Nearly 500 housing units pitched for South Fremont BART station

The longtime owners of nearly 10 acres adjacent to the Warm Springs/South Fremont BART station have big plans for the land.

They have proposed building nearly 500 multifamily units and townhomes on Lopes Road and Warm Springs Boulevard, about a block from each other, according to plans submitted Aug. 17 by their agent, Arizona-based firm Land Advisors.

The two sites are owned by LLCs affiliated with the James W. Lopes, a former Fremont resident who died in 2019. Steve Reilly of Land Advisors is a contact for the LLCs.

The plans call for:

• 212 multifamily units and 64 townhomes on 6.7 acres at 44690 Lopes Road, now site of a single-family home.
• 213 multifamily units on 2.9 acres at 45021 Warm Springs Blvd., now a vacant site.

Land Advisors declined to comment, instead referring to the preliminary proposals submitted to the city. Both pre-applications indicated they would utilize Senate Bill 330, which provides an expedited path to approval for eligible residential projects. No formal development application has yet been submitted; The city of Fremont could not immediately be reached for comment Monday.

The two developments would raise hundreds of homes on land just a few minutes’ walk from the Warm Springs/South Fremont BART station, which has been at the center of the area’s commercial and residential boom since it was opened in 2017. Fremont has sought to transform the Warm Springs District, to the city’s south, into a jobs and housing hub: It has been working alongside employers and developers in the region to bring more than 20,000 new jobs and 4,000 new homes online.

The area is already home to employers such as Tesla, which maintains its 5.3 million-square-foot Fremont factory in the region, where it employs nearly 22,000, according to the company’s website; data storage device manufacturer Western Digital, which leases nearly 300,000 square feet there; and Thermo Fisher Scientific, which opened a major facility nearby Tesla’s in 2014.

Over the last few months, I’ve reported on younger companies like Our Next Energy, an electric vehicle battery manufacturer, and Bloom Energy, a clean energy company, that have made commitments to the area.

A big part of Warm Spring’s growth has been Lennar’s master-planned project there: The Miami-based homebuilder received approval to raise more than 2,200 homes and 1.4 million square feet of commercial space on 111 acres in Warm Springs in 2015. Lennar has progressed through several phases of the project — some homes are already occupied, while others are listed for pre-sale on the developer’s website. Lennar said previously it expects to complete the final phases of its project in 2026.