Located just north of San Jose, east of Palo Alto and southeast of San Francisco, the Dumbarton TOD site is ideal for serving a larger area of transit ridership within the East Bay and Silicon Valley. The station will connect rail, bus transit, a new retail center, the Bay Trail, and additional open space amenities to 2,500 residential homes with a wide range of housing types and affordability. Challenged by site contamination after a century of industrial production, the specific plan creatively balances constructible development areas of brownfield land with a form-based approach to zoning, to allow development flexibility and adaptability to ever-changing market conditions.
Smart Growth principles were applied to guide the sustainable community vision and design—one of the key elements of the plan being the Neighborhood Center—the core concentration of transit, retail and urban gathering where land use densities and intensity promote measured walkability. In keeping with the design philosophy of an integrated community, parks, trails and public and private recreational open space areas lay a pedestrian- and bike-friendly framework to connect throughout the over 200-acre neighborhood. Sustainable landscape design concepts bridge the public realm of a modified street grid of shorter block lengths and block scaling to reinforce the urban pattern and attributes of a small walkable town.
A series of community outreach workshops were hosted to help build consensus behind the specific plan, adopted in 2010.
