The Burlingame Voice

A Guy Can Dream, Can't He?

May 11th update--Water usage is up.  Maybe people don't take the drought seriously because all they see around them is new construction and approvals for even more?

New Bayfront toy store: Meta

Brick and mortar retail got a boost today--just not on the Avenue or B'way.  Meta (aka Facebook) has announced a shop at the old Drive-in location and  The Registry is regurgitating the press release:

Today, we’re announcing Meta Store — our first physical retail space, which will open May 9 on our campus in Burlingame, California. In the Meta Store, you’ll be able to get hands-on experience with all our hardware products. 

Through interactive demos, you can make video calls to retail associates with Portal, learn how Ray-Ban Stories can help you stay present with the world around you, and explore the magic of VR with a first-of-its-kind immersive Quest 2 demo. 

The Meta Store also features an interactive Quest 2 display wall, allowing you to explore the hardware, its accessories, and the breadth of content available today. Last but not least is our immersive Quest 2 demo area, where you can try Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing or Supernatural on a large, wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what you’re seeing in-headset. You’ll also get a 30-second mixed reality clip of your demo experience that’s yours to share.

Starting May 9, the store will be open Monday through Friday from 11:00AM to 6:00PM PT. It’s located at 322 Airport Blvd in Burlingame, California.

It looks a lot more interesting than the Amazon store on the Avenue.  Hopefully they move a lot of product and generate a lot of sales tax for B'game.  I do wonder if they designed the parking structure to account for a retail space with non-employee parking access since all of the parking is in the structure.  While we wait for Top Golf out on the Bayfront, GOLF+ may be the next best thing.

May 25 Update:  I stopped into the Meta store today to have a look.  There's plenty of staff to give you a tour of the Rayban smart glasses and the Portal device.  The glasses are kind of cool and maybe a bit spooky with the dual cameras and video capability.  The Portal looks to be well-designed with more capability than the competition.  It's already a year old (a long time in consumer electronics) so probably wait for v2.  The virtual reality demo requires an appointment, so plan ahead.  Not the most obvious location, so use this photo and the signs to guide you.

Do we have enough "military" equipment?

Headlines can be deceiving.  They can be especially deceiving is there is no subsequent context given.  And they can be more deceiving when some are playing politics with the headline.  So it was for me on Wednesday when the top-of-fold front page of the Daily Journal blared "Sheriff's Office details $2M in military equipment".  The usual suspects in the defund, defang the police movement jumped all over it, but I was left to ask, "Is that a lot or not enough?"  Hard to say.  The DJ notes

The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office released its first annual Military Equipment Use Policy, detailing the more than $2 million worth of equipment in its ownership as part of a state mandate process aimed at expanding transparency around the stock of military-grade weapons held by any given jurisdiction.   During the required update from the Sheriff’s Office on the policy, Allen noted the Sheriff’s Office does not currently own any equipment directly handed down by the military or that is from companies who supply the military with equipment.

But the department does own equipment that falls under what the state defines as military equipment, based on interpretations of Assembly Bill 481, which took effect this January. In total, acquiring and maintaining the equipment has cost the department more than $2 million.

So it would have been nice to see the headline use "military" in quotes like I did above. If you click through to the article I'm not the only one questioning the terminology, but the piece is helpful in that it details the gear

According to the report, the county currently owns:

• a Lanco Bearcat armed vehicle
• a mobile command vehicle
• two bean bag launchers and bean bag munition
• three bomb squad robots
• four .50 caliber semi-automatic rifles and ammunition
• four 37 millimeter tear gas launchers and tear gas grenades
• 10 pepperball launchers
• 11 drones
• 41 stingball grenades, 42 flashbang devices and 114 less-lethal launchers used to fire rounds of soft rubber bullets.

“This equipment is necessary because there are no reasonable alternatives that can achieve the same objective of officer and civilian safety,” Sheriff Carlos Bolanos said.

In search of some context, I reminded myself that the County is about 450 square miles and has about three-quarters of a million residents.  It's home to a decent chunk of Silicon Valley tech offices and data centers.  Bio tech, including labs, is booming in the County so much that San Carlos just put a moratorium on new bio building applications.  We've got a lot of potential targets.  And as I look at the list, you would be hard-pressed to make a decent Schwarzenegger movie with what we have.  One Bearcat for the whole County?  One mobile command vehicle?  It seems to me AB 481 that required releasing this info "for transparency" may be causing too much transparency to all the wrong people.  Let's hope not.

B'gamers' Incomes up 34.3%

I love statistics and I love them even more when they are stack ranked.  So the Sunday Comicle article titled "Here’s where median household incomes increased the most in the Bay Area during the last decade" drew me in immediately as I wondered how they came up with these statistics and where B'game landed.  The answer to the first question is

The data set comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Surveys for 2015 and 2020, and included places in the Bay Area with at least 20,000 residents.

That is interesting because I was selected this time around to fill out the full "ACS" as part of the census.  It was a chore due to its length, but as I recall it used pretty wide ranges to gauge income.  So averaging them all together across any given town and reporting it down to tenths of a percent seems a bit overly precise.  It's not like the IRS came up with the number.  But wait, there's more.  Burlingame's 34.3% increase over the last five years came in eighth and landed just below EssEff, but

San Francisco’s median household pay increase fell short of East Palo Alto’s increase of 47%, partly driven by the historically economically disadvantaged city’s proximity to the Meta, formerly Facebook, headquarters (Ed:  Hey, we got one of those too). That increase was more than any other place in the Bay Area during the last decade despite the city’s population barely increasing, as median incomes soared from the $56,000 range to more than $80,000 annually.

“It’s gentrification,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. As Meta and other tech companies expanded their sprawling campuses on the peninsula and in the South Bay, “The people who lived (in East Palo Alto) who had been relatively poor got a chance to sell their homes for a whole lot of money” to people who could afford them, he said, driving up income levels.

Is Levy saying "gentrification" isn't the bad word some people claim it to be?  Sounds like it.  More caveats came from Sonoma State econ professor Robert Eyler who said

where he lives in Petaluma, which was third from the bottom of the entire list of the list in terms of income growth, has both a somewhat transitory population and an already-high median income for the Bay Area, possibly leaving it with less room to grow.

So describing the growth rate without knowing the baseline numbers from 2015 only tells half the story--or less.  You will probably hear our 34.3% number bandied about for better or worse, so now you have "the rest of the story".

Our newest downtown parking structure

We have a new 368-space parking structure just south of Howard Ave that recently opened.  That's a lot of parking, but some people may think it's too far away from the Avenue especially if they just want to stop into Peet's and grab a cup of coffee and a newspaper.  Voila, we now have a new one-space parking structure right outside of Peet's.  It is not quite as secure as the big one, so be prepared with a chain and lock to hook up to the parking structure (second photo, lower left).  This spot has no time limit as it was in use most of the day--and the price is right, too!

ADA Lawsuits: Burlingame not immune

I have heard about the stream of ADA access lawsuits targeting small businesses in B'game over the last few months.  Now the SF Chronicle is reporting that two high-profile, big city DA's (who are facing recall elections) are trying to do something about it.  This strikes close to home because the typical settlement is in the range of $10,000 - 11,000.  That's no small change for a small business.  The Chron notes

Accusing a law firm of fleecing small businesses in California with thousands of baseless disability-rights suits, the district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles asked a judge Monday to halt the practice and order the firm to refund millions of dollars the businesses paid to settle the suits.  For years, the firm, Potter Handy of San Diego, has been “bombarding California’s small businesses with abusive, boilerplate lawsuits,” District Attorney Chesa Boudin and his Los Angeles County counterpart, George Gascón, said in a suit in San Francisco Superior Court.

They said the firm sues on behalf of a handful of disabled clients who, in most cases, have never even visited the businesses and claim violations that are typically fabricated.  One of Potter Handy’s clients, Brian Whitaker, has filed approximately 1,700 suits, and another, Orlando Garcia, has filed more than 800, the district attorneys’ lawsuit said. Both live in Los Angeles County but have filed hundreds of cases in the Bay Area.

I spoke with local litigator Mike Liberty, who has represented one local B'game business in one of Mr. Whitaker's 1,700 lawsuits, about the move by Boudin and Gascón.  He estimates there could be as many as 40 such suits just in B'game.  While Mike agrees that the statute is being exploited, he's not confident that the federal law as currently written will give a judge enough room to side with the plaintiffs and the Mom & Pops.  I often complain about judges legislating from the bench and this is no exception.  The answer may be to revise the ADA itself, but in the meantime I would love to see our Burlingame City Attorney, Michael Guina, jump into support the lawsuit via an amicus brief.

It would show that our city council's oft-repeated support for small B'game businesses walks the walk and not just talks the talk.  Check out the photo below of an EssEff business that got sued during Covid when it was only doing take-out!

May 8 Update:  Here is a paragraph from the Daily Post that is B'game specific.  Can you say "refund"?

Spring treehugger post: Another Japanese maple

I just can't help admiring our Japanese maples every spring.  There are other lovely trees blooming--cherries especially and my apple and pear trees are just starting, but the Japanese maples are the best.  Notice this one has three colors at once--it sprouts in green then quickly transitions through yellow to red depending on which leaves get the most sun first.

CD15: Shoe....or Foot in Mouth?

When the scramble for Jackie Spier's seat in the US Congress started in November, we dropped the flag here.  Then the gamesmanship (can I still use that word? Yes.) got interesting here.  Now we have the first video advertisement of the race from our own Emily Beach titled "Shoes" that DJ columnist Mark Simon addressed yesterday here.  I was reading it aloud over lunch to someone with as much local, institutional political memory as Mark Simon; starting near the bottom of the column:

Beach has used some of her money to launch a new video ad, the first one in the campaign. Titled “Shoes” it shows the various shoes she has worn as an Army captain, businesswoman, a volunteer and councilmember.  The ad opens with Beach saying, “Jackie Speier has big shoes to fill.” A video shot of Speier is in the background.

That is as far as my reading got before my lunch partner said, "Oh....Jackie is not gonna like that!  Gina Papan tried that during a county supervisor race and it did not end well."

Recall that Dave Pine is our sitting supe.  Simon goes on to write:

It is an unwritten rule in local politics that campaign materials not include a photo of someone who has endorsed your opponent. In this case, Speier has made an unusually high profile endorsement of Mullin.

So, it is a little surprising to see that shot of Speier briefly but prominently on display, in the Beach ad. Asked about it, Beach said that the screen shot is from Speier’s public video announcement of her retirement. “I was impressed by her message and by her life’s work,” Beach said.

It could be argued that the video is, in essence, in the public domain, but the problem with unwritten rules is, you know, they are unwritten. In the past, Speier has been known to react testily to the unsanctioned use of her image.

There are at least two scenarios at play here.  One says Jackie triples down on her support for Mullin with more fundraising help for the money front-runner, recorded phone messages, big color glossy mailers, et al.  Scenario 2 says she is wrapping things up politically and will let Mullin passively choose what he wants in the way of images and collateral.  In my experience, it takes a while to get passive in retirement.

Click through and read the rest of Simon's column for the money trail.  You won't get a word on the policy differences between Beach, Mullin or Canepa, but at least you have "the rest of the story" here.   "politics is a blood sport"  Aneurin Bevan (Welsh Labour Party politician)

North End tsunami still coming hard and fast

We noted that a Density Tsunami Approaches eighteen months ago here.  One of the elements was the old Peninsula Museum of Art space at 1766 ECR on the north end.  The original, approved plan fell through and a new developer is back with an eight-story all residential proposal that is getting positive vibrations from the Planning Commission according to the Daily Journal piece:

A proposed eight-story north Burlingame apartment building with 311 units received a mostly positive review from the city’s Planning Commission this week, advancing the plans to replace a vacant building at 1766 El Camino Real.  The project would include 37 studio units, 137 one-bedroom units, 120 two-bedroom units and 17 three-bedroom units.  The (22) affordable units would be provided in exchange for the building’s density exceeding that otherwise allowed by the city, per the state’s density bonus law. The law in this case allows the developer to add 72 units on top of the maximum allowed by local zoning.

That seems like a deal.  I'll do the math here.  That mixture equals 465 bedrooms and a bunch of baths.  Then we read

The 504,000-square-foot project would occupy a 1.7-acre parcel, with a partially below ground two-story parking garage providing 319 spots.

Just by chance I was talking to a neighbor of the Summerhill development now known as the Anson Apartments on Carolan who recalled how the neighbors were told there would be no overflow parking problems.  Well, that hasn't played out too well.  The single-family neighborhood around Toyon, Linden, Azalea, etc is apparently learning differently to their distress.

But it's not just parking.  One wonders if the parents and future parents of kids at Franklin school are paying attention?  Is BSD paying attention to this and all the other projects moving forward in Buildingame?  Does anyone know of a portable classroom company I can buy stock in?  Let's all keep these hulking monsters in mind when we are told to skip a few showers and stop watering our lawns.  I choose not to participate in the Collective Amnesia.  Here's a rendering of the proposed building that some seem to think is Eichler-esque.

Park Rd. Progress

We have always tracked major developments in town here at the Voice.  The Safeway project even has its own category on the right frame.  So the two huge projects in "Buildingame" on Park Rd. -  the old Post Office Sares Regis project and the subsidized housing project merit some recorded history.  The former is well into the dirt and digging for the underground parking should start soon.  The latter is rising like a behemoth behind the single story spaces on Howard.  Who knew those three blocks between Howard and Bayswater would epitomize Buildingame with the new parking structure and the subsidized housing project.  Three years from now we will look back at what once was.