FREMONT, CA—The city plans to spend about $15 million to help it develop a downtown.

The money would be spent to acquire specific properties and planning officials will work in concert with private development that is more pedestrian and bicycle friendly in order to bring some street life and electricity to the central area of the Bay Area's fourth largest city.

The new downtown will stretch along six blocks of Capitol Avenue, near City Hall, the Fremont BART Station, the county courthouse and Washington and Kaiser hospitals, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. It will include apartments, shops, bike paths, sidewalk cafes and landscaping, anchored by the Hub and Gateway Plaza shopping centers.

“The challenge is, how do we create a sense of place that's unique to Fremont? There's no secret-sauce way to do this. We have to let it happen organically," said Jessica von Borck, downtown project manager, who spoke with the paper. "And it's not going to happen overnight."

City officials have been talking about creating a downtown for decades, the Chronicle says, noting that the city's original general plan included a downtown.

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Fremont Planners Want to Build a Downtown

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