What Happened to the Depot Circle: The Downtown Precise Plan's Defining Project

When Redwood City adopted the Downtown Precise Plan in 2011, one of it's major components was what was known at the time as the Depot Circle.  The city envisioned the "Depot Circle" as a massive multi-building, mixed-use development that would cover two parcels of city-owned land known as "Block 2" and "The Winslow Street Parking Lot".  The defining feature of the development would be [not so surprisingly] the Depot Circle - which in the city's words, would be "a public open space intended to create a welcoming and exciting entrance to Downtown from the train station".  Below is a summary of available information on the progression of the Depot Circle Project: 

August 2011 - A request for qualifications document is released by Redwood City to solicit interest from development teams to develop two city owned parcels of land: "Block 2" and "The Winslow Street Parking Lot" (both parcels can be seen in the graphic below).  Potential uses for the project are listed as office, residential, hotel, retail, restaurants, and entertainment.  



December 2011 - After receiving 5 responses to the request for qualifications document, the city invites two developers to submit detailed proposals for the project: Hunter/Storm and Lowe Enterprises.

May 2012 - The city chooses the Hunter/Storm proposal as the preferred scenario, and plans are made to move forward with a development agreement.  The Hunter/Storm proposal is a development ranging in height from 4-9 stories that includes 261,000 S/F of office space, 3,000 S/F of retail, a 120 room hotel, and 810 parking spaces.  Pictured below is the birds eye view of the Depot Circle Project provided in Hunter/Storm's 2012 proposal:



Since the May of 2012, the city has not publicly released anything referring to the Depot Circle.  However, in late 2013 Hunter/Storm did break ground at the Block 2 parcel.  We know that development now as Crossing/900, and it is slated to open for business this October.  Crossing/900 includes over 300,000 S/F of office space, just over 5,000 S/F in retail, and 904 parking spaces that will be open to the public evenings, weekends and holidays.  According to Redwood City's website, it also includes a public plaza, which one would assume will serve as the "welcoming and exciting entrance to Downtown from the train station" they referred to at the time of the Depot Circle idea's inception in 2011.

For whatever reason, Hunter/Storm abandoned the hotel portion of their proposed development, which presumably would have been built on the Winslow Lot.  But interestingly enough, a proposal for a 200 room hotel at the Winslow Lot was submitted by none other than Lowe Enterprises - the developer that lost the bid on the Depot Circle Project.  The hotel was even included on the development map published in the May 2015 issue of Redwood City Climate Magazine.  But that project has since hit a potentially fatal roadblock...

August 2015 - Just last week, the city announced that they are putting the brakes on the hotel proposal in light of the sheer volume of construction that is already taking place in the downtown area.   Mayor Jeffrey Gee also expressed that they were finding it difficult to design a hotel with enough parking on the 46-space Winslow parking lot.  Instead, the city now wants public opinion on potential uses for the lot.  Starting early 2016, residents, business owners, and property owners will be invited to engage in a series of community workshops, City Council meetings,  and online surveys to hopefully figure out the best use for the lot.  The only thing that is out of the question at this point is additional office space - the cap of office space allowed under the Precise Plan has already been reached.

So even though the city hasn't released any information on exactly what happened with the Depot Circle Project since Hunter/Storm submitted their proposal, it is clear that somewhere along the way plans changed.  Crossing/900 accounts for all (and then some) of the commercial, retail, and parking space that was called for in their original proposal, but the future of the Winslow Street Parking Lot now seems to be in limbo.  Eventually it is likely that something will be built there, but not for some time.  Meanwhile, the parcel of land directly in between Block 2 and the Winslow Lot on the backside of the Fox Theater (labelled as "Future Lot" in the first graphic) has been approved as a mixed-use office/retail development.  I've talked more about this development in a recent blog.

Hotel or no hotel, Depot Circle or Crossing/900, it looks like one way or another the corridor of land walking you from the train station to Theater Way should turn out to be a pretty impressive Gateway to Downtown.  We'll get our first glimpse of what this will look like when Crossing/900 opens late next month.