A wave of new luxury apartments are coming online in the Peninsula, with an assist from a few cities – Redwood City, San Mateo, Foster City – that want to energize their downtowns and meet demand for housing. Redwood City officials spent years devising a plan to make the downtown more walkable and urban. First came retail and entertainment. Now, it’s housing. The first residents are moving into Township Apartments on Main Street, developed by Sares Regis. The project is attracting young, single techies and people moving out of single-family homes. “People do want options where they work on the Peninsula and Silicon Valley,” Jeff Smith, vice president at Sares Regis Group of Northern California, told the SF Business Times. “They don’t want to spend an hour on a bus commuting from San Francisco.”
A Sares Regis exec explains why the company is focused on the Peninsula. “After the years of uncomfortableness, as I’ll call them, in 2008 and 2009, we’ve really made a concerted effort to stay as close to our office as possible, and we’ve always been in the San Mateo/Foster City area,” said Drew Hudacek, chief investment officer of the Sares Regis Group. His company is bullish on the geography in the middle of it all. They’re banking on the professional population that is leaving San Francisco, and investing broadly in amenities. “With pricing where it is both on the for-sale side and for-rent side, a brand new apartment, even if it costs $3,000 or $4,000 a month, is a very attractive option if it gets a young family into a great school district,” Hudacek said, as reported in The Registry.
Multifamily housing stock is playing catch up to single family residences. 1000 units are under planned for downtown Redwood City. An apartment project by Facebook West will come before the Menlo Park Plan Commission in May, a development proposed for the high-density zone in eastern Menlo Park.
Photo Credit: Township Luxury Apartments
