Mixed-use plans are taking shape for Chevron's former sprawling headquarters in California's Bay Area, adding to development efforts that aim to rethink suburban sprawl while adding homes to address the state's affordability crisis — in part why the energy giant is leaving the state for Texas.
The almost 92-acre campus at Bishop Ranch in the East Bay of San Ramon holds roughly 1.3 million square feet of office space — one of the largest such campuses in California's Bay Area — slated to be demolished to make way for 2,600 residences, 125,000 square feet of retail space, a 2.5-acre park and an outdoor performance theater.
In a formal application recently submitted to the city, locally based Sunset Development proposed 426 housing units for the first phase of the Orchards project, with plans for two more phases in the future. The project could be approved within the next 12 months, with construction aiming to begin in 2026.
It’s the latest effort to rethink suburban sprawl in favor of a more walkable community centered around diverse housing.
Sunset — led by the Mehran family, now in its third generation of ownership of Bishop Ranch since buying it from Western Electric in 1978 — is promoting the ambitious development as part of what it calls “a 15-minute lifestyle," by putting together apartments and single-family houses with uses residents need, from offices to grocery stores to entertainment.
The growing demand for mixed-use developments reflects the nationwide shortage of affordable housing that has coincided with a surplus of office space since the explosion of remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic.
San Ramon, a suburban town about 35 miles east of San Francisco, is on the hook for slightly over 5,000 new units of housing by 2031 as part of state requirements that all cities in California do their part to address the state’s housing shortage.
“Sunset Development and the city of San Ramon are collaborating to respond to the housing needs of its residents,” wrote the developer in materials filed on the Bishop Ranch transformation. It added: “Bishop Ranch is evolving into a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use district combining residential, commercial and office uses."
Creating walkable neighborhoods
Sunset Development has been converting the sprawling Bishop Ranch site that was once the largest office park in the Bay Area into a contemporary mixed-use complex where residents could eventually live, shop and play without having to get into their cars. Those plans started to take shape in 2018 with the opening of the $300 million City Center shopping mall.
Studies have shown that most Americans prefer to live in walkable areas. While there is a limited amount of downtown real estate available, “by replicating the live-work-play environment in a smaller area, developers can deliver those active lifestyles to more people outside the urban core, and at a relatively lower cost,” said Julia Georgules, director of local research markets at JLL, in a report.
San Ramon approved rezoning the 92-acre former Chevron site at 6001 Bollinger Canyon Road from office to mixed-use space at the end of last year. Earlier this year, the first group of homeowners at Bishop Ranch began moving into 404 townhomes and apartments dubbed City Village that were built by local developer SummerHill Homes.
The Orchards project — a nod to Bishop Ranch's origins as a locale for growing fruit trees during the first half of the 20th century — aims to include a diverse mix of housing from single-family homes and townhouses in the first phase to multistory apartment buildings, including an unspecified amount of affordable housing down the road to accommodate everyone from singles and young families to empty nesters and retirees, said Sunset.
The country’s second-largest publicly traded energy company sold its longtime San Ramon, California, headquarters in 2022 to move into leased space as part of its plans to shrink its California workforce and expand in Houston, Texas, joining a spate of companies that have moved out of the state in recent years, citing high costs and too much regulatory oversight. Chevron said earlier this year that it would transition all corporate functions to Houston over the next five years.
Chairman and CEO Mike Wirth and Mark Nelson, the company's vice chairman, planned to move to Houston before the end of 2024, said Chevron in a statement in August. The company said positions that support Chevron’s California operations would remain in San Ramon.