emeryville

The Bay Area Real Estate Journal

Phoenix From the Ashes

The East Bay’s Emeryville sheds its toxic past for a high-tech, clean-tech, biotech future.

By Alfred J. Bru

Emeryville is that little Bay Area city that could. Sitting on a tiny parcel of real estate just under two square miles, the city has emerged in the last thirty years from a seedy past to become a hotbed of bleeding-edge technology, with an impressive list of companies in life sciences, biotechnology, nanotechnology and biofuels taking root.

This is the same place that in 1927, then-Alameda County District Attorney Earl Warren called “the rottenest city on the Pacific Coast.” Perhaps it was because Emeryville was a meat-processing paradise for decades, with livestock penned up, waiting to be sliced and diced at one of the many butcher shops, slaughterhouses and tanneries. It stunk. So bad, in fact, that the stench became one of its more memorable qualities.

But Warren actually had bigger gripes with the city when it became a different sort of meat market during the years between the world wars. With brothels, speakeasies, race tracks, illegal liquor syndicates and gambling halls, Emeryville became a partytown, the entertainment center of the East Bay.

“Emeryville had a very bad reputation,” said Bob Canter (pictured to the left), president and chief executive of the local Chamber of Commerce. “The city is small, so it was easy in those days for the bootleggers and the gamblers to pay off all the cops.”

Steel mills, paint factories, chemical and machinery plants supplanted the brothels after World War II turning Emeryville into a thriving industrial center. But as the ’70s and early ’80s rolled in, many of the manufacturers packed up and left, leaving behind a toxic wasteland from the oils, acids, arsenic and who knows what else that they had dumped into the ground.

Emeryville needed a makeover. One of the first steps was bringing in a new city manager in 1988. That person was native San Franciscan and former Oakland city manager John Flores. Once on board, Flores challenged Emeryville to modernize or dissolve.

“I give credit to the leaders in the city in the ’60s, ’70s who recognized that we had a problem,” Flores said. “Emeryville had a bad reputation in the business community as a risky place. They couldn’t get financing to do anything in Emeryville because it was too expensive, either politically or because of the toxic waste.”

To re-make Emeryville, the council conceived a new blueprint. “What they wanted were some trees, parks and residents. Some pretty basic things,” Flores said.

“The model that stuck in my mind was to make it a dense urban city,” he said.

With the city still stinging from its days as an industrial dump, Flores also wanted to rebuild with a new breed of tenant. “You could read in the journals that technology was coming to the forefront, not only biotechnology, but software, and that was where the future was.”

The city made the decision to go after biotechnology, nanotechnology, life science and high-technology firms, in addition to bumping up retail. Today, Emeryville is headquarters to renewable fuels maker Amyris Biotechnologies Inc.; Chiron Corp., a division of Novartis; Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios Inc. Peet’s Coffee & Tea Inc., child’s educational toymaker LeapFrog Enterprises Inc. and Jamba Inc., maker of Jamba Juice, also are based in Emeryville. A recent, major coup was getting the U.S. Department of Energy to build the $125 million Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville. Dedicated in December 2008, JBEI’s mission is to develop the next generation of biofuels.

Emeryville’s resurgence has resulted in a rapidly growing population, which has passed the 10,000 mark, up from 7,000 only nine years ago. Most live in high-rise condos and apartments and are young, non-family, upwardly mobile and affluent.

To support its growing residential base and the nearly 35,000 day-time visitors who come to work or shop, Emeryville has one the nation’s busiest Amtrak stations, a free shuttle, first-class hotels, improved schools and the Bay Street Mall, a shopping, dining, entertainment and housing center.

San Francisco’s TMG Partners is pursuing city approval for its LEED-certified Emeryville Marketplace. Sitting on 14 acres that were an auto retail center, the 1.2 million square foot complex has a multi-modal transit center, walkways, parks, housing, offices and shops within walking distance. Construction has not begun. Another new, mixed-use, LEED-eligible neighborhood, OakWalk by BayRock Residential, has 58 condos and townhomes. At Bay Street Site B near the Union Pacific railroad tracks at Shellmount and Powell Streets, plans are underway for a hotel, department store, other retail and housing. Currently soil and groundwater are being exorcised of contaminants, including chlorinated volatile organic compounds and lead. Recently, the City Council gave the go-ahead to Wareham’s latest development, the Emery Greenway Building on Hollis Street. Ultimately, Emeryville cannot escape the national economic trajectory, Wareham President Rich Robbins said. Still, he is happy to have made his corporate home in the West Coast’s rottenest city and expects it to have more not-so-rotten days ahead.

“We couldn’t be more proud of the tenants and businesses we’ve brought to Emeryville or the building we have in Emeryville. We’re going to grow in Emeryville,” he said.

With .7 of its 1.9 square miles under water and with areas that still need to be cleaned up, the obvious question is just how much more growth can Emeryville handle. “We can always build up. And that’s where it should go,” Flores said.

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