San Ramon's Bishop Ranch business complex shifts to mixed-use residential model
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Bay Area, businesses were forced to find a new way to work. Five years later, the continuing popularity of remote work is presenting a major problem for those who own and operate office buildings.
A business complex in San Ramon is learning to move with the changing environment.
When the sprawling Bishop Ranch complex opened for business in 1978, it was literally for business. But since then, business has changed. Like a lot of places in the Bay Area, they're left with the simple choice to adapt or die.
These are tough times for Bishop Ranch. Chevron has moved its global headquarters out of the area, and late last year human resources company Robert Half International ended its lease, leaving an entire office building vacant with desks and furniture still inside.
The Bay Area Council Economic Institute has been studying the issue. Executive Director Jeff Bellisario provided an explanation.
"Post-pandemic, we are in a new world of remote work. One that is likely permanent in some ways," he said. "And I do think that investors, land owners, are looking for, 'What is the next thing? How do we put our assets to work in a way that makes the most sense?'"
At Bishop Ranch, that means pivoting to the future. It was built as an office-oriented environment, but in 2018 they opened City Center, a retail, dining and entertainment destination. And now, after the pandemic with most of the complex's vast parking lots empty, they are re-imagining the area as a mixed-use residential community.
"City Village," a development of single-family homes, recently opened. There also is the senior living complex, "Belmont Village." On March 4th, builder KB Home filed papers with the county saying they purchased a huge office building called Bishop Ranch 7, for $57.8 million in order to replace it with more than 100 homes in a housing project called "Bartlett."
"We want to maximize in our region what we have to solve the problems that we have, right?" said Bellisario. "Housing affordability tends to be our biggest issue. We don't have a ton of land to build new housing. So I think that idea sets the stage for that kind of innovation that we need."
He said there's a reason they're focusing on a place like San Ramon rather than the larger population centers like San Francisco.
"The suburbs seem to be the place that have won out of all of this," Bellisario said. "The dense metro areas that are very expensive are the ones that are struggling to still recover from the pandemic. Whereas suburban locations, people are wanting a backyard, they want maybe a little bit more affordability, they maybe want to live near where they work; maybe want to walk to more places. So this idea at Bishop Ranch of combining still office, but having the City Center there and residential, it makes a lot of sense."
A lot of people look at the empty office space in the high-rises of San Francisco and wonder why they aren't being used as housing. But Bellisario said most office buildings don't have the necessary infrastructure to support a living space, and to try to convert them would be economically unfeasible.
"The number of buildings that we could call convertible is not extraordinarily high in the city of San Francisco, or really anywhere around the region," he said. "It is the dream. I think if we could crack that code of conversion to residential, it would solve many of our downtown issues, in particular. But it is much easier said than done."
That's why KB Home plans to demolish the building at Bishop Ranch rather than convert it. The current plan at Bishop Ranch is to build more than 8,000 new homes on the 858-acre property. That's enough to accommodate 25,000 to 30,000 residents.
It's a new way of looking at things, but Bellisario believes there is still plenty about the Bay Area to be optimistic for the future.
"Look at all the metrics on AI companies' employment. We still have all the great universities here. We still beat Texas on the weather most days of the year!" he said. "I think the opportunity now is how do we re-envision our downtowns, re-envision our land use policies, so that we're not stifling that next wave of growth."
In 1906, the Great Earthquake all but destroyed San Francisco. But it rose from the ashes to be something even greater. And there's no reason to believe it won't happen again.
