Burlingame / Hillsborough bay side — The City of Trees, a Working Bayfront, and a Landlocked Neighbor That Isn't Actually on the Water

What Actually Makes This Market Different

Start with the correction, because it changes how the rest of this page should be read. This site's own destinations listing names this market "Burlingame / Hillsborough bay side," and the honest answer -- checked directly against the U.S. Census and Hillsborough's own town materials -- is that Hillsborough is landlocked. Its total area is 6.2 square miles, and all 6.2 of them are land; the Census records zero square miles of water for the town. Hillsborough borders Burlingame to the north, San Mateo to the east, unincorporated Highlands-Baywood Park to the south, and Interstate 280 to the west -- hills, creeks, and estate lots, not a shoreline. This page treats that plainly rather than forcing content about a bay side that doesn't exist, the same way this site has corrected other imprecise source notes elsewhere. The real bay side in this market belongs entirely to Burlingame, which carries roughly 2.5 linear miles of its own San Francisco Bay frontage -- a corridor of hotels, offices, and public parkland along Airport Boulevard and Old Bayshore Highway, not a residential waterfront of private docks the way some other markets on this site are.

Burlingame earned its "City of Trees" identity the hard way: the Peninsula in 1854 was described as a windswept, nearly treeless prairie, and it was wealthy landowners William Howard and William Ralston who began planting imported eucalyptus and elm along what's now El Camino Real to dress up a grand estate entrance. What survives from that project -- the Howard-Ralston Eucalyptus Tree Rows, a 2.2-mile stretch between Peninsula Avenue and Ray Drive -- is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the city backed the trees with real regulatory teeth: an 1908 ordinance against cutting or injuring them, and a 1930 zoning ordinance specifically blocking commercial development along El Camino Real to protect the corridor. That civic identity plays out downtown too, where Burlingame Avenue runs as a genuinely walkable, tree-shaded shopping and dining strip -- one of the older streets in the city, dating to Burlingame's founding -- with a quieter sister district on Broadway a short distance north.

The bayfront tells a different, more industrial-turned-office story. Burlingame's roughly 2.5 miles of Bay shoreline developed on filled former tidal marsh, historically supporting warehouses and logistics operations serving the airport immediately to the north, and today it carries a corridor of major hotels (the Hyatt Regency, the Hilton San Francisco Airport Bayfront, the San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront) and office campuses, including Meta's Reality Labs facility at Burlingame Point. Bayside Park and the adjoining Anza Lagoon sit right on this corridor and connect directly into the San Francisco Bay Trail, running south toward the 670-acre, county-run Coyote Point Recreation Area -- a park that straddles the actual municipal line between Burlingame and San Mateo, making it a shared regional resource rather than exclusively either city's own. That bayfront proximity to SFO isn't incidental description -- it's a genuinely distinctive, physical feature of this market that no other Bay Area page on this site can claim in the same way: Bayside Park is a documented plane-spotting location, with mudflats exposed toward the runways at low tide, and it comes with real, ongoing flight-path noise that Peninsula-wide reporting has tracked since a 2015 FAA procedure change.

Hillsborough, treated honestly on its own terms rather than as a bay-side extension of Burlingame, is a genuinely remarkable place in a completely different way. It was incorporated on May 5, 1910 by a 60-to-1 vote of roughly 750 residents, growing directly out of the movement around the Burlingame Country Club, and it was built from the start to protect a rural, estate-oriented character against annexation and urban encroachment -- a mission it has kept up ever since through zero commercial zoning (no stores, no restaurants inside town limits) and a half-acre minimum lot size that shaped its historic estates, including the Carolands chateau, Uplands, and La Dolphine, commissioned by San Francisco's elite between 1910 and 1920 in what contemporaries called the "Newport of the West." By recent Census-based reporting, Hillsborough is the wealthiest incorporated town in California by median household income, with that figure exceeding $250,000 and nearly 70% of households earning above $200,000 annually. None of that requires a bay to be true, and this page doesn't pretend otherwise.

Several things this research could not pin to one clean, confirmed figure: a single, reconciled median home price for either Burlingame or Hillsborough (multiple 2026 sources disagree by hundreds of thousands of dollars in Burlingame's case and by millions in Hillsborough's); Burlingame's current FEMA Community Rating System status, beyond confirming the city has participated in the base National Flood Insurance Program since 1981; and a specific, confirmed distance in miles from SFO's runways to any individual Burlingame bayfront address, beyond the general "10 minutes" travel-time figure commonly cited and the direct visual/mudflat proximity documented at Bayside Park. Confirm current numbers directly with the City of Burlingame, the Town of Hillsborough, the San Mateo County Assessor, and a local buyer's agent before making a purchase or relocation decision.