Big Life Sciences Campus Planned for Burlingame
Submitted May 11, 2010, 6:22 PM
Millennium Partners, developers of San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel and Millennium Tower residences, has filed an application with the city of Burlingame to develop an office and life-sciences campus on the city’s largest remaining undeveloped piece of property.
The site is an 18-acre, nearly square tract on the bay side of U.S. Highway 101 at 350 Beach Road, said William “Bill” Meeker, director of the city’s Community Development Department. It is adjacent to the Coyote Point County Park and the San Mateo Municipal Golf Course.
“This is a large development for Burlingame,” Meeker said. “I imagine that absent the hotels, this is probably the largest development the city has seen in one fell swoop.”
“This will be the most significant project the city has had in the last 15 or 20 years,” he said.
Sean Jeffries, a Millennium principal in its San Francisco offices, said the company bought the property in 2006 for $24.5 million and has been researching the Burlingame market since to determine the best use. Under consideration have been both a hotel and residential development. Millennium is better known as a developer of more urban, metropolitan-core sites but has sought to do more suburban development in the Bay Area, at one point entertaining a hotel at San Jose’s Santana Row, for instance, he said.
“We typically like to find good sites and then craft uses to fit that site,” Jeffries said. The Burlingame offices could be either multi-tenant or a corporate campus, he said. “It will offer an alternative use for someone who wants to move north out of Silicon Valley but does not want to go all of the way to San Francisco.”
Millennium has built in the past on speculation but won’t decide how to proceed on this site for some time, he said. It is too early to estimate what the ultimate investment required will be for his company.
Though South San Francisco and the Mission Bay district of San Francisco itself are better-known life-sciences and biotechnology clusters, Meeker said Burlingame supports about 30 incubator biotech companies scattered across the city on both sides of the highway. The campus is expected to be built in phases, he said, though it is not yet clear what those would be.
Millennium is an experienced developer across multiple property types. According to its Web site, it has developed more than 1,600 luxury condominiums, eight five-star hotels, an extended-stay luxury hotel, a million square feet of offices, 1.2 million square feet of retail space, four theaters and five health clubs. The company owns and operates real estate valued at more than $4 billion.
Burlingame is a four-square-mile city perhaps best-known for its expensive housing, ritzy downtown shopping strip and large cluster of hotels. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, its per capita income is roughly twice that of the state at large.
Millennium still must complete its environmental review, Meeker said, so the application is expected to take some 24 months to complete. An environmental consultant has not yet been hired. In the past, wind surfers who favor the area have taken a deep interest in how the site is developed, he said. Discussions between that group and the developer are already underway. San Francisco International Airport will also likely make a review, but he did not expect issues.
“The developer has said that they have done a lot of wind analysis to define how the buildings are sited and shaped to minimize wind impacts,” Meeker said.
The campus will be designed to maximize sea and city views and around sustainable design principals, according to a city description. “On their north faces these buildings will have floor-to-floor, clear, transparent, insulated glazing that will take advantage of the bay views, views of landing airplanes and provide maximum daylight harvesting deep in the building’s footprints,” the report says.
