This week, as promised, I took a break from Redwood City and instead walked north to check in on the progress of a couple of affordable housing projects in Belmont. I started my walk as usual from my home near Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, and wandered through the Edgewood Park neighborhood. My walk took me down Finger Avenue to El Camino Real, at which point I turned north — but just for one block. After I stepped over Redwood City’s border with San Carlos, I used Eaton Avenue to jog one block west to Laurel Street. I then headed up Laurel all the way to Cherry Street, where I stopped for a moment to watch the construction on Cherry Street Commons, a five-story affordable housing project that will ultimately contain 33 for-rent apartments. That project is coming along nicely now, although utility work being done on the street is causing some traffic slowdowns along Cherry Street at the moment. Being on foot, I of course wasn’t affected, and thus was able to get some photographs of the work in progress. Pictures like this one:

When complete, the building should look a lot like this:

Being just a half block off of Laurel Street, and extremely close to the San Carlos Caltrain station, this project is ideally suited for low income folks who may want or need to save money by not owning a car. The building’s garage will have room for 21 cars, though, with an entrance from the alley that runs between this new building and the nearby Laurel Street businesses (the garage door is just visible as a square grid on the right side of the building in the above rendering).

From Cherry Street, I continued up Laurel Street to San Carlos Avenue, where I made my way back out to El Camino Real. There, I turned north and walked up to San Carlos’s border with Belmont. Before I stepped over the line, however, I paused again, to see if there were any signs of activity on a large multi-family housing project that had been approved in September of 2023, was amended by the developer in 2024/2025, and then re-approved by the city last April. So far, though, no activity:

This was, of course, a CVS Pharmacy. In its place, the developer intends to build this:

11 El Camino Real will be a six-story multi-family housing project with 251 units (for-rent, I believe, but I might be wrong about that). This new building’s footprint would not only include the space that today is the empty CVS, but also the parking lot in front of the CVS up to (but not including) any of the rest of the San Carlos Plaza shopping center. That center’s L-shaped building and the parking within that L would remain.

Of the new building’s 251 apartments, 25 would be affordable at the Very Low income level, and 13 would be reserved for those at the Low income level. The remaining 213 units would be market-rate (that is, leased [or sold] at whatever rate the market will bear). Parking would be accommodated almost entirely by a two-level, 303-space garage, one level of which would be entirely below ground with the remainder occupying a significant portion of the ground-floor level. Entrance to, and exit from, the garage would be directly from El Camino Real, roughly in the middle of the building.

Given the relatively recent re-approval, I’m guessing that this project won’t get underway until 2027 at the earliest (if it does indeed get underway; you never can be sure).

Continuing on, the first of the two Belmont projects I was particularly eager to see is located just north of Belmont Hardware, at 900 El Camino Real. Now called “The Corners at Belmont,” the project straddles Hill Street: 24 of the project’s 37 affordable units would be located in a building just south of Hill Street, with the remaining 13 located in a separate building just to the north of Hill.  When complete, the project will look something like this:

At the moment, only the first floors (made of concrete) and the second floors (wood-framed, as all of the upper floors will be) have been built:

This will be a 100% affordable housing project (except for one unit, which will be home to the building manager). It will be a fairly basic project, with no pools or other such amenities. There will be a community room in the south building, as well as a small (just under 1,000 square foot) outdoor area on the side of the south building away from El Camino Real. Otherwise, it will just consist of the apartments, the lobbies (one in each building), a management office, and parking — which will not be in an enclosed garage but will instead be in what the developer refers to as “tuck-under” parking: basically, a garage with no door on the ground floor of the building. The entrance to that parking area, which you can see towards the right in the below photograph, will be from Hill Street:

Only 11 spaces will be provided to serve the 37 apartments.

Further up El Camino Real is the project that was my ultimate goal. With an address of 800 Belmont Avenue, this one is a whopper: it stretches from El Camino Real up to (but not including) the building that used to house The Vans restaurant. And as you can see, it is making great progress:

This one is also fully affordable, and will consist of 125 for-rent apartments in sizes ranging from one to three bedrooms.

Because Belmont Avenue is closed for the duration of construction, this project is tricky to photograph. So here is a rendering:

This rendering shows the building as viewed from El Camino Real. At that end it has a relatively small (but tall: six stories) footprint, with the building growing wider as it climbs the hill and follows the curve of Belmont Avenue. Here is what the El Camino facade looks like today:

And here is what the rest of the building looks like from El Camino:

I used the next street to the north — Anita Avenue — to hike up to the top of the project, but construction fencing, trucks, and other buildings prevented me from getting a decent view of the project from up there. This is the best I could do (the building that looks like a house was The Vans; to the left of it is the highest part of the new housing project):

There are some nice views from up top, though; many of the apartments on the upper floors will have lovely views of Belmont and the bay.

This project will include a community room, a gym, a management office, and an outdoor play area in addition to a 152-space internal parking garage (accessed from Belmont Avenue).

To avoid retracing my steps, after doing my best to get a glimpse of the 800 Belmont Avenue project I continued up El Camino to 42nd Avenue, which I used to duck beneath the Caltrain tracks. I then walked south along Old County Road to Harbor Boulevard, where I turned east and made my way to Industrial Road. Then I walked along Industrial all the way back to Whipple Avenue in Redwood City. Along the way I checked in on Honda San Carlos’s new dealership building:

Pretty snazzy, eh? It sure beats that trailer they’d been using since first moving to this site…

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Just a reminder that tomorrow, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., there will be another protest — this time against our country’s activity in Venezuela as well as against ICE — with people lining the sidewalks in the vicinity of El Camino Real and Jefferson Avenue. If you feel strongly that what our federal government is doing is wrong, it takes very little effort to make a sign and stand out in front of Sequoia Station or Whole Foods for 90 minutes on what looks to be a pretty nice Saturday…