Developers plan to replace the mall with the Speedway at Bayfair, a 400,000-square-foot redevelopment project at the former shopping epicenter at East 14th Street and Hesperian Boulevard that will offer research and development space for Bay Area tech companies.
It’s the latest example of how the Bay Area’s huge commercial spaces, once packed with chain stores and food courts when malls ruled the shopping landscape, are being reimagined in the post-Amazon age.
“It’s been great because the project has a ton of good infrastructure,” said Steve Kapp, Speedway’s project manager and B3 Investors’ executive managing director. “When I say that, I mean it has very heavy amounts of power there and tons of air conditioning. Those two things are key for cooling in R&D spaces.”
The Bayfair Mall opened in 1957; built for $25 million, it boasted more than 80 stores at its peak and was able to accommodate 15,000 cars in its parking lot, according to an Aug. 8, 1957 San Francisco Examiner article on the store’s opening. The mall once featured leading American department stores like Macy’s, Target and Kohl’s.
But Bayfair has watched those stores close over the past decade—as did other once-popular Bay Area shopping centers, including the Hilltop Mall in Richmond and the Vallco Shopping Mall in Cupertino, which have closed as online retail grew to dominate the retail marketplace, making trips to department stores in malls obsolete.
In July 2022, the Bayfair Mall’s owner, Madison Marquette, along with affiliate Newmark, sold the 42-acre property for $57 million to B3 Investors with plans to redevelop the aging shopping center.
The mall’s interior officially closed in early 2023, but the loss of Macy’s in April 2024 – a store that had been a tenant since the mall opened in 1957 – marked a turning point as developers focused on creating a new iteration of the property.
“Looking at as closing down a mall is not the right way to look at that property,” said Nancy Wallace, a UC Berkeley professor of real estate and sustainability.
Wallace has turned Bayfair into a literal textbook example of what is happening to former malls—she uses the Speedway redevelopment project as a model for her students to learn about adaptive reuse, turning empty storefronts into homes, labs and startups.
Wallace said dead malls across the Bay Area and beyond are finding new life as redevelopment projects that seek to address a new set of community needs such as housing, transit-oriented development and office space for emerging industries.
“This is a huge effort to build a great deal of housing, including workforce housing. The core lab is part of the economic motivation for all of this,” Wallace said. “The fact that they have already redeveloped the Macy’s site with paying tenants and turned those empty comic book stores into high functioning tech space filled with Stanford and Berkeley PhDs is amazing.”
In the South Bay, the city of Cupertino agreed in July with the owners of the Vallco Mall property to permit the construction of 2,700 housing units, with about a third set aside for affordable housing. And Prologis, a San Francisco-based real estate company that owns Hilltop Mall in Richmond, hopes to create a data center, a transportation hub and hundreds of housing units in collaboration with the city’s specific plan to redevelop the 145-acre area around the mall.
The opening of Speedway at Bayfair will also work in coordination with San Leandro’s Bay Fair Transit Oriented Development plan. The city of San Leandro aims to leverage 150-acres surrounding the Bayfair BART station to foster a mixed-use community, create public spaces and enable a “range of development scenarios,” according to Bayfair planning documents.
As stores left the Bayfair Mall, the city of San Leandro gained more leverage to create flexible zoning for mixed-use development that utilizes pre-existing transit lines, said San Leandro Assistant Community Development Director Avalon Schultz.
“We saw a chance to rezone and provide property to evolve away from strict mall uses,” Schultz said. “The Bayfair plan, in coordination with Alameda County, was really looking at how to build on this prime location next to BART and turn it into a mixed-use transit village.”
BART has already taken notice of the progress at Bayfair. A 2024 update to BART’s transit development plan showed the Bay Fair station was re-evaluated from a mid-term project to a short-term project, citing the Bay Fair station’s high rankings in development streamlining, market readiness for offices and development capacity.
Phase I of the Speedway at Bayfair is already complete, with numerous Bay Area biotech and green energy companies moving into 140,000 square feet of renovated office space, Kapp said. Charge Robotics, a green tech company specializing in automating solar installation, has moved into the former mall where residents used to purchase corndogs and bedazzled shirts.
“With Macy’s going out, that is part of the second phase, and that’s another 250,000 square feet available starting in 2025,” Kapp said. “I think it’s going to become a nice mixed-use project for innovative projects for companies that are seeking affordable space with lots of power.”
Developers have already reinvented one shopping mall in San Leandro called Gate 510, a 300,000-square-foot biotech campus on 1900 Davis St. While the projects have some similarities, Kapp said Speedway at Bayfair has more retail amenities that make the redevelopment project a true campus for the surrounding community.
“When B3 bought the mall in 2022, they had already proved they could be really creative with redeveloping properties in San Leandro because of their Gate510 site,” Schultz said. “It was exciting to see how they wanted to invest in the interior of the mall to create Speedway. This building has been changing and evolving over time. It’s never been one thing.”
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