Vallejo trades two old shops for 1,100 storage units

Drive north on Sonoma Boulevard toward the Highway 37 ramps and the last stoplight before the freeway is Lewis Brown Drive. A Shell station on one corner. A Jack in the Box and a Popeyes. Behind them, set back on 2.35 acres, two low single-story commercial buildings that most people pass without a glance.

Those two buildings are coming down. On Oct. 19 the City of Vallejo signed a notice of exemption for a four-story, climate-controlled self-storage building at 1609 Lewis Brown Drive: about 1,100 indoor units, 49 feet tall, 137,138 square feet. The applicant is DXD Capital, a storage developer based in Albuquerque.

This is a story about what Vallejo's north gateway turns into, and it lands in a city where home prices are drifting down. According to Houseberry data for Vallejo, the typical home was worth about $530,700 in October 2026, down from $539,000 a year earlier. In North Vallejo, the Highway 37 corridor neighborhood we score, it was about $496,000.

A big box with nine parking spaces

The numbers in the city's filing are modest everywhere except the building itself. Nine parking spaces. Bike racks. Landscaping and the street and sidewalk work the city requires along Lewis Brown Drive. Two jobs.

The building is the part you will notice. At 49 feet it would be the tallest thing on that stretch of Lewis Brown, more than twice the height of the buildings standing there now. Divide 103,020 rentable square feet by 1,100 units and the average unit comes out near 94 square feet, a little smaller than a 10-by-10.

Vallejo has approved this kind of building before, and not always quietly.

The 2014 fight is the one people remember. Commissioners argued that a storage complex would diminish the city's entrance and produce few jobs. The council disagreed. The Fairgrounds Drive project, approved in 2020 according to Solano Futuro's project tracker, now operates as an Extra Space.

Walk south from the site and you reach Security Public Storage at 4360 Sonoma Boulevard. Across Sonoma Boulevard is an Extra Space at 4311. StorageCafe lists 15 storage facilities with Vallejo addresses.

So why add 1,100 units here? The rents. StorageCafe puts the average climate-controlled 10-by-10 in Vallejo at about $125 a month. The Extra Space across the boulevard posts a web rate of $84 for a 10-by-10 drive-up unit and $142 at the counter. Our rough math, at $1.25 a square foot, says a full building would gross about $1.5 million a year. Few uses of a 2.35-acre lot next to a freeway ramp make that kind of money with two employees.

Why we would not fight this one

We think this is a reasonable use of a bad housing site, and Vallejo should let it go ahead.

The lot sits in a FEMA flood zone, the AE category, according to its LoopNet property record. It backs onto an industrial strip of auto body shops and warehouses along Commercial Street. Its front door is a Highway 37 interchange. Homes on this lot would sit between freeway exhaust and a floodplain, and no builder is lining up to try.

Storage is also about the quietest neighbor a commercial strip can get. Customers come and go a few at a time, and the Oct. 19 filing found no significant traffic, noise or air quality effect.

The honest cost is the one the 2014 commission named. Two jobs on 2.35 acres is a thin return for prime freeway frontage, and the city's sales tax take from a storage building is close to zero. A gas station, a drive-thru or a contractor's yard would employ more people. That is a fair argument. Our answer is that the property sat on LoopNet with a $3.75 million asking price, and a storage developer is the buyer who showed up.

The homes around it will barely notice

Nearby homeowners can relax about this one. Vallejo prices are sliding at the same slow pace, 1.3 to 1.6 percent in a year, whether a neighborhood sits by the freeway or up in the hills.

Houseberry's 12-month history shows Northgate down 1.6 percent to about $728,000 and Downtown Vallejo down 1.4 percent to about $374,000, both as of October 2026. North Vallejo fell 1.3 percent. A storage building did not cause any of that, and it will not reverse it.

What does move Vallejo values is the bigger stuff, like the sale of the old Mare Island shipyard we covered in August. Houseberry gives North Vallejo a 1.5 out of 5 on safety and 2.1 on amenities. Only five of the 23 Vallejo neighborhoods we rank score 3.5 or better on safety. A 49-foot box on Lewis Brown Drive does not change those scores either way.

The one date that matters is about Nov. 26. Under state law, a challenge to a notice of exemption generally has to be filed within 35 days of the notice, and this one was posted Oct. 22. If nobody sues by then, the storage building is coming, and you can compare how every Vallejo neighborhood scores on our Vallejo neighborhood ranking before you decide which side of Highway 37 you want to live on.

Sources

• CEQAnet record, DXD Self-Storage Project, SCH 2026100790
• City of Vallejo notice of exemption, PLN25-0027
• Inside Self Storage, Vallejo council overturns commission on storage project, December 2014
• Solano Futuro, 384 Fairgrounds Drive self-storage facility
• StorageCafe, storage units in Vallejo
• LoopNet property record, 1609 Lewis Brown Dr