Seaport Centre

Seaport Centre is a high-tech business park located in Redwood City, California, USA, and as of 2007 is one of the largest biotechnology research complexes in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The property consists of 623000 sqft of developed building area, and is situated in proximity to the Port of Redwood City.(Cutland, 2005); the property is classified as Class A office space and is constructed as a series of separate buildings. The original lands of the Seaport Centre were used as salt evaporation ponds on tidal lands of the San Francisco Bay, a land use that started sometime prior to 1940. As of 2002 leasing rates at Seaport Centre were in the range of $27 per square foot per annum.(Ginsburg, 2002) In 2005, Slough Estates, a United Kingdom-based REIT, purchased the entirety of Seaport Centre to develop it as a biotechnology research center to compete with the existing biotech hubs in Silicon Valley and South San Francisco.

The Seaport Centre is located on generally level ground at approximately 25 ft above mean sea level. Stormwater surface runoff is pumped from Seaport Centre to discharge into Redwood Creek

Aerial photographic history
Due to the large scale of this area and its historical lack of accessibility, the area history can be revealed well with aerial photographic records. In 1989, the firm of Earth Metrics Incorporated conducted a review of historic aerial photographs dating back to 1956.(Earth Metrics, 1989) The Seaport Centre site and its environs, as of the 1956 aerial stereo photo, were essentially undeveloped, although extensive salt evaporation ponds were evident on site. Redwood City Planning Department records confirm that the site was used for salt evaporation since sometime prior to World War II.

Analysis of five sets of time staged stereo pairs of aerial photos reveal that the Seaport Centre site remained undeveloped until 1982; up until that time, city records show that the site was zoned as "Tidal Plain", a designation not allowing urban development. Area land use gradually changed from 1956 until 1982, in the form of gradual building development in the local area. As early as 1956 a rail spur is evident, which served the loading of raw sea salt for export from the area. No agricultural history is associated with the site, other than the salt harvesting.

Early tenants
Since development of Seaport Centre in the early 1980s there has been a consistent trend of the property's use as a research and development hub for the biotech industry. In a 1989 tenant survey, some of the principal tenants present were: Vascualar Interventions Inc., Genelabs Incorporated, Precision Images Inc., Invitron, Charles Evans Inc., ICT Corporation, Resound Incorporated, Ideon Corporation, Cygnus Research Corp, Color Prep, Aurora Systems Inc., Abekus Video Systems Inc., Personics Inc., Instor Corporation and Visucom, Inc.

A number of these early firms utilized a variety of hazardous materials in their normal processes. These substances included a variety of toxic solvents and other organic chemicals such as acetone, benzene, methyl ethyl ketone and toluene. Use of such chemicals on site is considered a risk, since the brackish groundwater at the Seaport Centre is shallow. ,

Microclimate
The microclimate at Seaport Centre is similar to that of the Port of Redwood City. Microclimates within the San Francisco Bay Area have certain gross similarities, but some meteorological parameters have pronounced differences. For this reason a detailed microclimate study was conducted at the nearby Port of Redwood City, with the specific goal of comparing meteorological parameters to nearby locations on the San Francisco Peninsula.(Port of Redwood City, 1994) Temperatures, for example, were found to conform closely to those of San Francisco International Airport and Palo Alto Airport; in contrast, wind speeds at the Port were found to be approximately half the levels of San Francisco Airport. This result is not surprising since Conomos observed that the wind speeds in Northern San Mateo County are high due to the San Bruno Gap in the Santa Cruz Mountains.(Conomos, 1979) The highest recorded 24-hour rainfall of 4.88 inches was on October 13, 1962. There are an average of 62.1 days with measurable precipitation at this location.