If Gilead Sciences, whose existing Foster City campus already spans about 72 acres, just won approval to demolish a dozen buildings and build up to 800,000 square feet of new lab space along the lagoon, why hasn't a single home listing in Foster City mentioned it?
Part of the answer is that this exact site already carried nearly the same approval once before, years before Gilead ever owned it. Nothing came of it. No demolition, no construction, no buildings. For over a decade, the entitlement sat on paper while the site kept functioning as a collection of low-rise office buildings. On July 20, 2026, the Foster City City Council voted to approve a new version of the project under City Ordinance No. 700, with council members Jimenez, Niederhofer, Sullivan and Venkat joining Mayor Kiesel in the unanimous yes. The question worth asking before you read anything else about jobs and housing demand is whether this round is different from the last one, and what a buyer or seller in Foster City right now should actually do with that information.
What Got Approved, and What Got Approved Before
The current project is known as the Chess-Hatch Master Plan, and it covers 1155, 1165 and 1185 Chess Drive, about twelve acres that Gilead has owned since it purchased the site roughly a decade ago. The new ordinance strips office use out of the plan entirely and locks the site into research and development space only, up to a maximum of 800,000 square feet, built in two phases.
Phase One tears down eight of the twelve existing buildings, a little more than 123,000 square feet of aging commercial space, and replaces them with a single two-story building of up to 200,000 square feet. Phase Two removes the remaining four buildings and adds up to 600,000 square feet across multiple structures, along with a parking garage. Trade press coverage of the project has pointed to a first move-in by the end of 2028.
Compare that to what the site already had on the books years earlier. The city had granted a General Development Plan under Ordinance No. 573 allowing up to 800,000 square feet of office, biotech or R&D use on this same twelve acres, and in April 2014 the Planning Commission approved a follow-on plan to demolish nine of the buildings then on site and build 600,000 square feet of office space across two towers. None of it broke ground. Gilead bought the entitled parcel in the mid-2010s, reportedly paying around $120 million for the twelve acres according to trade press coverage, and the approval sat unused for another decade until the company came back this year with an entirely new plan. The lesson for anyone reading market headlines about Foster City is straightforward. An approved development is a legal ceiling, not a delivery date. The gap between the two, on this exact site, ran more than ten years.
| 2013-2014 Approval | 2026 Approval | |
|---|---|---|
| Site | 1155-1191 Chess Drive, 12 acres | Same parcel |
| Square footage ceiling | Up to 800,000 SF | Up to 800,000 SF |
| Approved use | Office, biotech or R&D mix | R&D only, office removed |
| Construction plan | 600,000 SF office in two towers; 9 buildings slated for demolition | 200,000 SF Phase One; up to 600,000 SF Phase Two; all 12 current buildings demolished across both phases |
| Outcome | Never built | Phase One pending, first move-in targeted by end of 2028 |
Why This Round Reads Differently
The structural difference this time sits in who is paying for it. The 2013-2014 entitlement was a general approval the original owner could have shopped to any tenant or simply held as an option, and for a decade it appears no one exercised it. The 2026 version has Gilead Sciences listed as its own project applicant, redeveloping a site it already owns rather than waiting for a third party to make the numbers work. Associate director of project management Josh Hunter described the goal at a related Gilead campus filing nearby as expanding the company's research capacity to support its biologics work, language that points to a use case Gilead intends to occupy itself rather than lease out.
Council member Stacy Jimenez, who was serving as mayor at the time, pushed for the project to move "with all expediency" during a June 2025 council discussion, a comment aimed at avoiding a repeat of the decade-long delay. That kind of pressure from elected officials doesn't guarantee a 2028 opening, but it does suggest the political appetite for another dormant entitlement is low.
The ordinance also attaches conditions that are harder to shelve than a floor plan. The city required Gilead to include a gateway landscape amenity at the corner of Chess Drive and Foster City Boulevard and to activate the adjacent lagoon edge with a pathway usable by employees, subject to design approval from the Community Development Director. Conditions like these get built into site plans and construction permits, which makes them a weaker candidate for indefinite postponement than a general entitlement ceiling.
The Money That Moves Before the Buildings Do
Separate from the square footage, the Chess-Hatch approval carries a little more than $20 million in developer impact fees payable to the city, with the majority earmarked for the city's affordable housing funds. That detail matters more to the housing conversation than the lab space itself. Foster City already runs a below market rate housing program with more than 400 regulated units across seven privately owned apartment complexes, and the city has separately said it will issue a Notice of Funding Availability for affordable housing developers with nearly $3 million available this year. A $20 million infusion tied to one project is a meaningful addition to that pipeline, and it starts moving through the city's books well before any lab technician moves into a new building.
That is the part of this story that a headline about "3,000 jobs coming to Foster City" tends to skip. The fee money is closer to certain than the jobs are. The jobs depend on Gilead's hiring plans holding steady through 2028 and beyond. The fee payment is a condition of the permit itself.
What This Means for Foster City Prices Right Now
Here is where the entitlement history should shape how you read current numbers. Over the three months ending in April 2026, Foster City homes sold at a median price of $1.6 million, up 8.1 percent from the same period a year earlier, with the typical listing drawing about three offers and going pending in around 14 days. Separately, average home values across the city sat near $1.86 million as of June 2026, down about 1 percent year over year. Those two figures moving in different directions in the same window is not a contradiction so much as a sign that Foster City's market is being pulled by ordinary supply and rate conditions right now, not by anticipation of a biotech build-out that is still two years from its first move-in.
That is consistent with what the site's own history teaches. Nothing in the current sales data suggests buyers are pricing in Gilead's expansion, because the physical proof that this round is different from the 2013-2014 entitlement only exists in permits and a July 2026 council vote, not in cranes on Chess Drive. A buyer weighing whether to pay a premium now on the assumption that thousands of new high earners are about to compete for the same inventory is getting ahead of a timeline the city's own construction schedule doesn't support yet. A seller who assumes the opposite, that nothing has changed and the market will behave exactly as it has, is ignoring that this is the first time in over a decade this entitlement has moved from paper toward an actual demolition permit.
The realistic read sits between those two positions. Phase One's 200,000 square feet, if it proceeds on the timeline described in city filings, brings a meaningful but not overwhelming amount of new lab capacity online well before Phase Two's larger 600,000 square feet. Any hiring tied to that space would ramp in stages over multiple years, not arrive as a single shock to local housing demand. If you are timing a purchase or a listing around this project, the more useful question is not "did Gilead just make Foster City more valuable" but "which phase are we actually in, and how far away is it from delivering people who need somewhere to live."
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Act
Does the $20 million impact fee affect my property tax bill? No. Developer impact fees are a one-time payment tied to the project's permit, separate from the annual property tax assessment on individual homes.
Will Chess Drive traffic or noise change before construction even starts? Demolition and site prep typically begin once permits are finalized and a contractor is engaged, which follows the ordinance approval. Watching the city's project page for permit issuance is a better real-time indicator than watching for hiring announcements.
When would new Gilead jobs actually show up as local housing demand? Based on the phasing described in city records, Phase One's building isn't expected to be move-in ready before roughly 2028, and Phase Two's larger buildout would follow after that. Any hiring tied to the new space would layer in after occupancy, not before.
Foster City has been here before with this exact site, and the outcome last time was a decade of nothing. This time carries real signals that it's different, a self-funded builder, a firm phasing plan, and fee money already flowing to the city. None of that means the housing market has caught up, and that gap between what's approved and what's actually reflected in home prices is exactly the kind of detail worth having someone local walk you through before you make an offer or set a list price.
If you're weighing a purchase or sale in Foster City and want a clear read on how developments like this actually intersect with timing, Julie Flouty can walk you through what the data supports today and what's still just a permit on paper.
