After three workers were injured Wednesday morning at the construction site of the Mission Hills Square development — a major mixed use project in Fremont that will feature 55,000 square feet of retail and office space and 158 condominiums — work was halted for the day.
But that work stoppage was only the latest in a string of much longer delays since the turn of the century that, until recently, had kept a development from taking shape at the site, according to city reports and those who have been involved with projects planned there.
The 12.9-acre parcel at 2501 Cormack Road, in Fremont’s Cameron Hills neighborhood, is in an upscale residential area filled mostly with subdivisions of single-family homes separated by rolling hills. It’s situated just east of Interstate 680, and just north of Auto Mall Parkway and Durham Road. A portion of the Hayward Fault also runs underneath the plot.
A shift in the site’s land use designation from low-density residential to commercial during the early 1990s allowed for retail and mixed use developments. In 2000, a proposal for a 105,000 square foot shopping center with space for a supermarket, retail shops and restaurants was approved, but city staff reports say the project never materialized.
Then in 2005, the development under construction today was first pitched to the city by a small group of investors under the company name QFCO, based in Burlingame.
Michael Luu, one of the partners in the group, said he designed the project, taking inspiration from Santana Row in San Jose.
Luu said he wanted to bring the “look and feel of an urban development into a dated Fremont area that’s really neighborhoods only,” he said in phone interview Thursday.
But that urban design played a part in the project’s first roadblock After three public hearings, the project was shot down by the city’s Planning Commission in October 2007.
“The project was incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood in terms of land use intensity, size and scale,” according to city staff report, citing the commission’s majority opinion.
Luu said people also were concerned that the area could be jammed with traffic due to the project and one other significant development planned about two-and-half miles to the west: a pro ballpark.
At the time, the Oakland Athletics ownership group had announced plans to build a massive new stadium and urban village with thousands of homes near the western end of Auto Mall Parkway. It ultimately never came to fruition, in part due to local pushback the A’s didn’t see coming.
“The neighbors were up in arms over such a large type of development that could congest traffic,” Luu said. “Everybody was worried about the possibility of major gridlock.”
But the developers of the Santana Row like project appealed the commission’s decision to the City Council and found sympathetic ears, winning approval of the project in late November 2007.
It looked like things were on track, but once the recession was in full swing, the group wasn’t able to find a lender that could put up the money for such a large mixed-use development without “onerous terms,” Luu said.
The group pursued cash from overseas investors, but ultimately, their efforts failed. The group sold the property and the project entitlements to a group of Taiwanese investors in 2014, Luu said.
The new group of investors, called Fremont Hills Development Corporation, hit a snag almost immediately. City reports said engineers found errors in the original plans, as a series of retaining walls behind the project’s buildings and parking lots weren’t tall enough to hold back the earth safely.
Engineers redesigned the walls to be taller, and planned to use earth-toned stones to build them so they wouldn’t be as noticeable to passerby on the roads.
The council approved the redesign in 2016, but then Mayor Lily Mei — who was then vice-mayor — and Councilman Vinnie Bacon who voted against it cited concerns about the walls and the fault under the ground.
“I’m really surprised that this project is going forward so close to the Hayward Fault,” Bacon said at an April 2016 council meeting.
Despite state law that requires developers keep any of the buildings at least 50 feet from the fault line, Bacon said he felt building this development there “is just begging for a disaster.”
But development in the area proceeds, but not without problems.
In June of this year — just four months before Wednesday’s accident — a worker on the site fell from a second floor onto a first floor concrete slab and suffered serious injuries.
Queens Land Builders, based in Alhambra, is the employer for the project, said California Occupational Safety and Health Administration spokesman Frank Polizzi. The investigation into the June incident is still open, so details about any potential penalties or citations against the builder are not yet available, he said.
Cal/Osha is also investigating Wednesday’s accident in which one man was critically injured and two others moderately injured when a steel rebar tower came crashing down as workers were strapped to it, according to fire department officials.
According to a financial analyst for Queens Land reached by phone Friday, Mission Hills Square is set to be completed in fall or winter of 2019, barring any further setbacks.
