There is no question that the Bay Area is home to some amazing innovation infrastructure – from San Leandro’s ambitious Broadband Initiative, to San Jose’s Cleantech demonstration center dubbed “Prospect Silicon Valley”. Mix in the hundreds of incubators, accelerators and co-working facilities, along with education initiatives and entrepreneur training, and you couldn’t ask for a better “innovation cocktail”.

As Warm Springs moves from the planning to implementation stages, we are exploring new developments that will further expand this ecosystem. First stop: Hunter’s Point. This project is particularly interesting to us based on the primary role of mixed-use developer Lennar, which is in contract to buy more than 100 acres in Fremont’s Warm Springs Innovation District.

Hunter’s Point has a rich history, dating back to the dry docks in the 1800’s and continuing until 1974 when the Shipyard closed. This history brought a loyal resident base, and the area still has the highest home ownership rate in San Francisco. On the plan horizon, more than 12,000 housing units will be added to the neighborhood.

View of the Bay from the Shipyard Welcome Center

The Hunter’s Point project is striking in several ways. It is vast – encompassing not only the old Shipyard, but also Candlestick Park for a total of 770 acres – and it sets a new standard for the term “mixed use.” In addition to the significant residential component, it contains the largest artist’s colony on the west coast, 700,000 square feet of retail space, and a 4.5 million square foot R&D District focused on sustainability and clean technology. Transit connectivity will be accomplished through Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), and the Balboa Park BART station. Downtown San Francisco is a short 10 minutes away on BRT. And, in response to the areas past environmental challenges, the parks and open spaces built into the plan (300 acres worth) will provide some of the most amazing public views in the Bay Area. This so-called “Crissy Field of the South” also doubles as an adaptive strategy for sea level rise.

To accomplish this audacious plan requires partnerships, not only between the City of San Francisco and Lennar, but with many other stakeholders. The partnership with the California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF) is particularly noteworthy. CalCEF is working with the former San Francisco redevelopment agency (now Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure) to identify anchoring institutions for a 260,000 square foot clean tech innovation center. The goal is to create the core of an ecosystem that can support companies that are located in the adjacent R&DDistrict from “Innovation to Installation”. For example, an ideal combination would bring together a STEM campus, a clean tech incubator, a corporate headquarters, and a workforce training center. The building itself would become a pilot and demonstration opportunity for the very technologies developed in the R&D District.

As with many large projects, the plan is expected to unfold over the next 20 years, which allows for different architectural styles, the testing of multiple generations of new sustainable technologies, and other evolving community needs. You can read more about the project in this San Francisco Business Times article by Blanca Torres.

From Hunter’s Point to Mission Peak, the Bay Area’s Innovation Outlook is looking sunny.