Presidio Bay's $1B Menlo Park Village Takes Shape on Former USGS Campus

• Presidio Bay releases new renderings for its 17.75-acre Menlo Park redevelopment
• The build: 670 homes and 713,000 SF of offices across seven buildings, plus a sports court and a two-story pavilion
• Presidio Bay paid $137M, or $332 per square foot, for the former federal campus at auction last year
• The project would deliver nearly a quarter of Menlo Park's state-mandated housing target

Presidio Bay Ventures has put a face on its 17.75-acre urban village at 345 Middlefield Road, releasing updated renderings for a project that would turn a shuttered U.S. Geological Survey campus into nearly 700 homes and three-quarters of a million square feet of offices.

The San Francisco-based developer filed the new plans this month, San Francisco YIMBY and the San Francisco Business Times reported. The look has shifted since the last round: warmer, redwood-complementing materials in place of the original palette. The three seven-story residential buildings get travertine tile, brick veneer, cast-in-place concrete and warm-toned metal. The four office buildings get terracotta panels, copper-tone and silver metal, and mass timber.

What Presidio Bay paid, and what it's building

Presidio Bay bought the 412,700-square-foot campus at a federal auction last year for $137 million, or $332 per square foot, taking down 16 former government buildings, including a 20,000-square-foot lab once occupied by the USGS.

In their place: 670 apartments and townhouse-style units totaling 779,050 square feet, split between 10 studios, 345 one-bedrooms, 188 two-bedrooms, 46 three-bedrooms and 81 townhouses. A third of the units, 118 of them, are set aside as affordable. The four office buildings add 713,000 square feet across five and six stories, with 43,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, a 10,800-square-foot childcare center and three acres of public open space woven between a 1.5-acre central meadow, pocket parks, a dog park and two larger lawns. Parking runs to 1.5 million square feet: 1,751 spaces for office and retail users, 805 for residents and 1,259 bicycle spots.

Gensler is overseeing the architecture, Gehl the masterplan, RG-Architecture the residential buildings and Studio MLA the landscaping. No construction timeline has been set, but Presidio Bay has said the multiphase build could top $1 billion.

A Middlefield Road corridor getting crowded

Presidio Bay isn't the only developer remaking this stretch of Menlo Park. The site sits directly across Middlefield Road from Saint Patrick's Seminary and abuts SRI International's headquarters, where Lane Partners is running its own overhaul of the 64-acre Parkline campus. Lane Partners' latest filing trades office space for housing too, cutting commercial square footage to 900,000 and pushing units up to 1,082 as SRI plans to vacate the site entirely. The high-density proposal at 80 Willow Road sits a ten-minute walk away, and Menlo Park's Caltrain station is nine minutes by bus.

Presidio Bay already has a foothold a mile from the site: Springline, its $245 million, 6.4-acre urban village at 1300-1302 El Camino Real and 550 Oak Grove Avenue in downtown Menlo Park, which the firm sold out. It has also filed plans for 347 more units downtown. Founded in 2012 by Sanandaji, Presidio Bay now holds 5.8 million square feet of residential, life sciences and office projects across eight states, valued at $5.4 billion.

What's next

The 345 Middlefield project still needs city approval, and Presidio Bay hasn't disclosed a groundbreaking date. If it gets built as drawn, it would account for nearly a quarter of the 2,946 homes Menlo Park must plan for under its state housing mandate, the largest single piece of that target now on the table.