Vintage Park, Foster City, CA

You probably will not live in Vintage Park, but there is a decent chance you will work here, and a very good chance you will end up here anyway. This is Foster City's jobs district, sitting at the northwest corner of the city. Gilead Sciences dominates it. The company's worldwide corporate headquarters is here, and its Integrated Campus is a 72-acre master plan approved to grow to roughly two and a half million square feet. That growth is not theoretical: new research buildings are going up on Lakeside Drive, a cancer research facility topped out in 2025, and a new manufacturing hub broke ground the same year. Vintage Park has had cranes over it for years and will for a while longer. The San Mateo-Foster City School District also runs its offices from Chess Drive here. The reason non-employees come is on the northern edge. Mariners Point Golf Center is a public nine-hole par-3 course that runs out toward the Bay, with a large practice range and lights for night play, which makes it one of the few places on the Peninsula you can hit balls at 9pm on a Tuesday. The parking lot is also one of the easiest ways to get onto the Bay Trail, and plenty of people use it for exactly that and never touch a club. Vintage Park is not somewhere you go to feel the neighborhood. It is somewhere you go to work, to hit a bucket of balls, or to walk the levee at sunset while the office lights come on behind you.