Fremont · Alameda County
Five towns, one city, and its own lock code.
Fremont is the only city we cover that writes its own hardware specification into its municipal code. If you are fitting locks on new work here, the numbers below are the ones that apply to you.
Fremont Municipal Code chapter 15.50
Fremont adopted a Building Security chapter of its own, sections 15.50.010 to 15.50.070. What it requires, in its own terms:
- A deadbolt with a cylinder guard and a hardened steel insert, minimum throw one inch , which is above the state's thirteen-sixteenths.
- A deadlatch with a half-inch throw.
- Main entry doors one and three-quarter inches solid core; other exterior doors one and three-eighths.
- A door viewer with a 180-degree field.
- Non-removable hinge pins and rabbeted jambs.
- Strike plates with solid shimming behind them.
- Sliding doors: a vertical hook-bolt deadlock, or a secondary bolt with a two-inch throw, plus anti-lift devices.
- Louvered windows require bars or grilles.
- "Garage doors shall have an inside slide bolt lock or its equivalent."
- Commercial cylinders must be "so designed or protected that they cannot be gripped by pliers or other wrenching devices."
The limit, stated plainly: section 15.50.030(a) applies the chapter to new construction. It is not a retrofit mandate and nobody is required to go and upgrade an existing house because of it. Anyone telling you otherwise in order to sell you hardware is misreading it.
One caveat we will not hide: the chapter still cross-references pre-1997 Uniform Building Code standards. Whether those references have been carried over to the current California Building Code equivalents, we could not confirm, so treat the specifications as the City's intent and check with Building and Safety on a permitted job.
Fremont Municipal Code ch. 15.50, read from the City's published code.
Five towns, five kinds of door
Fremont's own history page puts it plainly: "In 1956, five individual townships came together to form the City of Fremont". Those five are Centerville, Niles, Irvington, Warm Springs and Mission San Jose, and the City still calls them its districts. Its General Plan then divides the city into 13 community plan areas and 28 named neighborhoods: Ardenwood, Glenmoor, Brookvale, Cabrillo, Parkmont, Weibel, Northgate, Sundale, Blacow, Grimmer and the rest.
That history is in the hardware. Niles and old Irvington and Mission San Jose have pre-merger building stock with correspondingly old locks. The bulk of the city is something else entirely: Fremont's Housing Element records about 79 percent of its housing built between 1960 and 1999, with over 32,000 units from the 1960s and 70s alone, and 57.8 percent single-family detached. The city went from 43,790 people to 100,869 in the 1960s.
So the typical Fremont call is a 1960s or 1970s tract house: a bore-hole knob and deadbolt, an attached garage with a side door everyone forgets about, and a sliding patio door at the back that is almost always the weakest point and almost never has the secondary bolt chapter 15.50 describes.
City of Fremont, Our Story; General Plan Community Character element; Fremont Housing Element 2023–2031; MTC census series.
Getting here
We come down 880 or 680 depending on where in the city you are. BART reaches Fremont and Warm Springs/South Fremont. The Warm Springs extension opened 25 March 2017, 5.4 miles, at 45193 Warm Springs Boulevard.
Fremont's own mobility plan defines a primary arterial as carrying over 20,000 vehicles on a weekday, and names Mission, Fremont, Paseo Padre, Warm Springs, Auto Mall, Mowry, Decoto, Stevenson, Thornton, Washington, Niles Canyon, Peralta, Grimmer, Osgood and Kato. In an emergency we are aiming at 20 to 30 minutes; across a city this large, tell us the cross street and not just the city.
Renting in Fremont
Fremont's rent ordinance is unusual and worth knowing before anyone changes a lock. Municipal Code chapter 9.60 sets no rent cap, allows one increase per twelve months, and requires an increase above 5 percent to state a reason, which the tenant can take to the Rent Review Board within 15 days. The Board's determination is "advisory ... and shall not be binding." There is a 180-day retaliation presumption and a $2,000 penalty provision.
None of that changes the lock rule: a landlord may not lock a tenant out without a court order executed by the sheriff, anywhere in California. We will let a tenant back into their own home on proof of tenancy, and we will not perform a lockout for a landlord without that paperwork.
Fremont Municipal Code ch. 9.60.
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