Woodside Glens, Woodside Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

The Glens began as a weekend idea. Woodside Glens Map No. 1 was filed in 1925 and Map No. 2 in 1929, creating 254 lots, most of them 10,000 to 12,000 square feet. The Town's Specific Plan says the lots were meant as second homes or vacation cabins, and quotes a 1925 newspaper ad that called them cabin-site lots, only an hour from San Francisco. Over the next six decades the cabins filled in, and by the 1990s homes stood on about 185 lots, lived in year-round.

When Woodside incorporated in 1956 it zoned the Glens R-1, which requires 20,000-square-foot lots, so most original lots became non-conforming and many houses ended up spanning two or more lots. Failing septic systems led to a sewer assessment district in 1968, part of the Redwood Creek trunk line, and the Glens has been on sewer since. In 1988 the Town capped house sizes in the R-1 zone, and in 1992, after the 1991 Oakland Hills fire sharpened worries about narrow roads and a single way out, the Town Council paused new houses here and ordered a specific plan.

The Woodside Glens Specific Plan was adopted June 1, 1993 and amended in 1999 to change the residential development standards. It catalogs the neighborhood in detail: roads often only 50 to 80 percent of the Town's standard width, more than 150 homes relying on Glenwood Avenue to reach Cañada Road, Cal Water mains looped for fire flow except on the Otis Avenue and upper Glenwood spurs, and about 30 acres of open space next door at Kite Hill, the Wildflower Preserve and the Joan Olsen Preserve.