with a small retail space on the ground floor and two futsal courts plus a small clubhouse on the roof (that would have been open to the public) that was to be built at 601 Allerton St. — plus an associated affordable housing project that would have been created from the small apartment complex currently located at 450 Redwood Ave.

For a rough idea of what we might have gotten had this project been built, see my post Better Than Ever.

Finally, while comparing my spreadsheet with what is currently on the city’s website, I learned that there is a project that we lost, and then regained. It seems that 1201 Main Street, the mixed-use (office and residential) project that Windy Hill Property Ventures had ushered through the approval phase (the Redwood City Planning Commission approved the project on April 18, 2023) was recently transferred to another developer, Mecah Ventures (which apparently is being run by Mike Field, the gentleman who established Windy Hill Property Ventures). After the transfer, the project was reworked to add more space to both the office and residential sides of the project, to where it now is planned to have 96,982 square feet of office space and 32 apartments (16 studios and 16 one-bedroom units), with four of the apartments being affordable.

These changes are significant enough that the project has to start over and go through the city’s approval process once again. Thus, I expect it’ll be some time before this project again pops up on my radar — at which time I’ll write more about it. I will note that the building on this site used to be home to Wings Learning Center, but, possibly due to the project’s prior approval, Wings relocated to 411 Middlefield Rd., in one of the ground-floor retail spaces inside the Indigo Apartments building San Bruno. Their former spot on Main Street is, I think, mostly empty now.

Thanks to a couple of very large development projects — ELCO Yards and Broadway Plaza — and a handful of small multi-family residential and retail projects, there is plenty of development activity underway to keep an eye on in Redwood City right now. And thanks to the city’s Development Projects webpage, it seems clear that we will continue to see plenty of development activity throughout the city for years to come.

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