In 2021, the Alston family bought a house at 415 Fairfax Avenue in Baywood. It was old — built in 1933 — and once they moved in they found the problems that come with old houses. Fixing it would have cost a fortune and dragged on for years. Tearing it down and starting fresh was cheaper and faster, so they planned a larger home with an accessory dwelling unit for his mother-in-law. First the city made them sit through a review to decide whether their 90-year-old house was historic. It wasn't.
What that triggered has cost San Mateo taxpayers something like half a million dollars — and that figure doesn't include what the Alstons themselves spent to defend the right to live in their own house.
A well-funded campaign
Once the demolition became public, a group of neighbors set out to stop it. Two organizations drove the effort, with heavy overlap between them:
- the Baywood Neighborhood Association, a homeowners' group in one of San Mateo's most affluent neighborhoods, and
- the San Mateo Heritage Alliance, a preservation group.
At the center of both was Mike Nash — president of the neighborhood association, a member of the Heritage Alliance, the Alstons' next-door neighbor, and the husband of the city councilmember who represents the district.
This was not a letter-writing campaign. The group collected the cash and hired a preservation architect to assemble a report of their own, arguing that the Alstons' unremarkable house was historic. They also funded and retained land-use attorneys to argue that tearing down one house required a full environmental review under CEQA. The Alstons, who are Black and Korean and had lived on the Peninsula for decades said the campaign made them feel unwelcome in their new neighborhood.
The city approved the project in 2022 regardless. The opposition's one win was cosmetic — they got the new house redesigned to suit their taste. In July 2023 the Planning Commission looked at the rebuild and found nothing to deny: the neighborhood wasn't a historic district, the plans met every standard, and state law tied the city's hands. The old house came down that year.
One house, fully permitted, replaced by a home and an ADU. This is exactly the type of infill development that the state of California has spent a decade trying to make seamless.
Losing wasn't enough
When the house was demolished it did not end the campaign.
In November 2023 the Heritage Alliance went to California's State Historical Resources Commission and applied to designate all of Baywood — 350 to 444 homes, depending where you draw the line — as a single historic district. The application flatly stated that a historic district would shield the neighborhood from SB 9, the state law that lets owners split a lot or add units. The pitch to neighbors was to landmark the entire neighborhood or else the house next door might become a fourplex.
Almost none of Baywood's homeowners had asked to have their home made historic. Many learned of it only when yard signs started appearing — bright yellow "No Baywood Historic District" placards up and down the blocks.
Lisa Diaz Nash — the District 1 councilmember representing Baywood, a board member of the neighborhood association, wife of the man leading the charge — promised to recuse herself from the Baywood question (Author's note: I am a resident of District 1). She did recuse on the nomination itself. But in March 2024, when residents asked the council to simply let the 444 affected homeowners vote on whether they wanted any of this, she was 1 of 3 members who blocked it from advancing. The vote broke her husband's way.
In the end, Baywood's own residents killed it. By late 2024, more than half the affected owners — over 51% — had mailed notarized statements of objection to the state historic office, enough to sink the nomination for good. The threat that started everything was dead.
The bill comes due anyway
Here is the part that should bother anyone who pays San Mateo taxes. While the threat to Baywood died in 2024, the city's response to it has not.
In June 2025 the City Council told staff to draft a complete rewrite of the city's historic preservation ordinance and produce a citywide survey of historic resources, and set aside about $330k of public money to hire a consulting firm to do it. Add staff time and the real number runs closer to $500k. Then, in early 2026, the council created a permanent Historic Preservation Commission to handle a few applications a year that the existing Planning Commission (budgeted at $50,400 annually) already managed.
The City of San Mateo faces a $14 million budget shortfall this year and a structural gap of $12-$14 million a year going forward. The city has frozen eight positions, told every department to find cuts, and is asking voters for a sales tax hike in November 2026 to bring in about $7 million a year.
Recapping: a hiring freeze, a new sales tax — and at the same time standing up a new commission and paying consultants to relitigate whether a neighborhood of already-legal houses is too precious to ever change.
A playbook
None of this is unique to San Mateo. The same move is playing out right now in Berkeley's Elmwood neighborhood. The city of Berkeley wants to allow taller buildings along College, Solano, and North Shattuck — a state requirement in high-resource neighborhoods to address historical inequities. Opponents answered by trying to brand the Elmwood shopping strip a historic district which would make building housing there far harder.
Preservation is a legitimate tool. Some buildings genuinely deserve protection. But when the trigger is always a housing proposal and the boundary always lands exactly on the parcels someone wants frozen it stops being preservation and becomes zoning by other means — a veto on new neighbors. And the public pays for it twice: once in the homes that never get built, and again in the consulting invoices.
San Mateo's City Manager Alex Khojikian named the cost himself at a recent council meeting — describing the downtown improvement plans the city has had to shelve in favor of historic policy writing:
"As part of the downtown plan that's one of the areas that we wanna focus on, but the downtown plan has been delayed a little bit by our historic uh work & initiatives but hopefully we'll get to that in the future so that we can focus on our city-owned parcels in our downtown and look at highest and best use strategies overall."
The state nomination died because Baywood's own residents recognized the playbook and rejected it.
The next time a housing proposal triggers a sudden case for historic status — and it will — name it, and show up: email your councilmember, speak at the meeting, and tell the city to build the downtown housing it just admitted it shelved.
Preservation should protect what's truly irreplaceable. It shouldn't be the tool a few well-funded neighbors use to decide who gets to live here next.