It’s taken 18 years to fully develop San Mateo’s 83-acre former horse racing track Bay Meadows, but a developer is finally submitting permits for the final two buildings of what will be a seven-building complex.  

Longtime Caltrain riders may remember there was a horse racing track called Bay Meadows in San Mateo years ago, right across from the Hillsdale Mall and the Hillsdale Caltrain station. But Bay Meadows closed down permanently in 2007, to make way for a $2 billion office, retail and housing complex. That timing may have been a bad bet for the developer, because the Great Recession came along just months later, and stalled the new development for a few years.

So let’s check in on the status of that Bay Meadows property.

The above image is real, though admittedly, it’s a little misleading. It only shows a sliver of the overall property, and most of the parcel has been developed into what is now the headquarters of video game company Roblox. Plus there's a little housing community there, also called Bay Meadows. But the office complex was always supposed to be seven buildings, and only five of them are built, nearly 18 years after the racetrack closed.

But the last two buildings are on the way. The San Francisco Business Times reports that developer Wilson Meany is submitting permits to finally build the final two buildings at Bay Meadows. That paper reports that the buildings will have 303,000 square feet of office space, ground-floor retail, and 67 more units of housing.

San Francisco residents might laugh, because just submitting permits doesn’t mean things still won’t take forever to build. But San Mateo works differently.

“Pulling permits would be more than routine. It would trigger a 180-day deadline for Wilson Meany to request its first construction inspection,” the Business Times explains. “It effectively locks the developer into a timeline to start building.”

This may seem like a terrible time to be building more office space, but the Bay Meadows office complex has done quite well for itself. While it’s mostly all just thanks to Roblox, the first five buildings of the complex are currently 88% leased, according to the Business Times.

Related: Talk of Redeveloping Golden Gate Fields Has Already Begun [SFist]

Image: Google Street View