East Bay Business Times - by Jessica Saunders Staff reporter
Friday, August 15, 2008
Stephanie Secrest | East Bay Business Times
Joe Garaventa of Garaventa Properties, which is working on a 450,000-square-foot retail center at Fairfield Corporate Commons.
Business parks that started out as job centers for far-flung East Bay populations are adapting to a more crowded suburban environment by increasing retail and dining options, going vertical and even adding housing.
The greater mix of uses at business parks ensures employees can live, eat and shop closer to work, a key asset in an era of uncertain fuel prices. Mixed-use is increasingly demanded by municipal planners seeking to minimize traffic congestion, one developer said.
Here in the East Bay, both 585-acre Bishop Ranch in San Ramon and 876-acre Hacienda Business Park in Pleasanton, two of the region’s largest business parks, show signs of the trend toward denser development.
Sunset Development Co. is planning to break ground on 2 million square feet of housing, hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail and new offices and government buildings adjacent to Bishop Ranch in a joint project with the city of San Ramon known as City Center and envisioned as the city’s new downtown.
At Hacienda Business Park, owners of the CarrAmerica Corporate Center announced plans to add 495,000 square feet of office space across three buildings, a 130-room hotel and three parking structures on its 60-acre site, which they say is underutilized.
Mixed-use trends are also showing up in business park proposals these days, including the Seeno family’s long-planned Benicia Business Park in Solano County. Discovery Builders Inc. of Concord is seeking to build a mix of retail, commercial and limited industrial uses on a 527-acre parcel overlooking Suisun Bay. Benicia residents have expressed concern at public hearings that the project will contribute to congestion, and final approval has been put on hold until the fall pending a new traffic study.
The outer East Bay benefitted from having enough unused land to master-plan those large developments, along with long-term vision and political will to see them through to completion, said Geoffrey Sears, a partner at Wareham Development in Emeryville. However, for commercial developers in the Interstate 880 corridor, like Wareham, which developed and manages R&D campuses in Emeryville, Berkeley and Richmond, there were no “green fields,” or undeveloped land, and often the only option to build was to clean up and redevelop former industrial land, he said.
Urban business clusters tend to be “less perfectly planned, more organic and eclectic” than suburban business parks, out of both necessity and intent, Sears said. They tend to include ground-floor retail, which also began showing up more often in the suburbs as buildings went more vertical.
As more East Bay business parks are being rethought to integrate mixed-use and housing, “the exclusive-business business park is becoming obsolete,” said Kate White, executive director of the San Francisco district council of the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit organization that advocates plans that maximize land use, such as clustering development around transit centers.
“Suburban office parks were developed in an era of endless oil, and we are no longer in that era,” White said.
Business parks evolved as a way to cluster employment in locations that didn’t have urban cores, so that companies could share amenities like parking and infrastructure and their often suburban-dwelling employees could drive to work. The suburban business park design was intended to be “people-friendly,” close to homes, with low-rise buildings and parklike settings with trees and lawns, said Larry Westland, senior vice president at TRI Commercial. “That was the thinking going back 40 years ago: let’s work close to where we live but have more architecturally friendly, warm fuzzy friendly style of architecture” than was found in the urban centers, he said. “Now the trend is just the opposite -- you want to be on public transportation and in the (urban) core where all the services are.”
Although suburban parks originally evolved to serve nearby residents, over time companies found that access to public transportation gave them a greater pool of employees from which to draw. That led to Bishop Ranch and Hacienda initiating shuttles and bus services to make it easier for employees to utilize Bay Area Rapid Transit and the Altamont Commuter Express.
That trend continues today, driving redevelopment projects that include commercial office space to be built adjacent to BART stations in the East Bay and elsewhere, further underscoring the importance of transit for businesses, White said.
The concept of people living in one place and walking or taking public transit to their jobs, shopping and entertainment is not exclusive to urban areas, said Joe Garaventa of Garaventa Properties, which is working on a 450,000-square-foot retail center at 125-acre Fairfield Corporate Commons in Fairfield.
“There is no reason that can’t happen in suburban business parks, and we are already starting to see that evolution,” said Garaventa.
“This is what people want. This is what cities want. It is an extension of smart growth,” he said. “It is the line of thinking that if we are going to grow, we are going to try and put a certain amount of convenience in people’s lives.”
Adding ground-floor retail and housing has been made easier by the fact that many business parks have gotten much denser since beginning as single-story building campuses in the 1970s. Many Bay Area parks, including Hacienda, went to two stories in the late 1980s and then mid-rise, or four to six stories, in the late 1990s, allowing them to accommodate more people and uses without acquiring more land, said S. Gregory Davies, chairman and CEO of CPS Corfac International.
“Developers building that (Tri-Valley) market, including ourselves, saw multi-story buildings as the product of the future,” Davies said.
Now developers like Blackstone Group, which acquired the CarrAmerica campus in Pleasanton when it merged with Equity Office Properties Trust, are eyeing the parking lots surrounding the multistory buildings for yet more density.
At Fairfield Corporate Commons, plans call for 410 units of housing, a retail center and eventually another 800,000 square feet of office space, said Garaventa. His company took the model proved decades earlier by Bishop Ranch and Hacienda to a place that also needed nearby jobs: Solano County, where 55,000 people commute out daily.
“As long as people live in suburban regions there will always will be a push to place jobs where people actually live and thereby get (them) a shorter commute,” Garaventa said.
And while mixed-use development can benefit communities by reducing car trips, it can’t address the needs of all businesses, such as light industry, said Joe Ernst, partner and development manager at SRM Associates Inc., which has developed part of Harbor Bay Business Park in Alameda for industrial users, including Peet’s Coffee.
Residents tend to dislike the truck traffic, noise and sometimes smells produced by industrial activity, so it’s a poor fit for locating adjacent to housing developments, Ernst said.
“I continue to think business parks for light industrial uses make some sense, because you have uses that historically haven’t fit well together,” he said.
Not only does the Bay Area economy need light industry jobs, but it needs to have them available closer to cities, Ernst said. “By moving it all out to the (Central) Valley you increase truck trips significantly.”
There are ways to design business parks to minimize the impact of industry on the surrounding area, such as including dedicated access roads for trucks, he said.
“Businesses that have like needs want to mass in one area. It makes sense,” Ernst said.
But will there be any more new business parks to fill those needs? Probably not on the scale of Bishop Ranch or Hacienda, made possible by single developers acquiring large tracts of land, experts said. The Bay Area has very few undeveloped parcels like that left, making it more likely that any new project would be infill redevelopment.
“Without the big undeveloped green field available, it’s harder to acquire land,” Sears said. “A political vision (for business development) would help communities. ... Hacienda and Bishop Ranch both started as the vision of single companies.”
jsaunders@bizjournals.com | 925-598-1427
