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The ongoing effort to reshape San Ramon’s Bishop Ranch into a central downtown area for the city as part of officials’ vision for the neighborhood’s future as a “10-minute city” is the latest in a series of transformations seen by the property over generations, including earlier incarnations as an agricultural hub and a sprawling business park hosting high-profile tenants.
As San Ramon Valley historian and retired public official Beverly Lane noted in a recent interview with DanvilleSanRamon.com, the 500+ acre property in central San Ramon has come to be known in recent years simply as Bishop Ranch — dropping the “Office Park” part of the title it was known as throughout the 1980s and 1990s — in what is both a throwback to its more than 150-year history as well as being a sign of things to come.
While the shift from business park to modern downtown area in the growing city is the latest and most visible change in the property’s recent history, the area has long been the site of debate and various visions for its future — with housing and a centralized mixed-use neighborhood on the table for Bishop Ranch going back to before its days as an office park.
What’s in a name?
The title of “Bishop Ranch” can be traced back to nearly a century before the site’s office park days, with a 960-acre portion of the former Norris Rancho being acquired by attorney Thomas Bishop as payment for his services in an early divorce case between Leo and Mary Jane Norris in 1891.
Bishop went on to diversify the property’s agricultural offerings from livestock, including the development of pear and walnut orchards — taking advantage of the area’s existing irrigation system and the overall favorable climate in the region for growing fruit trees, with the area going on to be reported as hosting the world’s largest Bartlett pear orchard by the 1940s.
“The ranch itself was quite an extraordinary ranch,” Lane said. “It was large. If you were ever going to talk about ranching the Valley, Bishop Ranch would be a topic. You would have Bishop Ranch, Wiedemann Ranch, Wood Ranch, Stone Ranch.”
“It was one of the few areas that did have access to water, so it could irrigate, whereas other ranches were all dry-farmed,” Lane continued. “The ranch was a demonstration of good management, and you would call it a diversified ranch, because they grew things, they had sheep, they had cattle.”
Previously, the Bishop Ranch site and surrounding Norris Rancho — which encompassed most of San Ramon — had been used primarily as grazing land since 1797, when it was first occupied by Spanish colonists from Mission San Jose. The Norris family purchased their 4,450-acre rancho, including the 960 acres paid to Bishop, from José Maria Amador in 1851.
However, the history of agriculture in the area and surrounding San Ramon Valley can be traced back even further, to the pre-Spanish era, when what is now known as Bishop Ranch was situated between the lands of the Souyen and Suinen Ohlone tribes, whose traditions of living off the range of native wildlife and plants in the San Ramon watershed date back as far as human history in the region.
Three villages were identified when Spaniards saw the area for the first time in the late 18th century, who were eyeing it as a potential mission site before ultimately occupying it for grazing lands. Following the Mexican-American War and the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th century, a new settlement would begin to form in the San Ramon Valley, spurred further by the inception of the railroad along what is now the Iron Horse Regional Trail and its stops in both Danville and the San Ramon Valley.
The development of a new community less than a century after the displacement of its original inhabitants, as well as Bishop Ranch’s success as a site for a range of agricultural opportunities beyond livestock grazing, were both “new” for their time, but with roots dating back much further — a tradition that appears to be ongoing in the evolution of Bishop Ranch, whose time as an actual ranch was just a blip on the radar of the area’s history under Spanish and early U.S. control.
The budding of a ‘model city’
Following the peak of the orchards developed on the site under Bishop’s ownership in the 1940s, the now-defunct Western Electric Company would go on to purchase the property — and present the earliest concepts for housing development — in 1955, originally with the goal of housing a power plant but proceeding to pursue a concept for a “model city” in the San Ramon Valley decades before San Ramon’s incorporation as a city in 1983.
“At a certain point — and a lot of it has to do with the freeway coming through — the freeway came to Sycamore Valley in 1964 and to Dublin in 1966,” Lane said. “And as a result of the freeway and the desire of people to develop, the assessor reassessed the ranch lands so that if their taxes were $1,000 they went to $10,000. They were no longer assessed as ag/ranch, they were assessed as their highest and best use was housing development. So in that period in the ’60s, few of the large ranches remained”
Officials with Contra Costa County and Western Electric, with significant input from the existing residents in the area, would go on to agree on a master plan for the proposed “model city,” with the goal of attracting more employers and workers to the area being central to the cause. In contrast with the present day, there was no housing shortage in the area, making that a low priority in the development of the early master plan.
“There was quite a discussion — huge discussion — and some of it was housing, but the rest of it was jobs,” Lane said. “So from the vantage point of what was happening in the Valley, people in Danville and San Ramon, which were the closest communities, were like, ‘We’ve got housing going in in spades, so this should be jobs.’ So there was support for this master plan.”
“Then Western Electric had some new technology come in and they didn’t need the amount of property that they had, and they were willing to sell it,” Lane continued.
Mehran family history
This background would go on to pose an obstacle to Sunset Development Company founder Masud Mehran, who began his development career and the company by building and selling five homes in 1951 — for $10,000 each — near Second and Q streets in Livermore, just outside what is now Stanford Health Care’s Valley Memorial Center.
Mehran’s operations would expand throughout Livermore from there, with Sunset Development going on to generate $109 million in profit by 1975. However, the company’s dominance in Livermore’s housing market was facing pushback, with the burgeoning environmental movement in the 1970s as well as concerns from neighboring residents over rapid development in Livermore leading to the passage of a 1972 ballot measure to limit growth in the city.
Mehran and his son — Alex Mehran Sr., the father of Sunset Development’s current president and CEO Alex Mehran Jr. — would go on to seek greener pastures, figuratively and literally, with the purchase of Bishop Ranch from Western Electric in 1978, signifying the family development company’s shift away from Livermore.
Unbeknownst to the Mehrans at the time was the fact that existing community members in the San Ramon Valley had also fought, by and large, to allow for limited housing under the “model city” master plan approved for Western Electric — meaning that Sunset Development had new hurdles to contend with following their departure from Livermore.
“Since Masud was a housing developer at that point, they went to the county and said we want to change at least part of (the master plan) for housing,” Lane said. “And folks in the valley who were not shy — and evidently unlike in other parts of the county, paid attention to changes in development — got really upset.”
A major issue for residents opposing an increase in housing from what had been outlined in the master plan under Western Electric was that they had fought for the master plan to facilitate jobs rather than housing, with the Mehrans’ early ideas for the area failing to address that feedback.
At the direction of county officials, the Mehrans would go on to solicit their own feedback from community members.
Bishop Ranch Office Park
“I think the Mehrans had not had that experience before, so in some ways it was a shock to them,” Lane said. “But Masud really took the lead initially, and Alex supported him. What finally happened was Alex came to see that if they built some offices initially, that would be a way to get income — because they’d stretched to purchase it — so they took a risk, and got an architect, and built offices which filled up in a hot minute.”
Though an experiment for the Mehrans, the decision to create Bishop Ranch Office Park amid community calls for new jobs paid off in spades as corporations and the workforce grew throughout the 1980s, as did the need for office space.
“It was kind of an eye-opener for them,” Lane continued. “It was a new kind of development, and then two huge corporations were looking for new headquarters.”
By 1985, Bishop Ranch was home to global headquarters for Chevron and Pacific Bell, which alone brought thousands of employees to the San Ramon area. While the move came shortly after the successful vote to incorporate the city in 1983, Bishop Ranch was originally left out of the city limits in the original boundaries approved, only later going on to be merged with the city.
“I think that Masud and Alex were very smart and very creative,” Lane said. “And sometimes people don’t think about that with developers — they have a knee-jerk reaction.”
By the 1990s, Bishop Ranch consisted of 10 million square feet of office, retail and lodging space, anchored by 1.8 million-square-foot Pacific Bell headquarters at 2600 Bishop Ranch and the 92-acre Chevron Park campus at Bishop Ranch 1.
Evolving with the 21st century
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued proliferation of remote work — and amid soaring real estate costs — the demand for sprawling office spaces such as those hosted at Bishop Ranch at the peak of business park days has dramatically reduced.
Meanwhile, the Bay Area and state at large are now in the throes of a housing shortfall — a reverse of the circumstances that led to the development of the office park in the late 1970s and ’80s.
But changes were already underway at Bishop Ranch before the pandemic.
City Center, aimed at serving as a central community gathering and shopping space and the anchor of a still evolving central downtown area, opened its doors to the public in late 2018.
Sunset Development has also purchased back some Bishop Ranch sites from businesses downsizing their headquarters, first Pac Bell — which would become AT&T in the early 2000s — at 2600 Bishop Ranch in 2013, during which the company agreed to lease back a smaller portion of space, then Chevron in 2022 in a similar deal, in which the energy giant downsized its operations and Sunset reacquired the Chevron Park campus.
Alex Mehran Jr., the current president and CEO of Sunset Development, has overseen much of this evolution in the 21st century, having joined the company in 2009 before taking the reins as CEO from his father in 2019.
“After the tech bust, there was a series of things that happened in the 2000s,” Mehran Jr. said in an interview with DanvilleSanRamon during a media tour of Bishop Ranch, from within the former AT&T offices. “There was a whole sort of telecom bust separate from the dot-com meltdown. There was a mortgage crisis in 2008, 2009. So there were a lot of things that really impacted demand here.”
Mehran Jr. said that his father had begun envisioning the area as a downtown for San Ramon starting in 2007.
“So we knew where we were going,” Mehran Jr. said. “But it was cool to get to that point because we could work together sort of figuring out how to take what is an industry-leading office park and make it into a great suburban downtown.”
“Today, 15 years later we’re seeing everything that’s going on and it’s really happening, and to have this project open with all the community coming through, you really see that it’s mixing together and becoming a place that people love, not just to go to work but to do a lot of other stuff,” he added.
That vision started growing closer to fruition in 2020, following the debut of City Center the previous year and the approval of Sunset Development’s CityWalk Master Plan by the San Ramon City Council — meaning the company had alternative plans already underway ahead of the ongoing aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amid a range of new projects in recent years (including the Belmont Village Senior living facility now under construction across from City Center and the 404-unit City Village development by SummerHill Homes with units now on the market), the most significant so far is the redevelopment of the former Chevron Park site into a mixed use neighborhood including 2,250 new housing units and 125,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space.
Called The Orchards, the project in concept and in name is a throwback both to Sunset’s early days in homebuilding under Mehran Jr.’s grandfather, as well as the area’s agricultural history under Bishop.
Modern-day demands
Not everyone in San Ramon is happy about the planned redevelopment of Bishop Ranch, with the Planning Commission and City Council regularly receiving public comments raising concerns about issues such as traffic congestion, water use, impacts on schools, and the environmental costs of development.
Additionally, some longtime city residents are dismayed with the rapid redevelopment and changes to the neighborhood, having been attracted to the city for its slower pace of life than other Bay Area hubs and community feel.
And like any developments in the city, projects in Bishop Ranch are subject to the fine-toothed scrutiny of the San Ramon Planning Commission and City Council, the former of which regularly holds lengthy study sessions and meetings combing through the details of proposed projects and providing extensive feedback.
At their June 18 meeting, planning commissioners reviewed a proposed 457-unit apartment complex in Bishop Ranch from Avalon Bay Communities. The live meeting yielded just one public comment from San Ramon resident Max Zhang, whose concerns were in stark contrast with those raised by residents when the Mehrans first brought Sunset Development to the Valley.
“I am happy to support a five- and seven-story multifamily project in San Ramon’s core, since the Bay Area’s housing crisis has never been more severe and we do need more dense infill multifamily housing, instead of single-family sprawl out in the hills like the house and neighborhood I spent 15 years growing up in,” said Zhang, who moved to Windemere Ranch with his family in 2007. “However, I am quite disappointed by some of the changes made to the project compared to the CityWalk Master Plan.”
While the environmental impact report prepared for Sunset Development’s master plan had studied the potential for 543 housing units at the site and up to 791 overall for the Bishop Ranch 3A neighborhood, the final plans being moved forward by Avalon Bay are well below that number, meanwhile including a generous number of parking spaces.
“I am disappointed by the loss of 86 units from 543 in the master plan to 457 in the current plan,” Zhang said. “I’m confused by the project offering 99 than required — 662 instead of the 563 required under the state density bonus provisions. San Ramon does not need more parking. I say that as a driver. It makes no sense to provide more housing for cars instead of more housing for people.”
“I’m not really sure how the project demonstrates compliance with the City Center quote ‘mixed-use zoning’ when it provides only 11,400 square feet of amenities which will be resident serving and I’m sure most of which cannot be retail — like a courtyard with a pool — I don’t know how that qualifies as mixed-use,” Zhang continued.
Unlike the 1980s, the housing market is on the side of Masud Mehran’s early vision for housing development in the area in the present day.
With Bishop Ranch still hosting companies that employ 30,000 people, bringing jobs to the city is no longer a major priority, but housing is — with state legislation aimed at facilitating housing developments and reducing obstacles for housing developers. Critiques of redevelopment projects in Bishop Ranch in the present day instead often focus on the minimal number of affordable housing units being built, as well as a broad definition of mixed-use zoning in the city overall.
“We still have 1,988 low- and very-low-income units to build,” Zhang said. “I don’t know why we lost 86 units and a potential maybe dozen or so low income units by accepting a smaller amount of units for this project. I sincerely believe that if San Ramon allows the rest of the CityWalk Master Plan to be built out like this with fewer units, more parking spaces, a lack of retail and affordability only to high income households, CityWalk will fail to meet its stated goals of creating a ‘vibrant, mixed-use, transit oriented district,’ providing ‘much needed affordable and workforce housing.'”
Nonetheless, the commission voted — with two commissioners absent that night — unanimously to approve the project with some amendments to the conditions of approval on June 18, paving the way for Avalon Bay to file development applications and continue pursuing the project.
Even amid ambitious redevelopment plans that include a vision for a total of 9,000 housing units in Bishop Ranch, the area continues to function as a base of operations for numerous companies and employees — exemplified again just last week when City Center welcomed a pet-friendly co-working space and dog training facility called The Hub.
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