A developer is building 100 townhouses in a corner of Richmond, California, a relatively affordable pocket of the San Francisco Bay Area known for its industrial base.
City Ventures’ project, Cherry Blossom Row, is in a narrow section of the Richmond Annex neighborhood that has limited-access highways on both sides, providing easy access for commuters headed to nearby Berkeley and Oakland or across the bay to San Francisco. Some people buying homes in the new development might use Interstate 80, which merges with Interstate 580 just south of the neighborhood, to get to work in those cities, sales manager Adam Lubow told Homes.com. Others can walk to the Bay Area Rapid Transit station, one mile away.
The median single-family home price in Richmond Annex is $850,000 and slightly less for townhouses, according to Homes.com data. In the San Francisco metropolitan area, the median price for a detached single-family house was just under $1.9 million in July.
Richmond, 16 miles northeast of San Francisco, is known for the shipyards that produced about 750 vessels for the U.S. military during World War II, according to the city government’s website. The city’s largest employer today is a Chevron oil refinery.
The 1,300-square-foot three- and four-bedroom townhouses, a quarter of which have sold to date, start at about $700,000, with five affordable units priced for income-qualified buyers at $555,150. For a four-person household, the income limit is $155,700. Owners also pay a homeowner association fee. City Ventures includes solar panels in the purchase price, rather than leaving it to buyers to buy or lease solar power on their own.
“[We include] the solar system in the base purchase price just as if it were the water heater or the HVAC system or the windows and doors,” Lubow said.
Each townhouse includes a two-car garage, a front-yard patio and a deck off the living area, he said.
Besides the Richmond project, City Ventures recently neared completion of 56 townhouses in Milpitas, a suburb of San Jose, and is marketing single-family detached houses and townhouses in Santa Rosa, northwest of Richmond in Sonoma County. The company, which is also active in Southern California, said in a statement that it has built 5,000 homes since 2009.
