Crypto Fast - Day 12 of 33
I am going to share about a small community on the Peninsula (west Bay Area) known as Foster City. I actually live pretty close to Foster City and have a lot of friends who live there. What most people don't know is that the international headquarters for Visa are located in the small town of Foster City. It was actually created out of landfill from the Bay in the 1960's. Originally, people thought it would not survive a major earthquake but it did quite well in 1989 when Loma Prieta hit us hard. The City of Foster City actually was a pioneer for two other nearby landfilled cities known as Belmont Shores and Redwood Shores.
The City of Foster City is located in central San Mateo County, along San Francisco Bay. As mentioned above, the city was founded in the 1960's on engineered landfill in the bay marshes. Foster City is a master-planned community that from the outset was designed to accommodate a wide mix of housing types as well as commercial and industrial development. The city has a total area of 19.8 square miles of which 3.8 square miles consists of land area and 16.1 square miles consists of waterways.
The city boundaries are formed by San Francisco Bay to the north and northeast, by Belmont Slough and the Redwood Shores district of Redwood City to the southeast, and by the City of San Mateo to the south and west. Primary access to Foster City is gained via the San Mateo Bridge (Highway 92), Highway 101, East Hillsdale Boulevard, Foster City Boulevard, and Mariners Island Boulevard.
Foster City is home to four public schools in the San Mateo-Foster City Elementary School District. Foster City Elementary School, Brewer Island Elementary School, and Audubon Elementary School serve kindergarten through fifth grades. Nathaniel Bowditch Middle School serves 6th through 8th grades. There are several private preschools and elementary schools. However, there is no high school located east of Highway 101 so Foster City high school students attend the public schools in the San Mateo Union High School District (i.e. Hillsdale, San Mateo, and Aragon).
All four public schools in Foster City (Audubon School, Brewer Island School, Foster City School, and Bowditch Middle School) have won California Distinguished School awards. In 1993, Bowditch was recognized with the U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon. In 2005, Bowditch became a California Distinguished School for the second time (a third recognition was given in 2013).
The main development in the district is the Vintage Park community, which is governed by a master plan. Vintage Park is a 132-acre mixed use site that includes a hotel, several office buildings, research and development facilities, small-scale commercial retail space, and several restaurants. The original Vintage Park master plan was issued in 1981, and has been amended several times since.
The large majority of the office and R&D portions of Vintage Park now are owned by Gilead Sciences. Gilead already owned about half of the area of Vintage Park before acquiring the large majority of the remainder in 2009 from EFI. Vintage Park is mostly developed, but there are still three large vacant lots with entitlements in place for 705,000 square feet of additional space. Gilead purchased those three lots for future expansion around 2010. Around that same time, the City of Foster City approved a project known as the Gilead Sciences Corporate Campus Master Plan. Since then, Gilead has expanded from its existing 630,000 square feet of office space to almost 1,200,000 square feet in 17 buildings at Vintage Park (encompassing about 40 acres).
