Burlingame Eichlers / Timeline
1947 – 1974
Twenty-five years, about eleven thousand houses, one bankruptcy.
Everything below is dated from published sources — mostly Eichler Network's own timelines, which are the closest thing this subject has to a chronicle. Where sources conflict we say so rather than picking the tidier date.
Burlingame's place in it
1963 design, 1964–65 build. Late in the run, after Claude Oakland took the account, and in the same years the company's San Francisco buildings started losing money. Why late matters →
The beginning
1947 – 1955.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1947 | Sunnyvale Building Co. formed. Selling prefabricated houses. |
| 1949 | April: Sunnyvale Manor — 36 homes on N. Bayview Ave near Maude. The first Eichler tract. May: Sunnymount Gardens, another 36, and the first use of the “Eichler Homes” name in marketing. September: University Gardens, Palo Alto. Stanford Gardens, Menlo Park — a dozen houses, and radiant heating is introduced. About 300 houses that year, on standard plans. |
| 1949–50 | Anshen & Allen engaged to design the tract houses. Post-and-beam with glass walls arrives. This is the hinge: Eichler stops buying plans and starts buying architecture. |
| 1950 | Green Gables, Palo Alto, wins “subdivision of the year.” The first architect-designed prototype is described as 1,044 sq ft, T-shaped, redwood inside and out, at $9,400 — with 51 sold in a fortnight. Those figures are single-sourced to an advocacy site. |
| 1951–52 | Jones & Emmons join, first built at Ladera, Portola Valley. First split-level houses for sloping lots. Upscale work at Lindenwood, Atherton. |
| 1953 | A second bathroom is added to every plan, starting at Fairmeadow, Palo Alto. Aluminium sliding-door frames replace steel. |
| 1954 | Greenmeadow, Palo Alto — the first Eichler community centre, pool and nursery school. Matt Kahn, Ernie Braun and Ned Eichler all arrive. The first sale to a Black family, and the buy-back of the objecting neighbour's house. |
| 1955 | Expansion beyond the South Bay: Rancho San Miguel (Walnut Creek), Terra Linda (Marin), South Land Park (Sacramento), and construction begins in the San Mateo Highlands — around 740 houses, the largest single Eichler tract. Compared → |
The confident years
1956 – 1962.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1956 | The X-100 — an all-steel house by A. Quincy Jones with Frederick Emmons, completed in the San Mateo Highlands. 150,000 visitors in three months. Listed on the National Register in 2016. Also: Edgewood Plaza shopping centre, Palo Alto, and five duplexes with low-gabled roofs — the first departure from the flat roof. |
| 1957–58 | The atrium is developed and first produced in 1958. Who invented it is the most garbled fact in the Eichler literature — Anshen & Allen, Claude Oakland and A. Quincy Jones have all been credited. We are not picking. Atriums → |
| 1958 | The Life House by Pietro Belluschi, San Mateo Highlands, featured in Life. And the resignation from the NAHB over race. That story → |
| 1960 | Claude Oakland & Associates engaged directly — Oakland leaves Anshen & Allen and takes the Eichler account with him. Kinji Imada joins him the same year. Jonas Harschel joins Eichler Homes as sales manager — he will end up owning 8 Mariposa Court. Eichler testifies before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The company is building around 900 houses a year. |
| 1961 | Eichler Homes goes public. Townhouses in Santa Clara. Aaron Green's arrow-shaped houses for the Highlands. Laguna Heights breaks ground in San Francisco's Western Addition — the beginning of the end, though nobody knew it. Southern California expansion begins. |
| 1962 | Diamond Heights, San Francisco — two-storey row houses with atriums. The New York venture at Chestnut Ridge in the Town of Ramapo: 140 acres bought, 216 houses planned, three built. |
Burlingame's years
1963 – 1967.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1963 | The gallery is introduced — a Claude Oakland design, a roofed interior space distinct from the open-sky atrium. The Mills Estate drawings are dated to this year, and one of them, catalogued at UC Berkeley, is titled Mills Estate No. 19. The Burlingame tract opens for sale late in the year. The tract → |
| 1963–64 | The San Francisco rental market is weak and the first urban buildings complete into it. Eichler Network's account of the collapse names these exact years. The Burlingame houses are going up while this is happening, and nothing about them shows it. |
| 1964 | The Summit opens at 999 Green Street, with a penthouse for Joe and Lillian — and a cost overrun of around two million dollars. Harbor Point, Marin. Jordan Quad at Stanford. Publicly, a triumph year. |
| 1964–65 | Mills Estate, Burlingame, is built — about a hundred houses, 2,100 to 2,450 square feet, on the ridge above Trousdale Drive. |
| 1966 | Spring: Eichler is hospitalised. Ned reviews the assets and recommends Chapter 11. Joe refuses. In May, stock is transferred for promissory notes. |
| 1967 | Eichler Homes, Inc. files for bankruptcy. You will see 1965 given for this in one widely read place. The weight of the sources is 1966 crisis, 1967 filing. |
| 1967–74 | Eichler rebuilds smaller under J.L. Eichler Associates, Nonpareil Homes and Alsco Homes. Ned is involved in none of them. Joseph Eichler dies in July 1974. |
What the timeline will not tell you
Five dates everyone prints that we could not stand up.
How we tier sources → · Claims that do not survive checking →
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