Three weeks after moving into a gleaming new office building at San Ramon’s Bishop Ranch in 2024, Chevron called with news that would devastate most landlords: the oil giant was pulling out of California entirely and moving to Texas. The company’s move would officially hit news sites within 24 hours.
Alex Mehran Jr., whose family owns Bishop Ranch, didn’t panic. Mehran’s family had originally sold Chevron its office campus at Bishop Ranch and then built and leased a new, smaller campus for the oil company a few years ago when it decided to downsize. The departure reaffirmed a vision Mehran had been shaping for years to transform the massive suburban office park into a small, walkable “10-minute” city that allows residents to access basic necessities like groceries, schools and parks within walking or biking distance of their homes.
“We’re not trying to get back to the good old days,” said Mehran, the president and CEO of Sunset Development. “We’re trying to think about what’s next. We don’t want to sit around and take a gamble for things to come back like they used to be.”
The move underscored to Mehran the need to realize his vision of bringing a total 8,421 new homes to Bishop Ranch over the next two decades, along with a boutique hotel and expanded retail. It’s an ambitious pivot that reflects a broader reckoning with the American office park, car-dependent corporate campuses that redefined suburban development for half a century but now sit partially empty in the remote work era.
Mehran’s proposed transformation builds on early success: City Center, the outdoor shopping complex built in 2018, functions as San Ramon’s downtown since the city doesn’t have one. With stores like Pottery Barn and Sephora and restaurants like the Slanted Door, it’s become the kind of lifestyle center that retail experts say works unlike the recently shuttered San Francisco Centre and struggling Sunvalley Mall in nearby Concord…