Living in San Mateo

Neighborhoods — The flats

Bay Meadows

The newest neighborhood in San Mateo, built from nothing on the site of the racetrack that closed in 2008, and the only one designed around a train.

On the map

On the slope

Elevation cross section of San Mateo, west to east: the Crystal Springs watershed at 560 feet falls to San Francisco Bay at sea level in roughly four miles. San Mateo Highlands — 310 ft Laurelwood & Sugarloaf — 330 ft Baywood — 130 ft Aragon — 90 ft North Central — 38 ft Downtown — 28 ft Hillsdale — 22 ft Bay Meadows — 14 ft Sunnybrae — 11 ft Shoreview & Fiesta Gardens — 8 ft Coyote Point & North Shoreview — 5 ft
The hills East of the corridor, on the old track infield. The Bay Drag toward the Bay →
Elevation
14 ft
Band
The flats
Nearest platform
Hillsdale
Getting to it
2–8 minutes
Street pattern
New, narrow, with alleys behind the houses
Fog
No
Tree canopy
Young — planted with the neighborhood, and good in twenty years
Noise
Low. Weekday office traffic, the occasional train, quiet evenings

Bay Meadows racetrack ran thoroughbreds from 1934 until 2008. What replaced it was planned all at once, which almost nothing else in San Mateo was: a grid of townhouses, apartments, and office buildings laid out around parks, with the Caltrain station at the edge and alleys instead of driveways so the streets stay narrow and the sidewalks stay usable.

The whole place reads new. Everything is straight, clean, and about the same age. The trees are young and will be good in twenty years. A hardware store, a grocery, and a coffee shop sit downstairs from apartments, which the rest of the Peninsula mostly gave up on doing.

What it's actually like

Walkable in the way a plan is walkable rather than the way a century of accretion is walkable. The parks are heavily used, especially the big lawn on weekends. Dogs everywhere. The office buildings mean the daytime population swells and then clears out, so weekday evenings are quieter than the density suggests.

Homes are attached — townhouses and condos, mostly, with rental apartments above the retail. HOA fees are part of the arithmetic here in a way they aren't in the ranch-house neighborhoods, and the buildings are new enough that wiring, insulation, and deferred maintenance are not.

Getting out

By train, Hillsdale station is at the neighborhood's edge, two to eight minutes on foot, with more express service than the downtown stop. No other neighborhood puts a platform this close to this many front doors, and it is the reason the neighborhood exists in this shape.

On foot, well — and deliberately so, which is a different thing from the accreted walkability of downtown. A hardware store, a grocery, and a coffee shop are downstairs from apartments, the parks are inside the grid, and the alleys keep cars off the sidewalks.

By bike, secure storage is built in, the Bay Trail is close, and separated lanes on 28th Avenue serving the station are in design.

By car, 101 is a two-minute drive in the other direction, and 92 is close enough to reach both freeways quickly.