This week I managed to get in two long walks: one through some of the residential portions of Redwood City with the aim of visiting as many of the entries in Redwood City’s Haunt Your Home contest as I could, and one through parts of San Carlos to check up on some of that city’s development activity. But before I get into all that, I was watching last week’s City Council meeting and was horrified to hear the Redwood City Manager say that not only is Second Harvest of Silicon Valley not going to be able to hand out turkeys for Thanksgiving this year, they’ve given up providing their clients with meat altogether. Apparently, there are just too many people needing the food that they provide, and not enough people donating food and, more importantly, funds. My wife and I donate money to Second Harvest each year, and hearing this latest news is spurring us to not only make our donation sooner this year, but also to increase the amount that we give. If you can, please consider supporting this very worthy charity that supports people living right here in our own community.

Halloween 2024 is now behind us, so I don’t plan to write much about the various displays I visited this week, other than to congratulate the contest winners, the honorable mentions, and, frankly, everyone who put in the effort to turn their yards into contest-worthy entries. As usual, the city produced a short video showing the winning entries, so I encourage anyone interested to check it out. You’ll find it on the contest web page; just scroll down below the map showing the locations of the various entrants.

Although my first walk took me through a number of Redwood City’s residential neighborhoods, I of course couldn’t help but touch on some of the commercial areas as well. I took a peek into the storefront that is slated to become Redwood City’s sixth cannabis retailer (at the corner of Central Avenue and Woodside Road, in the old Gold Star Market space). The last time I checked, some light demolition had been done, but the building permit to actually do the interior renovations had not been issued. Since then, the permit was granted, but from what I can tell no real work has gotten underway as yet:

Up at the corner of Woodside Road and Massachusetts Avenue, the relatively small office building that has long been under construction at 1390 Woodside Rd. continues to be…under construction (this thing got underway more than than three years ago!). The building itself is looking pretty complete, at least from the outside, with at least some of the landscaping installed. When I was there on Monday the driveway into the ground-floor garage was being prepped for paving.

I’ll note that one of the glass panes that makes up the balcony on the Massachusetts Avenue side of the building, which was shattered (by heat?) many months ago, remains un-repaired:

Work is still actively being done on this building, however, so it’ll get wrapped up someday…

I’ve written a handful of times about the McDonald’s along Woodside Road; it continues to march towards completion. But this week I went by the Chick-fil-A out on Whipple Avenue. As you may know, that place is undergoing renovations in yet another attempt to reduce the traffic backups that sometimes occur along Whipple Avenue (backups that on occasion go around the corner and extend down Veterans Boulevard as well). Although the building itself is being remodeled, much of the effort is going towards moving and reducing the number of parking spaces and re-routing the on-property drive-thru lanes to make them longer than before (thereby enabling more cars to line up on the property itself, and hopefully reducing the number that have to wait out on our streets).

Work still needs to be done before the parking lot/drive-thru can be paved and striped. As for the building, it, too, still needs some work:

Like McDonald’s, I expect that this project will move along quickly and that this Chick-fil-A will be back open soon. In the meantime, though, if you are craving some of their products, I bring you this sign:

It notes that “you can still find us at our 1531 Main Street, Redwood City location.” If you aren’t familiar, that is the ghost kitchen where food for delivery is produced. I never would have thought to actually go there to order and pick up food, but apparently you can!

On Wednesday I pointed my feet northwards and headed into San Carlos. I was aiming for the replacement fire station at the corner of Alameda de las Pulgas and Howard Avenue, but before I got there I took a brief detour and checked on the modular home that was built at 183 Ruby Ave. That thing finally appears to be done, and there might be someone living in it, but I noted that the temporary power pole used for construction is still in place (and apparently still providing power). I’ve heard that PG&E can take a long time to get things done these days, so perhaps this isn’t a priority for them…

Temporary power pole notwithstanding, I’m going to mark this one as “completed” in my book. (If you don’t know, or don’t recall, the history of this project, see my post Chasing Houses from August 4, 2023).

As for the fire station, that is nearly complete, although not quite:

I’m just loving the large glass doors! Passersby will be able to see the fire engines inside.

My next target was the four-story mixed-use (residential and retail) building at 560 El Camino Real. This is the former site of Applewood Pizza (which had been gone for years when this project got underway). Now, the wraps are being taken off this new 24-unit condominium building (with 2,756 square feet of retail space on the ground floor):

Given the relatively small footprint remaining after you set aside the retail space, to fit the needed 35 vehicles into the buildings single-level ground-floor parking garage, a mechanical lift system will be used to accommodate 14 of those vehicles (the garage will also have 11 regular spaces, 8 tandem spaces, and 2 ADA spaces). By peeking over the construction fencing along the side of the building, I got a glimpse of that lift system:

I’m really curious to know how well these things will work.

Out towards the freeway, I visited the site of the Portal 405 building, a 240,000-square-foot life science building located at 405 Industrial Rd. From the exterior the building itself looks pretty much complete (although the driveways and landscaping are yet to be done, and I’m guessing that there is still work to do on the interior):

From there I headed down Industrial in the direction of Redwood City. First I spent some time looking at the research and development building that was created out of the former Honda dealership building at 777 Industrial Rd.:

This building is indeed complete, but not yet occupied. I find it fascinating not only because it was created from a relatively new automobile dealership building, but also because, like the dealership before it, it essentially sits on stilts, leaving most of the ground floor beneath the building available for parking. The buildings were designed this way because the ground is contaminated (or was; it had been, and may still be, undergoing groundwater decontamination), and the soil needed to remain undisturbed as much as possible.

In order to provide the promised amount of parking (228 spaces), this building comes with a parking stacker on a scale I have not yet seen in any of the projects in our area:

This free-standing structure can accommodate a whopping 108 vehicles using mechanisms from a company called Harding Steel. For the curious, here are the instructions for using it:

And here is what the mechanisms look like up close (note that they are arranged two cars deep):

I’m not sure I’ll ever get a chance to see this thing operate, but I’d sure like to…

Some of you are probably thinking that the developers of projects like these are crazy, and that there is little or no demand for these buildings. While that could be true, I should note that the largest life science development in the area, the two-building Alexandria Center for Life Sciences at 825 Industrial Road, has a number of tenants. And the developer of that project is so confident that companies want the space they have to offer that they’ve just completed demolition on a third life sciences building to be located right next to the 777 Industrial Rd. building shown above (and just across Bransten Road from Alexandria’s existing campus):

I took the above picture from the corner of Bransten and Industrial, looking east towards the freeway. The building you see is the backside of 777 Industrial. Bransten Road is off the right edge of the image, and just to the right of that is the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences. The new building planned for this site — 888 Bransten Rd. — would be a three-story, 105,416-square-foot life science building. There would be surface parking along two sides of the building, with additional parking available in the large garage that was built for the next-door Alexandria Center.

Not far away, there is yet another research-and-development building going up in the area, this one along Brittan Avenue, just a short way west of Industrial Road:

This project, at 1030 Brittan Ave., is producing a three-story research and development lab and office building with one level of below-grade parking. It is being built to supplement the next-door MBC Biolabs, and will provide additional flexible lab space “for ambitious biotech companies tackling today’s biggest challenges.” As I understand it, instead of providing permanent space for biotech companies along the lines of what Alexandria does, this is more for startups and companies needing lab space on a relatively short-term basis. Thus the “flexible” aspect of what they provide: if a biotech company is starting a new research project and needs lab space for some months or years (but not permanently), they can lease space here for the duration of the project. Clearly, there is demand for this kind of thing, given that the larger MBC Biolabs building next door is apparently not enough to fill the need.

That’ll do it for this week’s walks. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to think about donating to Second Harvest.