Westport

Westport is basically a big office park on the western end of Redwood Shores. There are 20 large office buildings arrayed across this area and surrounded by parking lots.

There are 3 main kind of companies that seem to make their home here, gaming companies, biomedical tech companies, and a general assortment of tech companies. (Exactly what you expect in the vicinity of Silicon Valley.)

For the first kind of company, you will find the following:

--Nintendo’s Nor Cal Office. The game maker may also have positioned this office here to be close to EA Sports whose HQ is just to the west of here.

--Trion Worlds, founded by a former EA big wig, and having several highly experienced game makers, this game maker is most famous for Rift and End of Nations video games but is poised to expand its offerings, including making TV shows.

In the second category, biotech, you will find:

--Proteus Biomedical, which is a leader in “intelligent medicine,” basically implants with computer chips and digestible monitoring devices.

--Counsyl, a gene test producer that combines a number of gene tests into one to find genetic problems such as Tay-Sachs and Krabbe diseases.

And then there are also the following tech firms:

--The HQ of Corticon Tech, a subsidiary of Progress Tech, that creates Business Management Software that automates decision making for large businesses.

--The Clickatell HQ is here too. Clickatell makes SMS (SaaS) solutions for mid-sized companies and has offices from here to South Africa.

--Merchante E-Solutions, a payment processing platform provider created by former BofA Merchant Solutions’ big wigs.

--Blackbox Network Services has an office here. Black Box creates network infrastructure applications. (Whatever that means.)

--Qualys, an information security company.

--Openlane, an online vehicle resale auction platform.

There is one company that is not directly involved in tech:

--Harvest Properties, a commercial real-estate investment firm.

All of this points to the driving engine of the Peninsula, the tech industry. This also gives you the reason why property values are so high here. With so many companies involved in the same general enterprise, there is a real value to having a company here, where you can get high quality workers from all over.

And, because many companies looked for a tech solution for HR problems during the Great Recession, it also points to the reason why real estate prices have remained so high on the Peninsula. Put simply, the tech industry didn’t really suffer very much from the Foreclosure Crisis.

Overall, a maybe only slightly above average office park.

Westport is an attractive Redwood City neighborhood mixed with glossy office parks and an isolated, somewhat affluent communal living space. For the latter, the living experience here is very communal, with homes sharing everything from backyards to walls. The neighborhood also accommodates a rather sizable drive-in workforce with newly constructed, three-story buildings skirting the northern portion. Geographically speaking, Westport is one of the smallest neighborhoods within the city, spanning just 0.4 square miles and only encompassing about a half dozen suburban streets. And according to the 2010 US Census, the district is sparsely populated (2,000), with white and asian residents making up the majority of the community.

Westpoint’s residential quarters are a little differently organized than the traditional California community. In fact, residences are arranged in intimate, grouped housing developments and newly built condominiums. They provide attractive communal living spaces that are well regarded amongst both locals and residents. In some areas, it can remind you of a gated community, with beautiful neighborhood aesthetics and green landscaping surrounding each small group of homes. As a result, residents seem to have a more intimate relationship with each other rather than the more sparsely separated neighborhoods you might be used to. For the perspective residents, the price tag for these homes are within the $500,000 to $750,000 range, while rents will cost you around $2,000/month. As for the typical household, they do pretty well for themselves raking in over $95,000/year.

For recreation, the district provides a large, grassy, and open-spaced terrain that acts as the centerpiece of the community. Here, you can find the Shorebird Court communal tennis courts and a lengthy playing field for picnics and youth sports events. If you drive along Marine Parkway, the district’s main street, the strip wraps around Redwood Shores and connects residents into town and other communities just like Westpoint. And it’s biggest perk is the couple surrounding sloughs (water runoffs) that quaintly surround each of these Redwood City bayside communities.