Happy Pi day! Today (3/14) is the day that nerds everywhere celebrate the numerical constant pi (and mathematics in general). Personally, I’m looking forward to having a slice of pie.

In response to last week’s post, one of my readers stated that “…the Box Building adjacent to the property [Sequoia Station] has been over 50% vacant since it was built”. I’ve heard similar statements before (not specifically about the Box buildings, but about other Redwood City projects) and although I don’t believe them to be true, my beliefs are just that — beliefs — and not based on hard data. Since reading that comment I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how I determine how much of a given building is occupied. Although I have yet to come up with anything that would prove truly definitive, I did decide that it would be worth my time to go around to each building and see who is listed as occupying that space. I can imagine I’ll be useful to have a list of companies that are headquartered in, or at least have offices in, downtown Redwood City. Thus, this week I walked around downtown and took photographs of each large building and made notes on who appears to be occupying it.

Take the Box buildings, for instance. I believe the one on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Middlefield Road (900 Jefferson) is fully leased by Box, Inc; it serves as that company’s headquarters. But 900 Jefferson has a sister building. This one, at 900 Middlefield Rd.:

A good portion of this building’s ground floor is, of course, taken up by food-service businesses: Cru (“Wine Bar Merchant Cafe”), Hidden Tap and Barrel, and Curry Pizza House. That’s helpful, but what I really needed to determine is who occupies the building’s upper floors. For that, I checked the building’s directory. Four tenants are listed:

• Davis Polk – a local office of a global law firm.
• Liftoff – a company developing technologies to help companies improve the visibility of their apps and build their brands. This office is their corporate headquarters.
• Biomea Fusion – a diabetes and obesity medicines company. This building appears to house their headquarters.
• Box – their inclusion on the building’s directory implies that Box needs more space than the other building provides.

This list is a fairly impressive list of companies and hints that the building is probably not “50% vacant” — but of course doesn’t guarantee that. I will note that having followed the progress of these buildings since before they were built, back in 2015 this building also had four listed tenants: Box, Pebble (the smartwatch folks), Wealthfront, and Shopkick.

Just across Winslow Street, the five-story office building that was constructed behind the Fox Theatre (at 889 Winslow Street) is home to the local offices of Bessemer Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Other tenants include McKinsey & Co. (a business consulting firm; this is their Silicon Valley office), and Twilio Sendgrid (a local office of a Denver-based software company).

These days, the building’s ground floor spaces are taken up by Bloomsgiving — which sells bouquets, plants, and serves coffee — and Undisputed Boxing Gym.

Over at 601 Marshall street, the seven-story building that stands at the corner of Marshall and Middlefield Road contains the Silicon Valley offices of Goodwin Procter, a large Boston-based law firm:

Although Goodwin Procter has its name over the front door and along the top of the building, 601 Marshall is also corporate headquarters for PubMatic, an advertising technology company.

Not all of Redwood City’s larger downtown office buildings are new. One of the older ones stands at the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Marshall Street:

Although (as you can see if you zoom in) this building does have at least one vacancy (on the ground floor), I stepped into the lobby and noted that it has a great many tenants. These include smaller law offices, investment firms (Edward Jones Investments has offices on both the fourth and fifth floors), and various other businesses. Other than that ground-floor vacancy, this one in particular seems quite full.

Over on Main Street, the four-story office building at 855 Main St. (by which The Baker Next Door bakes and sells bread and serves a variety of house-made breakfast and lunch items, plus coffees and such) is almost, or is entirely, full, with three big-name tenants: Freshfields (an international law firm), Hogan Lovells (an international law firm), and Delphix (not a law firm; Delphix is a software company, now part of Perforce, that helps technology teams automate data management).

The four-story office building at the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Broadway for years has been the headquarters of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI):

It also has some retail businesses on its ground floor — Wells Fargo Bank being the most significant — and a community room. But some time ago, CZI moved to a larger building at 1180 Main St.:

The upper floors of the building at 2075 Broadway may now be empty, but the Silicon Valley offices of Latham & Watkins (yet another huge — 3,500+ lawyers — global law firm) are moving from Menlo Park to Redwood City, and as best I can tell, they’re taking over some or all of the space that CZI recently vacated at 2075 Broadway.

Lastly, I should again mention (having written about it before) that the Chan Zuckerberg Institute has pre-leased about half of the office space in the under-construction ELCO Yards project to house the Chan Zuckerberg Institute for Advance Biological Imaging. There is still no word on whether or not the remainder of the office space in the ELCO Yards project has been leased, but I’m sure the developer — IQHQ — is quite pleased to no longer be constructing a completely empty project.

Downtown Redwood City has other office buildings, of course, but those are mostly smaller ones. I do find it interesting just how many large law firms have moved their Silicon Valley offices to downtown Redwood City recently. Then again, a recent article in the Silicon Valley Business Journal noted that global companies like these are particularly interested in placing their offices where employees can “venture out for food and drinks without using their cars” (after noting that Latham & Watkins is relocating to Redwood City from a location on Scott Drive in Menlo Park, where amenities are scarce). Thanks to a vision created and fostered by various Redwood City Councils over the last 15 years or so, these days downtown Redwood City has just the kind of amenities that these companies are looking for — food, drink, and easy access to mass transit.

Overall, downtown Redwood City’s office buildings seems pretty full, at least as far as leasing goes (which, again, doesn’t mean that every desk has someone sitting at it on any given day; varying corporate work-at-home policies complicate what “full” means). And as more companies move into Redwood City, they inspire others to give our downtown a good look, so newly built office space in Redwood City may well remain in demand.

Having meandered through downtown Redwood City, I headed down Middlefield Road to take a good look at the progress being made on the burned-while-under-construction affordable housing building at 2700 Middlefield Rd., behind the Fair Oaks Health Center. When I got there, I was amazed at how much progress has been made in recent months.

From behind the Fair Oaks Health Center it is hard to get a good look at the building that burned, since most of it is blocked from view by the development’s other building — which mercifully was not affected by the fire. This is the best I could do from that vantage point:

But I continued down Middlefield Road, followed Fifth Avenue under the Caltrain tracks, and then walked back towards Redwood City along Westmoreland Avenue (which parallels the Caltrain tracks on the west side). From there, I had a terrific view of the building project:

As you can see, the building (comprised of two towers, it seems, containing a total of 104 apartments) is nearly ready for its exterior finishes. And based on photos from just before the fire, it appears that the work crews have advanced the project beyond where it was when it burned. Which is certainly something worth celebrating. It still has quite a way to go, but I was really pleased to see how much progress has been made on this badly needed housing project.

Since I was in the area, I checked in on the now-empty lot on Buckingham Avenue next to La Casa de Sobrato, an affordable residential housing complex associated with the St. Francis Center. This lot:

Efforts are being made to bring a mini-version of a Magical Bridge Playground, built in conjunction with the Magical Bridge Foundation, to this lot. Given its small size this “pocket park” would have fewer amenities than one will find at a typical Magical Bridge (such as the one in Redwood City’s Red Morton Park) but it would still be designed for people of all abilities and would provide at least some amount of park space to a part of unincorporated San Mateo County where, I understand, there currently is none. Fundraising is underway to support this project; if you are able and are interested, please learn more about the project here on the Magical Bridge Foundation’s website, and consider giving to this most worthy cause.

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If you are upset with all of the chaos going on in Washington, DC right now, and wondering what you can do, consider joining one of the “Protect & Resist” demonstrations at the corner of El Camino Real and Jefferson Avenue each Friday from 5 – 7 p.m. These demonstrations are currently scheduled to take place each Friday from now to the end of May (although presumably there will be more or fewer depending on how things play out). They are sponsored by SURJ (“Showing Up For Racial Justice”) Redwood City, a local chapter of a national organization. For more information, and to sign up to get updates from the organization, visit the Mobilize website.