HAYWARD, Calif. — Eight lanes of freeway would be slicing through what’s now Debbie Frederick’s house if everything had gone to plan.
Instead, the retired nurse practitioner gazes through her home’s picture windows on clear afternoons to take in a vast sweep of the San Francisco Bay. With binoculars, she can spot a spire of the Golden Gate Bridge 30 miles away.
She had rented this three-bedroom stucco house in the East Bay city of Hayward for nearly a quarter century when, just over a decade ago, her absentee landlord, the state of California, finally gave up on plans to build the proposed 238 Freeway.
