Eichler built about two hundred houses here, and hid them on purpose.

The count is genuinely disputed. Eichler Network, which researched the subject for its own magazine, says “200-plus, built 1963 to 1968.” Several commercial sites say “235, built 1964 to 1966” — a figure that has no traceable source and that cannot accommodate the 1967 and 1968 houses we have verified, nor the city’s own record of construction starting in November 1963.

We are going to say roughly two hundred to two hundred and thirty-five, built between 1963 and 1968, until somebody counts the parcels properly. That is a job we intend to do.

Foster City named its neighbourhoods to schemes, which is handy: the street sign tells you roughly where in the build sequence you are standing.

This is the thing that makes Foster City unlike every other Eichler market, and it is documented in the city’s own 2016 historical evaluation:

“Foster worked primarily with three builders: Eichler Homes, Duc & Elliot, and Kay Homes, and sold each company limited numbers of scattered lots in a given neighborhood so that no one area looked too homogeneous.”

T. Jack Foster Jr. put it more plainly: “We thought that to mix them up somewhat was better. It makes for a more attractive neighborhood.”

So there is no Eichler tract in Foster City. There is no block where every house is one. They are salted through three neighbourhoods among houses by two other builders, and the house next door being obviously not-an-Eichler tells you nothing whatsoever about yours.

It also means Eichler was building inside another developer’s master-planned community rather than developing his own subdivision — which Eichler Network calls one of the most unusual groupings in his whole repertoire.

Eichler printed a sales brochure specifically for Foster City, with loose plan leaflets inside. We hold six of those sheets. Five are signed Claude Oakland, Architect, A.I.A. The sixth is signed John Brooks Boyd, A.I.A. — Eichler’s in-house architect, who adapted other firms’ work and is credited with very few designs of his own. One of them is here.

Not Jones & Emmons. Not Anshen & Allen. That is what most people assume and it is wrong.

Eichler drew these houses for this place, and several things appear here that appear almost nowhere else.

The gallery. A long covered circulation spine instead of a central atrium — thirteen feet by thirty-six and a half on Plan CC-13. If you have one, you are almost certainly in an Eichler and you can probably name the plan.

The fish bowl. An atrium enclosed on all four sides by interior space, with no exterior wall at all. A Foster City resident described living in it in exactly those words.

The outriggers. Projecting beam ends shaped rather than cut square, on certain 1968 houses in Marina Point.

The sloped-top front door, and double gable roofs on some plans rather than the single low gable people picture.

On the intact examples, original mahogany panelling, cork floors and teal front doors survive.

Foster City sits on Brewer Island, a salt marsh diked for dairy farming in the 1890s. T. Jack Foster bought 2,600 acres in 1960, the engineering firm Wilsey, Ham & Blair produced a master plan approved in 1961, and a dredge worked the San Bruno Shoals around the clock for years — roughly eighteen million cubic yards of sand, raising the ground about six feet. The hole the sand came out of became the lagoon.

The city incorporated on 27 April 1971, on a 98 per cent vote.

Every house here stands on engineered fill behind a levee, and that levee was rebuilt and raised about six feet between 2020 and 2024 under a $90 million bond passed with close to 81 per cent support. The flood position, the lagoon rules and what a disclosure package here contains are involved enough to need their own page — and the FEMA maps for Foster City were revised on 11 September 2026, so anything written before that date is out of date.

The City of Foster City’s own historical evaluation records one detail about Eichler’s work here that is easy to miss: “for his Foster City homes, Eichler advertized in the Chinese Times in San Francisco.”

Eichler sold to anyone who could buy, at a time when that was neither normal nor uncontroversial, and he resigned from the National Association of Home Builders over it. Foster City was among the places where that policy was put into practice, and the Fosters shared it — Eichler Network describes him as the builder most representative of their goals.

It is in the city’s own record rather than in company mythology, which is why we repeat it.

About two hundred houses, and in a normal year very few change hands. If the only thing we had to offer Foster City Eichler owners was a valuation, we would have almost nothing to say to almost all of you.

Roughly two hundred Eichlers, none of them on an all-Eichler block, and a handful of sales in a good year. When one moves, the buyer has usually been waiting rather than searching. Join the list and you hear when we hear — no volume, no drip campaign, and nothing sent unless something actually happens.

Eichler built roughly eleven thousand houses and they do not price the same from one city to the next. Foster City has about two hundred, scattered on purpose through three neighbourhoods of a planned community. Palo Alto has thousands — Greenmeadow alone is 243 houses, on the state register since 2005. Menlo Park has about fifty across four clusters. Los Altos has about forty, almost all in one tract.

The county line matters too — Foster City sits in San Mateo County, most of the Silicon Valley stock in Santa Clara, and that changes the assessor, the permit path and where the drawings live.