How many Eichler neighbourhoods are there?

Roughly forty subdivisions, holding about 11,000 houses, overwhelmingly in the Bay Area with three Southern California communities, a handful in Sacramento, and three houses in Chestnut Ridge, New York. Neither the tract count nor the house count is exact — Eichler Network, the most authoritative source on the subject, says plainly that no one has a precise tally.

What is the largest Eichler neighbourhood?

The San Mateo Highlands, with roughly 740 homes, is the largest single tract. Construction began in 1955 and ran to about 1964, which means it spans nearly the whole architectural range — early flat-roofed houses through the atrium models to the late large ones, plus the X-100 steel house and Belluschi's Life House.

About forty subdivisions

Eleven thousand houses, and Burlingame has about a hundred of them.

Which is roughly nine-tenths of one per cent of everything Eichler built. That is the context for every other page on this site: Mills Estate is not a small corner of a famous tract, it is one of the smallest tracts there is, and it is the reason nobody has written a book about it.

A caution about every number here

House counts for Eichler tracts are estimates, not censuses, including ours. Nobody — not Eichler Network, not the archives — holds a parcel-level list. Treat these as orders of magnitude.

A cream-painted two-storey Eichler in Burlingame, with stacked vertical-boarded volumes, a clerestory band on the upper floor, a shed roof over an open carport with a lamp post, and a walled entry court to the left. — **A two-storey Eichler, in Burlingame.** Nothing in the published record on this tract mentions two-storey models, which makes this photograph evidence rather than decoration. Note what it does **not** do: it does not put a bedroom over the living room and call it a day. The upper volume is stepped back and broken into boxes, the clerestory band carries round it, and the whole upper floor sits behind a low shed roof over an open carport — so from the kerb the house still reads horizontal.

The Peninsula

San Mateo County and the mid-Peninsula.

Tract	City	From	Note
San Mateo Highlands	San Mateo (unincorporated county)	1955	~740 houses — the largest single tract. Contains the X-100 steel house (1956) and Belluschi's Life House (1958). Compared →
Mills Estate	Burlingame	1963	~100 houses, built 1964–65. Claude Oakland. City jurisdiction. This site →
Stanford Gardens	Menlo Park	1949	A dozen houses. Where radiant heating was introduced.
Atherwood	Redwood City	1949–50	Early work.
Ladera	Portola Valley	1951–52	25 houses. Jones & Emmons' first built Eichler work.
Lindenwood	Atherton	1951–52	The upscale end — $42,500 to $49,500 when new.
Foster City	Foster City	1960s	Built on engineered fill, on flat reclaimed land. Compared →

The South Bay

Where it started.

Tract	City	From	Note
Sunnyvale Manor	Sunnyvale	1949	The first Eichler tract — 36 houses, April 1949. Phase two is where post-and-beam arrives.
Sunnymount Gardens	Sunnyvale	1949	36 houses. First use of the “Eichler Homes” name.
University Gardens	Palo Alto	1949	50+ houses — Josina, Kendall, Barron.
Green Gables	Palo Alto	1950	“Subdivision of the year.” National Register.
Fairmeadow	Palo Alto	1953	Where the second bathroom became standard.
Greenmeadow	Palo Alto	1954	First Eichler community centre, pool and nursery school. National Register.
Pomeroy West / Green	Santa Clara	1961	Townhouses.

East Bay, Marin, and beyond

Everywhere else.

Tract	Where	From	Note
Terra Linda	San Rafael, Marin	1955	National Register. Where Eichler went door to door in 1955 and offered to buy back the houses of anyone who objected to a Black neighbour. Nobody accepted.
Rancho San Miguel	Walnut Creek	1955	National Register.
South Land Park	Sacramento	1955	Only about 60 houses built.
Strawberry Point	Marin	late	Part of the late group with Burlingame and Walnut Grove.
Walnut Grove	Walnut Creek	late	Documented for its clipped gables — another late roof experiment, like Burlingame's folded plate.
Harbor Point	Marin	1964
Diamond Heights	San Francisco	1962	Two-storey row houses with atriums.
Thousand Oaks, Granada Hills, Orange	Southern California	1961–66	Two Granada Hills houses are Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments. Sources disagree on whether expansion began in 1961 or construction ran 1964–66.
Chestnut Ridge	Ramapo, New York	1962	140 acres bought, 216 houses planned, three built. No source we found explains why it failed.

Reading the list

The date tells you most of what you need to know.

1949–50 gets you the earliest work: small, around a thousand square feet, steel radiant tubing, and the transition from plan-book houses to architecture happening mid-tract.

1951–58 is the classic period — two bathrooms, aluminium sliders, the arrival of the atrium, and the experiments that produced the X-100 and the Life House.

1960–65 is Claude Oakland's era, and the houses get bigger, the roofs get stranger, and the plan vocabulary expands into galleries, loggias and entry courts. Burlingame sits here, at the end of it.

What late means for the house you own → · Burlingame, the Highlands and Foster City, compared →

Talk to us

Looking outside Burlingame?

We sell Eichlers across the Peninsula and we keep sites like this one for several of these tracts. Tell us which you are considering and we will tell you what the trade-offs actually are.