Updates:
This past Friday we had the opportunity to visit the Fremont Innovation District with their Economic Director Christina Briggs. Below we have included a brief background summary on the district, some lessons learned from Fremont that we can apply to Milpitas, and various differences we noticed between the two cities. Background on Fremont: The Tesla factory, now the largest employer and anchor of the Warm Springs Innovation District, was once an auto factory for Toyota and Chevron. Once this car factory closed down, there was an economic crisis in the area as around 5000 jobs were lost. There was a lot of empty space and there was federal funding to do something with the area. BART construction for the new Warm Springs Station was already underway. Union Pacific Railroads bought the unoccupied land, and wanted to convert it into an old railyard. This would have been a low intensive use for the space, and would not be providing as many jobs as the auto factory once did. The city convinced Union Pacific to sell it by telling them that they would sell it for an increased price since the people buying it would use it for a higher and better use. The city also expedited the process and this transaction occurred within one year. The City of Fremont worked with the Urban Land Institute to determine how many residential units to put in. Developers want to build housing as opposed to building commercial spaces because there is a demand for housing due to the Bay Area housing crisis. It was important that the new development have space to meet the market demand, have a neighborhood feel, and create employment/commercial space. Together they decided on a total of 4000 housing units. Lessons for Milpitas: Fremont did a good job with Transit Oriented Development (TOD), mixing housing, transit, and jobs. They created a mainstreet within the Innovation District, called Innovation Way, to serve as a touchstone and central area. The BART Station connects to Innovation Way via a pedestrian bridge which the city developed and paid for. Similar to Milpitas, Fremont also has a downtown area and is in the process of further developing it. In both cases, there is the challenge of developing a sort of city (the innovation district) within a city. Fremont recognized the importance of creating community benefits with the new developments, so they built a new public school for Fremont ISD which was funded by the developers Valley Oak, Lenar, and Toll Brothers. These developers contributed a total of $50 million for the construction of this school. Fremont recognized that creative collisions, a key part of innovation districts, are harder to achieve in new development scenarios versus in places like Cambridge where these collisions happen more organically. Fremont has developed a ”weirdification” goal of trying to give the city and district an edigness factor. They hope to achieve this by building amenities and pedestrian friendly spaces where people can socialize and ideate. Fremont was not strict in requiring a certain amount of commercial space, instead they hope to make space and allow restaurants and retailers to move in more organically. Finally, Fremont thought a lot about the broader Bay Area area ecosystem and their role in it. They recognized that they are not Palo Alto, which has historically been R&D. Instead, they identified their strength in manufacturing and actually creating products, and they attempted to stay true to their roots. Differences: The Warm Springs Innovation District is different from other innovation districts because it is a manufacturing anchored innovation district; its main employer is the Tesla factory. A key difference between Milpitas and Fremont is that in Fremont there were no new housing units built, so the housing units were built in conjuction with the construction of the commerical spaces. In Milpitas, the new housing developments are already built or under construction, and the innovation district is being built after. Another key difference between Milpitas and Fremont, is that the size of the Fremont district is much larger than the intended area for the Milpitas district, making placemaking potentially harder in Fremont than in Milpitas. Looking Ahead: This coming Monday we will be presenting at the Economic Development Meeting in Milpitas. The focus of our presentation will be on the take-aways from our tour of Fremont and the best practices that can be applied to Milpitas. We are excited for this opportunity, and to meet the other people from Milpitas involved with this project. This week we were finally able to get a hold of the Boston Innovation District, and we are going to schedule a conference call with them in the coming weeks. Comments are closed.
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