Drive south on Beach Road this month and a flagger will wave you into a single lane before you reach Main Street. Cut over two blocks to Mallard Road and you will see moving trucks backed up outside a row of 1950s duplexes that face the lagoon. From the driver's seat, these look like two unrelated projects. One is a public works crew driving steel into the roadbed. The other is a private developer clearing tenants ahead of a demolition. Look at what each project is actually built to stop, though, and they turn out to be the same problem in two different budgets.

Both sites sit on ground that has never been especially solid. Both projects, this fall, are about the same thing: keeping water and unstable soil from taking down the structures built on top of them. One is paid for by the city. The other is a condition the city attached to a private permit. Together they explain more about how Belvedere actually manages its exposure to the bay than either project explains on its own.

The Sea Wall Is Getting Its Third Repair in a Decade

The Beach Road Sea Wall Stabilization Project, which the city started referring to in shorthand as BRSP, runs from July 27 through October 30 along the stretch of Beach Road between Peninsula Road and Main Street. Before the sea wall work itself, PG&E spent late July relocating utilities in the right of way to clear the path for construction. The work now underway involves driving a steel sheet pile wall to a depth of 32 feet along the sea wall, in three separate sections, mostly on the bay side of the wall but with one section running through the roadway itself in front of 28 through 38 Beach Road.

That depth matters against a baseline most residents already sense but rarely see stated outright: Beach Road and San Rafael Avenue sit on top of earthen levees built roughly 80 years ago, and those levees are what keep both the roadway and the utility lines underneath it from settling into the bay. This is not the first time the wall has needed emergency attention. It was repaired as recently as 2019, and city records point to two prior emergency repairs within the past decade. This year's project is the third.

It is also, by design, a partial fix. The city's own budget documents put this repair at roughly $3 million, drawn from funds the city set aside rather than new taxes. The Ark newspaper's reporting on the project cited a slightly higher figure, $3.8 million, a small discrepancy worth flagging rather than resolving. Either number is a fraction of the $28 million Belvedere Critical Infrastructure Project that this repair is meant to hold the line until: $20 million for seismic upgrades to the levees themselves and $8 million for flood protection along the bay frontage. Belvedere voters already said yes to funding the first phase. In November 2022 they approved a 0.8 percent real property transfer tax specifically to pay for the seismic work. The Beach Road project running through this October is the stopgap, not the finished plan.

Two Blocks Away, a Private Developer Is Solving the Identical Problem

Walk over to Mallard Road and the language changes from public works to permitting, but the underlying engineering problem does not. The Mallard Pointe project, a planned redevelopment of the properties at 1 through 22 Mallard Road, received its demolition permit from the city on July 15. That permit lets the developer, Thompson Dorfman Partners LLC, begin the process of clearing the site, and it triggered 60-day notices to the tenants of the existing 22-unit lagoon-side complex, built in 1951. Those notices put move-out around mid-September, and city documents note that demolition itself could begin as early as September 15, tomorrow, as of this writing.

That date comes with a catch the demolition permit alone does not resolve. The developer cannot actually start tearing down the duplexes until a separate bulkhead permit clears review, and that permit remains under consideration. Belvedere's vice mayor, Kevin Burke, has said the city deliberately tied the two permits together after residents raised concerns that the buildings could come down while the bulkheads along the lagoon were left unaddressed. The bulkheads themselves will not be replaced all at once. The plan calls for removing and rebuilding them in small interlocking sections, with a stormwater pollution prevention plan that uses straw wattles and other erosion controls to keep construction sediment out of the lagoon. Because the buildings date to the 1950s, the developer's asbestos contractor, Asbestos Management Group, has already obtained the necessary permits from the Bay Area Air District for every structure on the site.

What replaces the 22 units is its own kind of number worth setting against a baseline. The approved project calls for 40 new units: a 23-unit apartment building along with 16 single-family and duplex homes and one accessory dwelling unit. Four of those units will remain deed-restricted as affordable housing for 55 years. Net effect: 18 more units than exist today, counted toward the housing targets the state requires Belvedere to meet. It is the kind of detail that matters less for anyone simply trying to get around the construction and more for understanding why the city treated this permit with the same working-group scrutiny it gives its own infrastructure projects. Planning and Building Director Rebecca Markwick, Building Official Brian Van Son, City Engineer John Moe, and council members Burke and Peter Mark now send residents weekly updates on the project's status.

Same Water, Two Different Ledgers

Set the two projects side by side and the coincidence stops looking like a coincidence. Beach Road's sea wall exists to keep the bay from undermining a public roadway sitting on an aging levee. Mallard Pointe's bulkheads exist to keep the same lagoon system from undermining a private waterfront property a few hundred yards away. Both use interlocking sections rather than a single continuous pour, a construction method chosen specifically because it lets the wall keep doing its job while individual segments are swapped out. One project is funded by a voter-approved transfer tax and the city's general budget. The other is a condition the city wrote into a private development's permit, at the developer's expense. Belvedere is patching the same exposure twice this fall, once as a public expense and once as a private obligation, because the water on both sides of Beach Road and San Rafael Avenue does not care which side of a property line it is threatening.

What to Expect on Beach Road Through the End of October

Anyone driving, walking, or biking this stretch of town through the end of the month should expect the following, based on the city's own project updates:

• Single-lane traffic control along Beach Road between Peninsula Road and Main Street, with flaggers present as needed, through October 30.
• Sidewalk closures and periodic parking restrictions in the same stretch, clearly marked as work moves between the three sheet pile sections.
• Occasional Saturday work from PG&E crews as they finish utility modifications ahead of schedule pressure on the main construction window.
• Moving activity and, potentially starting as early as September 15, demolition equipment at 1 through 22 Mallard Road, contingent on the bulkhead permit clearing review.

Residents who want firsthand updates rather than driving past and guessing can join the city's Mallard Pointe project email list or check the project pages the city maintains for both the sea wall work and the Mallard Pointe permitting timeline.

The Season Closes With a Reminder of Why This Matters

The community calendar wrapped its own summer chapter on September 6, when Belvedere Park hosted Foreverland, a Bay Area tribute band, for the last Concerts in the Park show of the year. It is worth noting what comes next on that same calendar. On October 9, the city's Be Ready Belvedere program returns to Belvedere Park to walk residents through sheltering in place during a community-wide emergency, building on a prior year's event where volunteers helped residents assemble go bags.

That drill is not incidental to the construction happening two streets over. Beach Road and San Rafael Avenue are the only two roads connecting Belvedere to the rest of the peninsula. If either is compromised, whether by an earthquake, a storm, or simply the kind of erosion this fall's sea wall project is designed to stop, emergency vehicles lose their route in and residents lose their route out. The city teaching people to shelter in place and the city driving sheet piles 32 feet into the ground under Beach Road are two responses to the same fact about where this town sits.

For residents watching flaggers direct traffic this month, that is the piece worth holding onto. This is not background noise around an otherwise quiet fall. It is Belvedere doing, in public and in private, exactly what it has done for the past 80 years: keeping the water on the other side of the wall.

If you are weighing a move in or around Belvedere and want a clear-eyed read on how projects like these affect specific streets and properties, Elizabeth Green Kilgore has spent nearly two decades following this peninsula block by block. Reach out to request a personalized market consultation.