Competing visions

The project to revamp the 12-acre Sequoia Station property, originally proposed back in mid-2021, was similarly withdrawn, but for an entirely different reason. There, the developer sold their portion of the property to another firm, one that intends to run the center pretty much as-is for a couple of years before — probably — proposing a redesign of its own. So, the previous design — one that would have included just under 1.25 million square feet of office space, 631 multifamily residential units, 166,000 square feet of retail space (with both a new Safeway store and a new CVS/pharmacy), a child care center and some amount of public open space — has been put on the shelf. If and when Hunter Properties — the center’s current owner — decides to redevelop the center, we’ll see if its vision aligns with what had previously been proposed or is something altogether different.

While we wait, others have been coming up with ideas of their own. Just this week, I attended a “Case Study Competition” put on by NAIOP Silicon Valley: our local chapter of the Commercial Real Estate Development Association. In this annual challenge, student teams from local colleges and universities come up with ideas for how a given subject property should be redeveloped.

This year that subject property was Redwood City’s Sequoia Station shopping center, and I was invited to watch as teams from Menlo College, San Jose State University, Santa Clara University, Stanford and UC Berkeley presented their proposals. Each team discussed their thinking behind what elements they thought the new development should contain — retail, residential, office, whatever — and how much of each. They then showed their design for how the development would be laid out. Finally, they went through the economics of their proposal, showing how much it would cost to build, how they might finance the development and how much profit they would realize in the end.

Although the five proposals were not hugely different — each contained a new Safeway store, some amount of additional retail, and housing — what else they contained, and how they laid out and styled the various buildings, set each one apart. Cal’s entry, for instance, allocated some of its residential units to workforce housing (subsidized for teachers, firefighters, nurses and the like) and others for seniors. And it made good use of the building’s rooftops to create additional open space. Menlo College proposed that the Safeway store be two stories, with ramps taking shoppers between the levels. Its overall design aimed to “bring the essence of the French Riviera to the Peninsula.” For its part, Stanford’s team employed a Spanish Revival-style, with retail “quads” having open-air courtyards in their centers. It proposed a long, narrow multistory parking garage against the Caltrain tracks to insulate the adjacent residential buildings from train noise. Oh, and Stanford’s proposal included no office space.

San Jose State’s “Spartan Station” placed three residential buildings along El Camino Real and two office buildings plus a three-story retail building (with retail on the first two floors and coworking spaces on the third) back by the Caltrain tracks. Finally, the team from Santa Clara University proposed three multifamily residential buildings and, rather than office space, a high-end 166-room hotel to accommodate the many travelers doing business with the tech and legal firms that have offices in and around Redwood City. That team’s design showed ground-floor retail spaces (including that all-important Safeway) within some or all of the project’s four buildings.

NAIOP’s University Challenge was intended to give the participating students “a taste of the challenge, enjoyment and passion it takes to develop the communities we live and work in.” Based on the creativity and enthusiasm expressed by the students themselves, the competition clearly did just that. By working through the many aspects of a major real-world development project, the competing students now have a much better idea of what working in the field would actually be like. And those of us in the audience now have a much better idea of what today’s Sequoia Station just might someday become.

Greg Wilson is the creator of Walking Redwood City, a blog inspired by his walks throughout Redwood City and adjacent communities. He can be reached at greg@walkingRedwoodCity.com. Follow Greg on Twitter @walkingRWC.