“What should our downtown be?”
This was the million dollar question that the Redwood City Council asked their community in the late 90s.
Working together, the council and the community created the Downtown Precise Plan. This blueprint describes the vision for the future of Redwood City’s downtown area, as well as balancing mixed-use development with historic preservation.
“The vision was to create a place where you could live, you could work, and you could go to restaurants, all by public transit,” said Jeff Gee, the mayor of Redwood City and a council member for 15 years.
The earliest changes came at the turn of the new millennium when redevelopment funds were used to fund the Courthouse Square and the Cinemark Movie Theater.
Next, the city focused its efforts on enacting the Downtown Precise Plan. The main focus of the plan was to make Redwood City’s downtown a more developer friendly place to build housing and business spaces so that it would see growth and development in its core areas.
“The Downtown Precise Plan was a form-based code to give developers a high degree of certainty that if they wanted to build a project in Redwood City, this is what they needed to do. It was to remove the subjectivity so that there was certainty in outcomes,” Gee said.
However, the plan’s creation did not come without challenges. The greatest of those was a lawsuit filed under CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act.
“When the city led this effort, there were two issues that the group sued the city on. One was that it didn’t go far enough to protect our historic buildings. And number two was that the shadow study was not sufficient,” Gee said.
After a three-year legal delay, the plan was published on Jan. 16, 2011. It proved to be an instant success, with many mixed-use housing developments being built in the core of downtown and tech companies like Box moving their offices to headquarters there.
“In downtown Redwood City, there is a lot of stuff going on. I have seen many of the big multi-unit places being built up,” said Andrew Ramroth, a math teacher at Carlmont and a longtime resident of Redwood City.
The most significant success, however, was the increase in alternate forms of transit besides cars.
“The Environmental Impact Report that was developed for the Downtown Precise Plan guessed that 25% of the people who lived, worked, and visited would not need a car. After the precise downtown plan was done the staff went back and counted cars. And it wasn’t 25%; it was closer to 50% of the people who lived and worked downtown who didn’t feel they needed a car,” Gee said. “They could take the train and walk to restaurants.”
Since the Downtown Precise Plan’s vision was focused on bikes and pedestrians, cars faced slowdowns and traffic on main streets. Gee faced lots of pushback from residents who were angered by how the Downtown Precise Plan affected their personal lives.
“There were people that were really critical of the effort,” Gee said.
Urbanization is a new trend for suburbs in America, and it is leading to the reimagination of towns for the 21st century. The traditional American suburbs with single-family homes, car dependency, and low transit are starting to change, especially in major metropolitan areas such as the San Francisco Bay Area.
The rise of suburban downtown districts across the U.S. signals this shift in thinking. Cities such as Arlington, Virginia; Plano, Texas; and Cupertino, California have taken steps to emulate the density typical of urban areas while preserving the suburban appeal that attracted residents in the first place.
Redwood City is an excellent example of this model in action.
Page 22 of the Downtown Precise Plan states that although all of downtown will be noticeably more urban than the rest of the city, it is not intended to be uniformly urban. As one proceeds from the edge of Downtown toward Broadway, Downtown will become increasingly compact, mixed-use, and dense.
The “new suburban” model focuses on creating mini-hubs that combine residential, commercial, and recreational spaces in close proximity. Redwood City’s vision aligns with this new suburban downtown, and it can be shown in its Downtown Precise Plan. Before the Downtown Precise Plan was enacted, a General Plan was created to give a rough draft.
The General Plan stated that downtown would be a dense, mixed-use district that is walkable and well-served by transit.
However, COVID-19 brought unprecedented challenges to the mixed-use suburbs in Redwood City and others alike. First, construction was slowed as the world was on lockdown, and many projects had to be put on hold. Next, the popularity of remote work led to a lack of a need for office spaces. Additionally, the businesses that mixed-use districts thrive on suffered from closures, and some were forced to go out of business.
According to data from the Pew Research Center, COVID-19 led to a rise in people wanting larger houses due to commutes being out of the picture. The percentage of people who wanted a smaller home, as seen in mixed-use communities, fell to 39% at the peak of COVID.
As the effects of COVID slowly fade away, many are left wondering what the future has in store for Redwood City. The city council has made sure that many plans are in place to continue the mixed-use developments seen in the past decade. One benefit of having mixed-use neighborhoods is more parks and green spaces.
“I think that there are actually a lot of good parks in Redwood City, and then we also have access to some of the parks that are in the mountains and have trails. I like all the Redwood City parks,” Ramroth said.
Another development that is going to be addressed is the state of the Caltrain grade crossings. Right now, the train tracks are cutting off downtown from the rest of the city, creating a barrier between two of the central zones.
Other than fixing the tracks, Redwood City still has challenges and opportunities to grow. One of its significant challenges is its bike infrastructure, which connects downtown to other areas of the city.
“The core downtown area is easier to bike around because there are more bike lanes and slower traffic due to it being more recently developed. However, Middlefield has faster traffic and doesn’t always have a bike lane,” said Tyler Kong, a sophomore living in Redwood Shores. “Additionally, a combination of parked cars and things on the sidewalk make it hard to alternate between them if there’s no traffic.”
As Redwood City’s downtown continues to establish itself as one of the prime destinations on the peninsula between the cities of San Francisco and San Jose, other cities, such as San Carlos, are building their downtown plans. Although there isn’t a foolproof method for creating an urbanized downtown, there are lessons learned that can help contribute. However, San Carlos and Belmont have their Caltrain stations separated from their downtowns by the major road, El Camino Real.
“In many ways, El Camino Real is a big barrier to walkability and the ability to bike. You can’t get off the train and just walk to a restaurant. You have to walk across El Camino Real and then walk a little further to get to the restaurants,” Gee said.
Mayor Gee has been involved in the construction of Redwood City’s downtown for over 25 years. He is constantly thinking about how his decisions will impact people in the future.
“When I’m making decisions, I’m not only worried about today, but I’m trying to figure out how the decisions I make tonight are going to affect life 30 years from now,” Gee said.
