San Mateo Just Approved 847 Homes at 690 Concar Drive

Fourteen and a half acres of asphalt between Highway 92 and the Caltrain tracks is about to stop being a parking lot. Updated permits for 690 Concar Drive were approved as of July 30, clearing the way for 847 homes on the site of a shopping center that has been quietly dying for most of a decade. In a city that has finished 39 housing units all year, that is not a rounding error.

The project has been circling since March 2025. The version approved this week is the one that counts.

What actually got approved at 690 Concar Drive

Brookfield Residential and The Pacific Companies are developing, with KTGY Architects on design. The approved plans cover the full 14.5 acres:

• 847 homes in total, split between 139 townhomes and 708 apartments
• 186 of those homes set aside as affordable
• Three-story townhomes across the northern half of the site, six- and seven-story apartment buildings to the south
• Roughly 1,000 parking spaces, divided between residents and public use
• The existing Trader Joe's building stays, and a relocated 7-Eleven takes the corner at Concar and Grant

Almost everything else on the site comes down. If you have driven that stretch and wondered why a 14-acre commercial parcel this close to a train platform needed a parking field you could land a plane on, you were asking the right question.

Nine minutes to Hayward Park is the whole argument

The site is about a nine-minute walk from the Hayward Park Caltrain station, with both 101 and 92 a couple of minutes away by car. That combination is why this project makes sense, and why it was worth two rounds of permits to get here.

It is the textbook version of what the region keeps saying it wants. Failing single-story retail, an enormous surface lot, water and sewer already in the ground, a commuter rail platform within walking distance, and a grocery store that stays. Building 847 homes here does not take a single existing home off the map. It takes a parking lot off the map.

The 1,000 stalls are the compromise, and that is a lot of parking for a site this close to a station. I would rather see fewer spaces and more homes. But a project that clears the entitlement gauntlet with 847 units and 186 affordable ones is not the hill to fight over parking ratios on.

San Mateo is adding homes exactly where its own scores are lowest

Here is the part the coverage skips. Everything east of El Camino Real in San Mateo carries a different profile than everything west of it, and the Concar site sits squarely on the east side.

Our San Mateo neighborhood rankings put Hayward Park at 3.5 out of 5 overall, 14th of 23 neighborhoods, with a median sale price around $2.07 million in June 2026. Fiesta Gardens, just southeast of the site, scores 3.0 overall with a June median near $1.67 million. Aragon and Baywood, both west of El Camino, score 4.4 and 4.3.

Flip to the amenities column and the map inverts. Hayward Park ties Downtown San Mateo for the best amenities score in the city at 4.3. Fiesta Gardens runs 3.8. Aragon, the highest-scoring neighborhood overall, sits at 4.0.

So the east side already wins on walkable convenience and loses on schools and safety, which is what drags the overall number down. Adding 847 homes and keeping the grocery store pushes harder on the one factor these blocks already lead. It does not, by itself, redraw an attendance boundary or change a crime rate. Anyone expecting east San Mateo's overall scores to jump because a big project landed will be disappointed, and anyone comparing east-side blocks on price alone is missing why they price the way they do.

The sharpest number in that whole area is inside one school path. Aragon High, which serves the Hayward Park blocks, scores a 5 on our five-point scale. Sunnybrae Elementary scores 1.3. That spread is the real east-side story, and no amount of new construction fixes it.

Thirty-nine units so far this year makes 847 look enormous

For scale, San Mateo averaged 254 completed housing units a year between 2022 and 2024. In 2025 the city finished 116. By the middle of this year it had finished 39. Foster City has completed one.

The reason is not zoning. It is money. "No one wants to do ground-up multifamily right now," Center Street Lending founder Stephen Couig told the San Mateo Daily Journal in June, pointing at construction costs and permanent financing that has nearly doubled since 2022.

Which is the caveat worth holding onto. An approval is permission, not a building. Plenty of entitled Peninsula projects are sitting on paper waiting for the math to work, and 847 units is a large amount of math. The 186 affordable homes in particular usually need a funding source that has nothing to do with the developer's pro forma.

What to watch on those 14.5 acres

The next real markers are demolition and building permits, whether the site phases (a project this size almost always does), how the affordable component gets financed, and whether Trader Joe's stays open through construction. That last one sounds trivial. For the households already living around Concar and Grant, it decides whether the next three years are an inconvenience or a hole in their week.

If you are weighing east San Mateo against the west side right now, the honest framing is that you are trading school and safety scores for the city's best walkable convenience, at a discount of several hundred thousand dollars. That trade is about to get more pronounced, not less. Looking hard at the area before you fall for an address is the entire reason we built Houseberry, and a site plan this size belongs on your radar before you write an offer rather than after.

Sources

San Francisco YIMBY, updated permits approved for 690 Concar Drive

San Mateo Daily Journal, new housing on the Peninsula has plummeted

Houseberry, San Mateo neighborhood rankings

Houseberry, Hayward Park neighborhood page