Foster City

Welcome to Foster City

Foster City is San Mateo County's largest and oldest master-planned community, and it still shows. In the late 1950s, developer T. Jack Foster bought Brewer Island, at the time a marshy stretch used for dairy farming and salt evaporation ponds, with the intention of building a genuinely modern city from scratch. The first residents moved in on March 7, 1964; Charles Zerbe, a San Francisco firefighter, paid $23,500 for his five-bedroom house on Pilgrim Drive. Within a decade the city had incorporated with a population approaching 10,000. Today it's home to more than 30,000 people.

What makes Foster City distinct is the water. Jack Foster's plan wove engineered lagoons and canals through nearly every neighborhood, and a lot of homes back directly onto the water with their own small dock. It's not just for looks. You can rent an electric boat and cruise the four-mile main channel past Leo Ryan Park, the Metro Center towers, and Sea Cloud Park, and plenty of residents do exactly that on a summer evening.

Leo Ryan Park and the Foster City Recreation Center sit at the center of it all, on the Central Lagoon. Food trucks show up most evenings from March through October, there are free concerts in the park's amphitheater on summer Friday nights, and fireworks go off over the lagoon every Fourth of July. Add in 11 miles of the Bay Trail, a skate park, a dog park, and yearly events like the Arts and Wine Festival and Polynesian Festival, and it's a city built around actually using its outdoor space, not just looking at it.

Schools are one of the biggest draws for families. Foster City's elementary schools (Audubon, Brewer Island, and Foster City Elementary) are part of the San Mateo-Foster City School District and consistently rank among the strongest in the county, and Bowditch Middle School regularly places in the top 6% of California middle schools. High schoolers typically continue on to San Mateo or Hillsdale High in the Sequoia Union High School District.

The city is also still growing. New mixed-use development is underway at Pilgrim-Triton and Foster Square, which will eventually add over a thousand residential units along with retail, restaurants, and office space, a sign that Foster City's original master-planning ethos is still at work, more than 60 years later.

I've had more than a few clients tell me they didn't expect to fall for Foster City until they actually walked around it. The lagoons and the docks read very differently on a map than they do in person. If you're weighing waterfront living here against Redwood Shores or San Mateo, or trying to figure out which lagoon-front streets actually get direct sun, I'm glad to help you sort it out.

- Caroline