In Wealthy Bay Area Enclave, a Battle Over ‘Historic’ Homes Hits Boiling Point

A yearslong, drag-out fight in a wealthy Bay Area enclave over what should be considered “historic” has reached a breaking point.

Last week, the San Mateo City Council sent a letter pleading with California’s historic preservation board to delay a decision on whether to deem Baywood, one of its most coveted neighborhoods, eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. The coalition of homeowners who launched the effort shot back, accusing the city of defamation.

For four years, a contentious battle has raged between the group, which said it wants to “protect historic resources” in San Mateo, and other homeowners who don’t see their 20th-century homes as particularly extraordinary. It all began when a few homeowners along Fairfax Avenue decided to renovate.

One of them was Gene Alston. He and his wife bought their home in 2021 and were drawn to Baywood’s wide, quiet streets, quick commute to their daughters’ school and strong community feel.

However, their excitement was quickly tainted. As Alston began preparing to renovate their new home — which included shifting the house forward on the lot, changing the architecture style and building an accessory dwelling unit for his mother-in-law in the backyard — neighbors got wind. They weren’t happy.

Flyers stuck in mailboxes warned that the new homeowners were going to destroy a historic property. When Alston hosted a meeting to discuss the remodel with neighbors who live within 500 feet, per city policy, he said a “flash mob” of people who live outside the radius joined the video call.

Leaders of the Baywood Neighborhood Association hired a historic preservation architect who deemed Alston’s home historic and retained attorneys to oppose the remodel. At the time, that included Mike Nash, whose property abuts the Alstons’ and who is married to San Mateo Councilmember Lisa Diaz Nash.

Alston, who is Black and Korean, said the effort felt hostile and made his family feel unwelcome.

Diaz Nash told KQED at the time that opposition to Alston’s renovation had nothing to do with proximity to her home.

“Is it because we are not established residents in Baywood, even though we’re established in San Mateo?” asked Alston, who has lived on the San Francisco Peninsula for decades.

The city approved his planning proposal in 2022, but it spurred a larger movement against development in Baywood.

‘It was a catalyst’

A few neighbors who had opposed the renovation of Alston’s home and two others nearby that year formed the San Mateo Heritage Alliance.

Under the organization, they applied to have Baywood added to the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district, which requires approval from California’s state historic resources commission. President Laurie Hietter said they wanted to preserve San Mateo’s architecture and history.

Critics of the group stuck yellow signs in their lawns and formed their own organization, Less Red Tape, to inform Baywood residents — most of whom were entirely removed from this debate at the time — about the potential drawbacks of the historic designation, which they said would include stricter environmental impact scrutiny and parameters on how they can renovate the exteriors of their homes in the future.

Since then, talk of the looming decision by the state has been continuous, at least at City Hall. Residents of Baywood and nearby neighborhoods have attended City Council meetings and signed petitions — some set on preserving the look of the neighborhood they moved into decades ago, and others arguing that new restrictions would make renovating their homes nearly impossible.

In June 2024, the council tried to broker an agreement between SMHA and Less Red Tape, proposing to create its own updated local historic resources program. In the meantime, council members hoped that SMHA would pause its appeal to the state.

The deal fell apart, but Hietter said SMHA still pulled back for about six months. In December, she announced that the group would resume its push for state recognition, citing slow movement on the part of the city.

In the council’s letter urging the historic resources board not to vote on Baywood’s status during its May meeting, officials said San Mateo had “recently allocated funds to develop a local process for evaluating and designating historic resources, including updates to related ordinances,” which it said would increase community engagement and “build consensus around our historic preservation efforts.”

“Should the nomination advance at the state level before our local process is fully developed, it could inadvertently undermine these efforts — not only in Baywood but across the entire City of San Mateo,” the council said.

What makes a neighborhood historic?

According to SMHA’s application to the state board, Baywood became a commuter suburb of San Francisco as the city emerged as an industrial hub in the 1920s and ’30s. Upper and middle-class businesspeople who wanted to get out of the dense cityscape after much of it was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake moved a 20- to 30-minute streetcar ride down the peninsula and built homes in the hills.

Hietter said the mix of French, Spanish revival and Tudor style homes are signatories of the time period and important to preserve. But not all Baywood neighbors agree.

“It’s an invented history,” said Frank Elliott, a fellow resident and founder of Less Red Tape. “The architecture is only distinct because the homes represent styles of houses that were built at the time they were built.”

The area that would be covered by the historic designation, which includes about 440 homes, is a mix of over 40 styles designed by more than 20 architects, he argues. Almost 100 have been renovated significantly enough that they no longer qualify as historic on their own, according to SMHA’s application.

The city has three existing historic districts, two of which have been recognized at the local level since the early 1990s.

Glazenwood — a neighborhood that spans one U-shaped road and a short offshoot just south of the city’s downtown — is the only residential zone considered historic. Most of the 70 single-story homes within the restored white pillars that stand at its three entrances are 1920s-style Spanish colonial structures.

The neighborhood was originally part of the estate of Alvinza Hayward, a San Francisco businessman in the late 1800s. When Hayward died, his mansion was turned into the ritzy Peninsula Hotel, which operated until the property burned down in 1920. After the fire, the land was divided into single-family homes, most of which were built between 1922 and 1925 by one company.

Exacerbating patterns of segregation

Just one additional property, the Yoshiko Yamanouchi House, has been deemed historic in San Mateo since the ’90s. However, across California, the number of applications from neighborhoods requesting historic status has been increasing over the last decade, according to Annie Fryman, the director of special projects at the housing advocacy group SPUR.

Although no searchable database of historic district nominations exists, according to the state parks department, six neighborhoods in California — including St. Francis Wood in southwest San Francisco — were granted historic status between October 2020 and March 2024 based on applications with the same loose outline as Baywood’s.

The increase in historic district applications could be a reaction to new state housing legislation being implemented at the same time, much of which is meant to ease development and help cities meet lofty requirements for building new housing, Fryman said.

Many of these laws, which aim to rectify years of housing discrimination, expedite permitting and allow more single-family lots to be subdivided into duplexes. They also carve out exemptions for historic places.

“One of the challenges with historic districts is that they’re often exacerbating existing patterns of segregation by saying, ‘This is already a segregated place and nothing here can ever change,’” Fryman said.

Disproportionately, neighborhoods that get these designations are in wealthier, more segregated areas.

“So many state housing laws are basically attempts on the edges to address existing patterns of segregation,” Fryman told KQED. “And establishing historic districts squarely takes us backwards in that journey. That’s something that hasn’t been reconciled in the field yet.”

When Baywood was developed in the 1920s and ’30s, it had housing covenants that blocked Black and Asian people from purchasing homes.

Today, it remains one of San Mateo’s most prestigious — and wealthiest — neighborhoods. It’s 70% white, and the median sale price for three-bedroom properties like the one Alston purchased was $3.03 million from 2021 to 2024, according to Zillow, an online real estate marketplace.

More ‘Red Tape’

Elliott and Alston believe the SMHA is motivated by a desire to “control the neighborhood.”

A historic designation could force homeowners to hire historic consultants, go through additional California Environmental Quality Act reviews or face lawsuits, making renovations more expensive and resource-intensive, Elliott said. CEQA litigation adds an average of two years to a housing project’s timeline, according to a report from the state’s Little Hoover Commission, an independent oversight agency that investigates state government operations and policy.

“In the face of such lengthy delays, financing can vanish, stopping a project even if it would eventually have survived the CEQA process and been approved,” the report said.

Hietter argues that a historic designation’s effect on homeowners would be minimal and maintains that the designation is symbolic.

Historic resource regulations are enforced at the local level, and it would be up to San Mateo to add Baywood to its historic resource ordinance, Hietter said. San Mateo is considering updating its ordinance, and SMHA would advocate for Baywood to be added, she told KQED.

“We’re not looking to have an extremely restrictive ordinance. The ordinance would only apply if you’re doing something that’s visible from the street,” she said.

“The gain for us is to raise awareness about historic resources, to have a sign that says, ‘This is a historic district,’ so that if people want to come in here and mow down a house, they’re going to think twice,” Hietter told KQED.

A time-consuming, costly process

The Alstons bought their first home in San Mateo 25 years ago and have built successful careers working for various Silicon Valley tech giants since.

After having two daughters and outgrowing that home, they moved around Burlingame and San Mateo several times, finally planning to settle in Baywood. Alston said the neighborhood finally met his wife’s top priority — a strong community feel similar to that of their first home, where young families were always hosting backyard barbecues and birthday celebrations or inviting the kids to shoot hoops and ride bikes.

The renovation, though, has been discouraging.

After Alston’s project plans were originally approved, neighbors submitted a historic evaluation of his house and a letter from an attorney, asking the city to apply historic preservation restrictions. Alston commissioned his own historic assessment, racked up thousands of dollars in city fees, and fielded multiple nuisance complaints in the following years.

His whole family, including his mother-in-law, presented the renovation project to the city’s planning commission in July 2022, anticipating appeals. It was unanimously approved.

Alston hoped to complete the renovation last year, but he said that additional pushback — and changes he made to the renovated design to try to nullify some of the controversy — slowed progress. He now believes the time-consuming and costly process will be over in May.

Alston said he thinks his project ultimately gained approval because it includes an ADU. California legislation passed in 2021 requires that cities limit project-by-project discretionary reviews of renovations that subdivide single-family lots into duplexes or add junior units.

The law, Senate Bill 9, has a carve-out for homes in historic districts.

Alston believes that if Baywood had been historic when he started the renovation process four years ago, “you wouldn’t be able to do it. If they for some reason wanted to pick on your project, you couldn’t do it.”