How to destroy great housing potential

Over eight years, the concrete here turned into a jungle as the city and the NIMBYs around it shouted, cried, and threw a fit that someone wanted to clean this all up and build homes here.

This is the view desired by exactly no one, except for the people that live around there, apparently. It comes with the added bonus of a daily show of a homeless person bathing in the canal on the southeastern border of the site. Inquire Eventbrite for tickets. // photo my own

I hate Fremont. It is one of the worst cities in the Bay Area. For its size and population, there is very little about it that gives it any kind of defining character. The vast majority of Fremont is dominated by gridded streets in a sea of red lights, making it far too long to get to a freeway to get the hell out of there, away from the endless desert of cheap strip malls and tract housing. Somehow, no matter where you are or where you need to go, it's always at least two miles away. Its urban fabric, if you could call it that, is about as bland as waiting in line for your turn at the DMV to renew your beige Toyota Camry plates while Nickleback plays softly over the PA system. Any Orange County expat could feel right at home in Fremont.

While some cities are certainly more violent, like Oakland, or contain more politically inept people, like Berkeley, or contain more shit on sidewalks, like San Francisco, each of those places has its own areas of charm. In Oakland, you can meander the hills or walk around on Jack London Square. In Berkeley, the areas surrounding the campus as well as Tilden up the hills can be quite the experience. In San Francisco, well, I hardly need to pimp out that city's culture.

But Fremont has nearly nothing. There is a small area near Mission San Jose that is nice enough to placate the mind from going on a murderous rampage while stuck in rush hour traffic on that street. And there's a small stretch of Fremont Boulevard containing a tiny downtown that has a great kebob shop and the kung-fu studio I attended when I was much younger. Truth be told, there are many great ethnic restaurants dotted throughout the city, but they are almost all in some awful strip mall as charming as the floor of a prison shower room.

Then there is the Niles District. The only part of Fremont that doesn't take four Ventis to drive four blocks, lest you pass out from boredom or repetitive stress syndrome of the retinas. Its claim to fame is the setting of many Charlie Chaplin films, and the town doesn't let you forget it. There is a large welcome sign with Chaplin's face drawn onto it and the district probably has more antique stores per capita than any other city in a 50-mile radius. There is a fairly nice downtown street with shops gracing one side and an old rail station where the Sunol Train still runs, largely as a tourist attraction. Off to the southwest side exists a few blocks of residences in classical American architecture. It is oddly, one of the worst restaurant regions in Fremont, but you won't starve there.

The historic district's major demerit is its primary entrance on the southeastern end of the main drag. To arrive at the downtown area, you drive in, underneath a railroad track. At the end before a right turn, there is a large empty piece of land, overgrown with weeds and tents, chain-link fenced off, the site of a former factory. After turning right, there is a rather trashy apartment complex before hitting the main street. 

The factory did have some history to it, built in 1908 by Ames Manufacturing Company before eventually being bought by Shuckl Cannery, which was later bought out by the Henkel Corporation. The factory was used until 2002, at which point, the factory was shut down due to its incompliance with earthquake standards. Since then, it's been abandoned, suffering a large fire in 2008, at which point the remains were torn down. The overgrown weeds on top of concrete with the occasional homeless tent have been the view of this site since. That would be nearly two decades of blight. One would think the residents in the area would be eager to see it transform into something more pleasing than a mound of rubble.

Our mission was to transform the factory building into something special that could be the monumental entry into the one redeeming part of Fremont.

The first pass was to introduce some three-story townhomes in a chic loft-style living, designed as a rustic industrial style, to pay homage to the industrial history of the site, with a nice restaurant space designed at the corner to welcome visitors into the district. The initial design was actually done by another, talented firm in the Bay Area before it was transferred to us in 2013.

"NO!!!" was the resounding, collective cry, of the residents in the area. 

These were not your typical NIMBYs. These NIMBYs were organized, well-heeled, and had a couple of lawyers in their cadre. They filed suit, claiming an insufficient Environmental Impact Report then swarmed the city council to let it be known that they were inmates and they were running the show. The city council was all too eager to acquiesce.

Back to the drawing board.

The claim by the residents was that the design was far too modern and dense for a historical region. They wanted something far more fitting with their district. Okay, I disagree, but we'll design something that extends the context to the downtown core, particularly it's at the end of the main drag. I was overwhelmed with other client needs at the time, so we enlisted help from a designer in our Santa Ana office. He did a fantastic job researching the urban fabric of the downtown area and brought all the design elements into the newly designed townhomes and flats on the site, complete with tile wainscoting, brick walls, and terra cotta accents.

"NO!!!" was the resounding, collective cry, of the residents in the area. 

The residents filed a CEQA lawsuit, the infamous California law that can be indiscriminately used to halt any development for the cost of dinner for two at a nice restaurant, which can delay any project for months to years, costing millions of dollars for a developer or landowner, which is incorporated into housing prices. 

When the dust from the lawsuit finally settled a bit, well over a year later, the residents put their demands on the table, with the city staff and council stepping away, letting these residents, that likely had the collective architectural experience that I alone had during my freshman year in college, run the entire direction of the architecture.

After their demands were in, I rolled my eyes out of their sockets. They wanted farmhouse, craftsman, and prairie style buildings, but "highly detailed". 

They pissed, cried, and moaned for years so that they could demand that their unique part of the town could be more like the rest of the city. Bland. Boring. Soulless.

Every other new housing development in the area is farmhouse and craftsman. Every fourth or fifth were prairie.

To make things even more stupid, if you take a stroll through their streets, you'll primarily find some nicely done Victorians, some poorly done Victorians, stucco craftsman houses, traditional houses, even some American Foursquare houses, and some Spanish style houses. If you go to an edge street right behind the site, there are some generic contractor special tract houses. What you won't readily find are Farmhouse or Prairie houses. You also won't find many, if at all, craftsman-style houses in the mold of Greene and Greene, which is more along the lines of what they wanted than the stucco craftsman houses in their district.

They could have had something that respected the heritage of their unique district. They could have had something that really extended the downtown to the gateway of the one good part of the city. They could have had something special.

Instead, they chose boilerplate Fremont. 

One of the worst cities in the Bay Area.

On top of this clown show, when the project moved to its last city council hearing, one of the council members had the gall to complain that the developer was "just doing the bare minimum".

The developer had voluntarily donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a city initiative called Safer Streets. Despite being well within the allowable number of units, the developer dropped 25% of the unit count to appease the city and the neighbors. The developer caved in to every single one of the neighbors' demands. If the city wants us to wear 37 pieces of flair, then make the minimum 37 pieces of flair.

You can bend over backward for cities that have elected anti-development council members, but they will never be appreciative or give any leniency whatsoever. I don't understand why they continue to do it. 

Now, I don't need 37 pieces of flair to express myself.