Anchored by the 5.3 million square-foot Tesla Factory and the Warm Springs/South Fremont BART Station, the Warm Springs Innovation District spans 850 acres of transit-oriented residential development and technology park space. The ultimate vision for this area is to serve as Fremont's key innovation hub and is on track to have over 40,000 technology jobs by 2035. In addition to Tesla, other major employers include Zoox, Seagate, Western Digital, ThermoFisher Scientific, and FM industries.

Development opportunities in Warm Springs include commercial, industrial, and office development. While most of the technology and life sciences employment base in this area occurs in lower-coverage industrial and R&D buildings, the district's zoning code allows for higher density employment such as office on sites proximate to the station. Within a half mile radius of the BART station (referred to as the TOD Overlay), the minimum density for office, hotel, and industrial is 1.5, 1.5 and .5 FAR, respectively, falling to .5, 1.0, and .35 FAR outside of the overlay.

Ardenwood Technology Park boasts nearly three million square feet of research and development (R&D), flex space, and office. In 2016, Fremont up-zoned much of the district to transition it to allow for significant increases in floor area ratio (FAR) in parts of the district. Development opportunities in Ardenwood include mid-rise office, hotels, and R&D. Increasingly, real estate investors are repositioning older R&D buildings for growth-state life sciences companies. While many of the businesses in the Ardenwood area are in the life sciences sector, the largest employer in the district is Facebook parent company Meta, who has leased over one million square feet of space and has plans to add up to 10,000 employees over time.

With over 30,000 jobs, Fremont's Bayside Technology Park is the largest concentration of jobs in Fremont. Employers include a wide variety of technology, life sciences, and warehousing uses. Over one-third of the jobs are in technology-related manufacturing, with Lam Research serving as the largest employer in the area. The Bayside industrial zone—and the heavier industrial area surrounding the Pacific Commons shopping center immediately to the north—are designated as Priority Production Areas, which are regional industrial zones prioritized for economic development, with high degrees of protection from competing land uses.

In recent years, the Bayside district has begun to see a transformation to larger, more contemporary industrial and research and development offerings through site aggregation and redevelopment. In 2021, a 210,000 square foot speculative industrial redevelopment project by Duke Realty was leased to Applied Materials for lab and production space. Bayside's land use designation is predominantly Tech Industrial (I-T), with a limited amount of commercial zoning. Industrial development with a Floor Area Ratio (FAR) below 0.45 is typically facilitated through ministerial design review, with projects exceeding this threshold requiring additional entitlement.

Spanning 840 acres, the Pacific Commons Shopping Center is Fremont's largest commercial center. In 2012, a major expansion of the center called The Block @ Pacific Commons was completed, anchored by Target and a 16-screen movie theater. The area surrounding Pacific Commons Shopping Center includes the Fremont Auto Mall, one of the largest collections of dealerships and highest grossing auto malls in northern California, and large swaths of industrial lands designated as Tech Industrial (i-T) and General Industrial (I-G), a heavier industrial designation. Immediately south of the center sits Pacific Commons South, an approximately 1.7 million square foot industrial campus with tenants that include Facebook parent Meta Labs, Bloom Energy, Cepheid, Sana Biotechnology, Quanta Manufacturing, and Amazon.

It's not very often that communities get to build a new downtown from the ground-up, especially in a place like the Bay Area. But that's exactly what's happening in Fremont. Located in a central, 100-acre area with a concentrated "retail spine" linking two major shopping centers and within walking distance of a BART station, Downtown Fremont is the culmination of years of planning and tens of millions in public investments.

Today, Downtown Fremont is on the rise, with its multiple mixed-use projects underway along with a new 6-story office headquarters for Fremont Bank. The development activity is now giving way to small business additions, including several prominent local restaurants and even an independent bookstore! In October 2021, the City of Fremont celebrated the opening of its Downtown Event Center, which includes a large urban plaza for outdoor gatherings and concerts that can accommodate thousands of people.

Development in Downtown is guided by the Downtown Community Plan, with conforming projects typically requiring only a ministerial design review. To prepare for and streamline investment, the City Conducted a programmatic CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) analysis that clears the path for up to 2.5 million square feet of commercial space and 2,500 residential units. Downtown Fremont also falls within a designated Opportunity Zone, which provides federal tax incentives for qualify long-term investments. While there is much more work to be done, the progress speaks to the momentum that is gathering in Downtown Fremont.

Encompassing Fremont's Downtown is the 430-acre City Center area. The City Center is home to three regional hospitals (Washington Hospital, Kaiser Permanente Fremont, and Sutter Health), along with several shopping centers including the Fremont Hub and Gateway Plaza. The City Center area is home to over 15,000 residents and 20,000 jobs, mostly in medical professions and retail. Residents and workers in the City Center also benefit from immediate access to the Fremont BART station and retail amenities like Whole Foods and Trader Joes, and open space including Central Park.

Like Downtown, development in the City Center is guided by its own Community Plan, which provides opportunities for streamlined development with conforming projects. The City has already made substantial investment in creating pedestrian linkages to the nearby BART station. Over time, development in the area is expected to create more housing units through multifamily and residential mixed-use projects, as well as additional commercial and retail offerings.

Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is an overlay designation applied to areas generally within half a mile radius of the Fremont and Warm Springs BART stations, the future BART station in Irvington, and the ACE/Amtrak Station in Centerville. The overlay applies to property with an underlying designation in one of the seven applicable commercial, industrial, or residential land use designations. TOD overlays support the common goal of maximizing transit use through density, land use mix, building form, and design, with each TOD intended to serve as a vibrant pedestrian-oriented district. The specific mix of uses around a given station varies depending on the surrounding land use, access, infrastructure, and other factors.