Hillsdale Reimagined Promises 1,350 Homes. San Mateo's Last Promise Took Twenty Years.
At a City Council study session late last year, San Mateo's mayor, Rob Newsom, told his own colleagues something an outside consultant never would have said out loud. He represents the district that includes Bay Meadows, the city's last mega-development, and he admitted he still passes stretches of it that sit empty, describing it as "driving through and seeing two city blocks that are vacant almost 20 years on."
Almost 20 years on. Bay Meadows was approved with an 18-year build-out target. The mayor was standing in front of the developers of the next mega-project when he said it.
That project is Hillsdale Reimagined, the plan to demolish most of the Hillsdale Shopping Center and replace it with a mixed-use neighborhood carrying up to 1,670 new homes. If you're weighing a purchase in San Mateo right now and have heard that a wave of new supply is coming, the mayor's comment is worth sitting with before you make any decision based on it.
The numbers behind Hillsdale Reimagined are genuinely large. The project covers 44.69 acres, and while the North Block retail area, 12.03 acres that includes Apple and Cinépolis, stays in place, the remaining 32.66 acres and roughly 1.49 million square feet of existing mall and garages would come down. In their place: up to 2.06 million square feet of new commercial space and up to 2.39 million square feet of residential space holding as many as 1,670 units, according to the formal application filed with the City of San Mateo. Fifteen percent of the apartments would be reserved as below-market-rate units for lower-income households, and 15 percent of the for-sale townhomes would carry moderate-income deed restrictions. Buildings along El Camino Real, closest to the Hillsdale Caltrain station, would rise 8 to 10 stories, then step down to townhouse height as the site approaches the existing Beresford neighborhood to the west.
The timeline so far tells its own story. The developer, Bohannon Development Company, filed a preliminary application in February 2025 and the formal Planned Development application that June. San Mateo didn't deem the application complete until June 1, 2026, nearly a year later. The City Council held a public study session on the project in late 2025, and when Bohannon had held an earlier neighborhood meeting to introduce the plan, reporters covering it were told to expect roughly four more years of permitting after entitlement hearings before construction could even begin. The environmental review under CEQA is targeted for completion sometime this year, with Planning Commission and City Council hearings not expected until late 2026. This is a project still in its paperwork stage, more than a year after it was filed.
This is exactly why Bay Meadows matters as a guide rather than a footnote. The former thoroughbred racetrack closed in May 2008, and the 83-acre site was approved for redevelopment roughly 20 years before the project's final leases were signed. The original agreement was meant to govern build-out over 18 years, expiring at the end of 2023. It didn't come close.
In February 2026, developers Stockbridge and Wilson Meany finally announced they had leased the last two commercial parcels to a major technology tenant, capping what their own release called "a more-than 20-year development plan." The finished tally: more than 1 million square feet of office space, nearly 1,000 homes, 18 acres of parks, a private high school, and more than 40,000 square feet of retail. Separate city records put the fuller residential count at 1,116 units across apartments, condos, townhomes, and single-family homes.
Here's the part that matters if you're touring homes in the neighborhood this fall: Bay Meadows isn't actually finished. The city's own records show the current Phase II development agreement runs through December 20, 2026, just three months from now, and it still covers completion of two mixed-use buildings adding 303,000 square feet of office space and 67 more housing units. Two decades in, part of San Mateo's model transit-oriented neighborhood is still an active job site.
None of this means the projects are stalled or mismanaged. At the same session where the mayor made his comment, Andrew Turco, a vice president at Sares Regis Group, which is also part of the Hillsdale team, explained the logic plainly: leaving half a large site undeveloped stops making sense once the financing is in place, calling it "a natural market forcing mechanism." Translated for a buyer, that means the pace of construction tracks the developer's leasing and financing math, not the region's appetite for more housing. Office space gets built when a tenant signs. Housing gets built when the residential product pencils against construction costs and interest rates at that moment. Both can, and did, take decades to line up at Bay Meadows.
That's the piece easy to miss when a headline reads "1,670 new homes." The number describes what's entitled, not what's delivered, and Bay Meadows is the only precedent San Mateo has for how long that gap actually runs.
Here's what makes the timing question sharper than it looks. While Hillsdale Reimagined spent nearly a year just getting its application deemed complete, San Mateo County's own housing market moved through a swing most buyers would find hard to believe happened in the same stretch of time.
Early in 2026, condo inventory across San Mateo and Santa Clara counties had nearly doubled from a year earlier, and San Mateo County's median condo price was running about 8 percent below where it stood twelve months prior. By the second quarter of 2026, that had reversed hard: countywide condo prices were up roughly 12 percent year over year, even as active listings fell about 18 percent from March to June. Single-family homes never cooled at all, closing June 2026 at a countywide median of $2.15 million, up 7.5 percent from a year earlier. Within San Mateo city itself, the median sale price over the three months ending May 2026 sat at $1.8 million, up 13 percent year over year, with homes selling in a median of 13 days.
A market that can flip from an 8 percent decline to a 12 percent gain in one segment inside a single quarter is not a market that waits politely for a 1,670-unit project to clear its environmental review. Part of that tightness has nothing to do with new construction at all. A large share of current homeowners are sitting on mortgages locked in below 4 percent, and refinancing into today's rates to move gives them little financial reason to sell, which keeps existing inventory scarce regardless of what gets entitled at Hillsdale.
If a Bay Meadows condo or townhome is on your list, ask directly about the Phase II agreement running through December 20, 2026. Two more buildings and 67 housing units are still being built nearby, and that affects construction noise, parking access, and possibly HOA reserve contributions in ways worth understanding before you write an offer, not after you've moved in.
If you're looking closer to Hillsdale itself, particularly on the Beresford side where the plan calls for buildings to step down to townhouse scale, it's worth walking El Camino Real, Hillsdale Boulevard, and State Route 92 at a normal commute hour. Residents near the site, including members of the Beresford Hillsdale Neighborhood Association, have raised traffic and infrastructure concerns publicly, and those roads carry the daily reality of living near a project that will take years to resolve either way.
None of this is an argument against Hillsdale Reimagined or against San Mateo's growth. It's a reason to stop treating a 1,670-unit announcement as a market timing signal. San Mateo has run this experiment once already, and the honest answer, from the mayor himself, is that even a well-executed version of it stretches past two decades and still leaves visible gaps along the way. If you're deciding whether to buy now or wait for supply that's still years from breaking ground, the market you can actually measure today, not the one promised for the 2030s, is the one that should guide your decision.
If you want a clear read on how a specific street or building near Bay Meadows or Hillsdale fits your plans, that's a conversation worth having before you tour, not after. Red Door Real Estate works these Peninsula corridors closely and can walk through what's actually changing on the ground versus what's still sitting in a planning file. Let's Talk.
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