Burlingame Eichlers / Three tracts compared
San Mateo County · three concentrations
Same county. Same builder. Almost nothing in common.
A ridge at four hundred and sixty-nine feet with no government to speak of. A hilltop inside a city that reviews your paint. And two hundred houses scattered across a lagoon city built on dredged sand, where every exterior change goes through a city planning permit. If you are choosing, this is the page.
Counts for all three are soft, and we would rather show you the softness than average it away. Every row that has a conflict behind it is footnoted underneath the table.
The table.
| Mills Estate Burlingame |
The Highlands San Mateo |
Three tracts Foster City | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eichlers | ~100 | ~650–700+ | ~200–235 |
| Built | 1963–65 | mid-1950s–1964 | 1963–68 |
| Ground | Ridge, hillside lots, bay views east | Ridge at 469 ft, watershed on three sides | Engineered fill over Brewer Island, ~8 ft above sea level |
| Verified sizes | 2,135–2,440 sq ft | ~1,800–2,200 sq ft | ~1,940–2,000 sq ft |
| Lots | 7,840–15,200 sq ft | Varies with the grade | ~5,580–10,000 sq ft |
| Architects | Claude Oakland; Jones & Emmons | Anshen & Allen; Jones & Emmons; Claude Oakland | Claude Oakland (FC‑); John Brooks Boyd (FB‑) |
| Documented plans | None | SM-3, SM-4, SM-54, SM-100/104/114/124/134/223, 101, 1414 ALT, 1454 | FC-13, FC-23, FB-4, FB-4S |
| Surviving brochures | None found | Seven — four on archive.org, three held privately | One, scanned privately |
| Government | City of Burlingame | Unincorporated San Mateo County | City of Foster City |
| Exterior changes | City residential design review | Nothing. No overlay, no guidelines, no district | City planning permit on almost every change — rules in transition |
| HOA | None found | None | None on the Eichlers |
| Eichler laid it out? | No — Trousdale, 1954 | Yes | No — T. Jack Foster's master plan |
| Schools | Burlingame Elementary; San Mateo Union High | San Mateo–Foster City; San Mateo Union High | San Mateo–Foster City; San Mateo Union High |
Where the numbers are soft, and why:
- Burlingame ~100 — Eichler Network's figure, repeated everywhere, never derived from parcel records. Why we hedge it.
- Highlands 650–700+ — Eichler Network says about 650; SAH Archipedia and Wikipedia say over 700. Both are printed on our San Mateo site because we cannot settle it.
- Foster City 200–235 — 200 is the figure attached to on-the-record reporting; 235 appears only on agent and registry sites. We publish the range.
- Foster City dates — 1963–68 per Eichler Network. The “1964–1966” seen on several sites is wrong at both ends: sales began in 1963 and the Marina Point cluster runs later still.
- Sizes — all three are small samples of individually verified houses, not tract medians. Treat as indicative.
The thing nobody puts in a table
Ground decides more than architecture does.
Two of these tracts are on ridges and one is on dredged sand, and that single fact drives most of the differences below it.
On a ridge the lots come out uneven, the houses get oriented to a view, split levels and stepped pads become possible, and the street grid bends to the contour. Burlingame's lots run from seven thousand eight hundred square feet to fifteen thousand two hundred. The Highlands produced the only two-storey Eichlers in the county — eight of them, on one street, because the ground left no choice.
On fill everything is flat, so the plan has to do all the work. Foster City's Eichlers are uniformly single-storey on slab, with no view siting available — and that is plausibly why the plan variations there got so inventive. One Foster City model has an atrium surrounded on all sides by interior space rather than opening to the front. An owner's description: “It's like a fish bowl.”
That flat-versus-hillside reading is our observation. We could not find a published source drawing the comparison, so take it as an argument rather than a citation.
If you are choosing
What each one is actually for.
Burlingame · ~100
Scarcity and size
The largest Eichlers of the three and by far the fewest. Roughly one per cent of the county's Eichler stock. A city that reviews design, schools in two well-regarded districts, and a ridge with a bay view. If you want the biggest Eichler and can wait for one of a hundred houses to trade, this is the tract.
San Mateo · 650–700+
Choice and freedom
Enough houses that something is always for sale, the deepest documentary record of any Eichler tract anywhere, and a county jurisdiction with no design review at all. Also the only two-storeys, and the X-100.
Foster City · 200–235
Water and rules
Lagoon frontage, the flattest ground in the county, a FEMA-accredited levee, and the strictest exterior control of the three — every change against a filed city planning permit. Also the best civil-rights story in Peninsula housing.
Talk to us
Deciding between the three?
We sell in all of them, which means we have no reason to talk you into one. Tell us what you actually need — size, schools, how much you intend to change the house — and we will tell you which ridge or which lagoon it points at.