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Here we go again!
Once again, a small, well-funded group is trying to block new affordable homes in Menlo Park. They say they want to “protect public parking” and on June 3, they got their wish, when the City Council directed staff to require that every one of the public parking spots be replaced.
So why are they still out there gathering signatures for a ballot measure to block these new homes?
We hear a lot about parking, but we are not hearing about our friends, neighbors, family and other important members of our community who need an affordable place to live.
Noemi
Noemi, an adult with developmental disabilities, lived in a crowded group home with shared facilities. Without space to study or access to transportation, she struggled to stay in school.
Everything changed for Noemi after she was accepted to live in Kiku Crossing in San Mateo, an affordable development very much like the one proposed for Menlo Park. Kiku Crossing replaced two city-owned parking lots with affordable homes and a parking structure.
After moving in, Noemi was able to complete a degree at San Francisco State University and now works full time. She can support herself and stay in her community near family.
Silvia
Silvia is a young college graduate who has worked in Menlo Park for four years while commuting from the East Bay where she lived with her parents because she could not afford market-rate rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Menlo Park. Today, she lives in a MidPen affordable home in Menlo Park and her commute is a 10-minute walk. She no longer spends hours to take multiple buses to get to work, which has freed up time to exercise, cook her own meals, get to know her neighbors and community, and be even better at her job.
Hallee
Hallee is 79 years old and has lived in her Menlo Park garden apartment for 39 years, supported by a kind landlord who limited her rent increases to a portion of the increase in her social security income each year. When her landlord sold the building, the new owner raised her rent 10% the first year, and 10% again the next year. Now she is paying 80% of her income on rent and can’t afford her medicines. Hallee is resourceful. She can tell you where all the best food pantries are, what they offer (canned tomatoes are a treat), and what bus takes you there. Hallee doesn’t drive because she cannot afford to own a car. Hallee does not want to move, and our community does not want to lose her. Affordable homes in walkable places will help Hallee and others like her stay in our community and live engaged and independent lives at every age.
These stories are at the heart of why our city is creating hundreds of new affordable homes on city-owned downtown parking lots.
It’s not new that there are opponents of new homes downtown. It’s not new that they have initiated a lawsuit and ballot measure aiming to stop this plan; it’s a repeat of prior failed efforts by anti-growth citizens to block progress. Opponents’ actions will force the city to spend more money on lawyers and elections, all to prevent members of our community from having an affordable place to live.
What is new is in the last several elections, city council candidates ran on a pro-housing platform and won. What is new is that people who support new homes and tenant protections are making their voices heard. City leaders and residents are serious this time about welcoming new residents into the center of Menlo Park, bringing more people, more life, more business to downtown.
Residents and allies can support efforts to provide housing for all of our neighbors and revitalize our downtown by signing this petition of support. We must keep moving onward towards an inclusive Menlo Park.
Margarita Méndez
Kevin Kranen
Kevin Kranen has lived in Menlo Park for 28 years, where he raised two children, now adults, who want to live in Menlo Park someday … if we build homes for them. Kranen is an active volunteer in the public schools as a tutor and theatre set-builder, a leader with Menlo Forward and Menlo Together, and a member of the Menlo Park Housing Commission. His views are his own.
Margarita Mendéz has lived in Menlo Park for 21 years, and is a dedicated public school teacher. She sees for herself the impact of a safe and stable home on her students’ health and education, and feels fortunate to have such a home for herself and her family in Menlo Park. Mendéz is a leader with Menlo Together and stays strong by commuting 9 miles each way by bike (2,520 miles each school year).
Other stories we are not hearing…
1. “Once again, a small, well-funded group is trying to block new affordable homes in Menlo Park.” . This is a misleading claim by an even smaller group (Menlo Together). Save Downtown Menlo Park has several thousand supporters – business owners and mostly residents – who DO support affordable affordable housing BUT believe a massive housing development of any kind Downtown would sacrifice the future economic health, physical characteristics, and general desirability of Downtown AND recommend that the City Council consider alternative locations like near the Civic Center or on acquired public land. They also believe a project that has the potential of so negatively transforming Downtown should be approved by a majority of voters, not as few as three council members. 2. While public parking is important the City is proposing a 10% reduction and eliminating convenient parking based on a hunch rather than a rigorous analysis of future parking needs. 3. Building a public parking garage will cost voters about $40M and the Council has not even mentioned a general obligation bond will be needed. Will 65% of voters approve this “tax”?
Savedowntownmenlo must be getting close to their signature drive quota to qualify for the ballot measure… Karen Grove (Menlo Together) has now funded (paid media) a Chronicle Story (Rich CA city ((Menlo Park)) losing their minds over housing) and now multiple Almanac stories. Do you really think these two articles were written because someone cares about Menlo Park?
I hope people visit these sites and try to envision how 345 families could live sandwiched in between 1-3 story retail/services business with accompanied 550+ cars along a single 2 way street (Oak Grove). No playgrounds, no ballparks, no green space. Sure Ms. Grove think the new residents will all get jobs in town, or not own cars, etc.
I hope people (citizens of MP) still think it would be nice to have a downtown. If not, lets bulldoze all of it and build some real housing for these (salt of the earth, most deserving, best sob stories you can find, etc.) people you so desperately want to live in MP, and give them the dignity of green space, parks, sports fields. You should also check a map and see how little open space Menlo Park has, how little parkland exists, how few sports fields exist. What will the children of these families do? Hang out in the parking lots?
Have any of these individuals looked for housing in the nearby city of East Palo Alto? Being a resident here in EPA, I can attest to the multitudes of single family residences were rooms and random spaces in the house are rented out to individuals. In fact, we have so many people here accessing the cheaper housing that on most streets it is difficult to find parking anywhere near your house. So places are available to them just mere feet from Menlo Park.
The other nice thing about them finding housing in EPA would be that it would keep parking accessible to my family in downtown Menlo Park. This is especially important for residents here since there is no “downtown” in East Palo Alto. Driving to, and parking in nearby Menlo Park is really the best option for us
That’s so sweet that Kevin wants his kids to be able to live in Menlo Park. But growing up here doesn’t mean that you’re somehow entitled to live here as an adult. There are many people who want to move into Menlo Park (as it exists now—not after it is transformed into an urban environment, as property developers and their allies want).
The fact that Kevin’s kids might not be able to afford to live here is not a compelling reason to transform Menlo Park into a metropolis. The privilege Kevin’s bio evinces is akin to someone saying: my dad drove a BMW, so I deserve to have a BMW also—even if that means forcing BMW to become a mass-market carmaker so that I can afford one.
Full disclosure, I support some amount of all-affordable housing on some city owned parking lots, and, I’m also working with Kevin in his role on Menlo “Forward” to *oppose* HOUSING on 80 Willow Rd.
I’m also working to educate Kevin on the severity of the increased housing (800 – 1500) unit deficit created by the SRI/Parkline project which proposes a brand new 1.1M sf office park with 4400 new employees and not enough housing to mitigate them.
So let me first dress Kevin down.
There is something of an irony for a prominent member of a group, Menlo Forward, which formed to oppose a housing project, try to distance itself from that fact by sanctimoniously sniffing at “failed efforts by anti-growth citizens to block progress.”
Look who’s calling the kettle black. For your sake, I hope that hugging up to Karen’s group is not as cynical as it looks.
Kevin. You ARE an anti-housing NIMBY. That’s your gateway drug into politics. Own it. And all of its complexities and contradictions. If you don’t. You are really easy to take down. Its Okay. You said what you had to say to get Menlo Together branding. I understand. It’s politics. God still loves you.
Second you show great historical and policy ignorance. The vast majority of those “anti-progress” efforts were to block OFFICE not housing. Office opponents did so as a form of preventative policy to avoid the jobs/housing imbalance you now hope to solve.
But honestly, its a bit late for that. The jobs/housing imbalance has been out of whack for 30 years and will stay that way until we all fully understand that OFFICE creates HOUSING DEMAND, and develop the courage to say, NO, to office projects that are unneeded in an affluent community of people who are already fully employed.
Its Jobs/housing imbalance, stupid. 1.9 jobs = -1 housing unit.
Jobs are the problem. Having unlimited numbers of tech bros employed in Menlo Park does not benefit Menlo Park it displaces lower-income families who already live here. One of the 4400 new tech bros who will work at SRI/Parkline will eventually take Hallee’s apartment because they can.
Those resisting “progress” were prescient, not reactive. They were working for Sylvia, Noemi, and Hallee 30 years before the faux housing awakening.
But with the right leadership, and knowledgeable citizens, Parkline can be denied and changed for the better. It’s not too late. Menlo Park can have a heart to heart talk with SRI to get them some of the money they need and to get Menlo Park more of the housing it needs.
And Menlo Park can adopt policies that require balanced office and housing.
Your anti-80 Willow Rd group needs to use its bullets on the right projects, in the right way, and stop running away from the “anti-growth” label. Welcome.
@PH, @Menlo Parker,
Sorry I have rattled your delicate sensibilities with real data and real people stories. But the facts also speak for themselves:
* Menlo Park has an egregious 5 jobs to 1 housing unit ratio (2022 Census) that has all kinds of negative consequences when it comes to traffic (forcing people to commute many miles), making housing unaffordable, etc. That ratio has grown from about 2.0 around 2010 due a combination of huge employment growth with virtually no new housing.
* There are only two ways to take aim at that egregious number – build new housing, especially for those who work here, but have been priced out by the inexorable job growth, and limit employment growth as much as possible, in spite of strong local government economic incentives to add commercial vs residential.
* Sadly the city is going to be presented with a bunch of mixed used housing projects, for a couple of reasons – 1) Menlo Park has historically created a bigger than usual percentage of commercial land / sq footage than most of CA which give us such a high jobs/housing ratio, bu also means we have to fins land to build housing on via housing overlays onto commercial. 2) Menlo Park is a rarity, one of only 6 (2%) cities in California over 25k people that has a jobs/housing ratio over 3.0 so the general housing formulas proposed by the state and many housing advocates don’t apply. For instance, the 2/3 housing. 1/3 commercial approach of the state, is housing negative and really, really bad for us.
* We have to steer a course that enables us to meet our state housing numbers, which only considers new housing units, not net-housing (housing units – the effects of new jobs), while also steering away from new incremental housing that comes with NEW commercial space and entitlements. That’s why I’m against personally against 80 Willow, but for SRI/Parkline which already has 1.38M sq ft of commercial entitlements.
* That said, all of that is negotiable between the city and the developers, even at this stage, but rollbacks of entitlements don’t happen very frequently, especially when the developer is providing something else the city desperately needs – 800 units of panned hosusin of which 31% would be affordable. But I also recently heard from some of the folks that had been trying to roll back the commercial square footage numbers that the new FEIR and CDP (development permit) would drop the employment cap of 3308 for the SRI/Parkline project. I wish they had gotten that crucial drop out in front of the community instead of trying armchair quarterback a new square footage number. That is a huge change that should draw outrage from the community (including from me).
@Menlo Parker,
We darn well better find space for my kids, your kids and any other new young entrants that are going to supply the brainpower, services, and muscle for the benefit of the community, because otherwise the Bay Area is going to age out of both relevance and economic dynamism.
This is the real doom loop. It will change everything about life in the Bay Area
By Dan Kopf, Roland Li and Nami Sumida | Updated July 14, 2025 7:02 a.m.
The Bay Area is getting old fast, and it’s accelerating. Though aging is a global trend, the San Francisco metro area — which includes San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Marin counties — is already the third-oldest among 20 of the largest regions in the U.S., trailing only two places in Florida. And no other region is growing older at a quicker pace.
That means fewer children, more elderly people and a declining number of 20-somethings. The confluence of demographic shifts will profoundly impact every aspect of life in the San Francisco area. Combined with rising housing costs and growing hostility toward immigration, the graying of cities and towns means the region’s continued prosperity is in doubt.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/sf-bay-area-aging-demographics/
If we want to free up housing, eliminate capital gains taxes for selling homes. People did lose 30-40 percent of their property value to taxes when they sell.
Prop 13 also messes with the market. If people could just move and buy another place somewhere more hospitable without losing a big chuck of their capital, then the need for prop 13 would go away.
Without prop 13 and capital gains taxes on primary homes, there would be a lot more turnover and lower prices.
Like so many things written about housing, this article is all about “feelings” and makes no attempt to understand market dynamics, incentives for people who own property and consequences of interfering with markets.
@Vincent,
I’m not so sure that eliminating capital gains would create enough new inventory of the right kind to move the needle on housing prices. Looking at my situation and situations of friends, there are too many other financial (Prop 13, interest rates) and social factors keeping us from changing. The new ADU laws are likely to be more effective in creating inventory in our case.
As for Prop 13, you’re right in so many ways, because it has so many perverse housing incentives built into it. But what’s the likelihood of that changing beyond the recent changes ?
I helped write this because we do have to consider the kinds of people we absolutely need to include and keep in our community, in spite of the crazy prices due to all the market interference you allude to.
I agree with you on the market interference, but I think you leave out the biggest market distortions of all – misallocation of housing vs commercial thanks to a high percentage of R1 residential zoning and pressures on cities to produce revenue in the face of Prop 13. When a town have 5 jobs for every 1 housing unit and 70% of your residential land locked up in single family homes, there’s something wrong. FYI – Manhattan only has 2.8 jobs per housing unit !
Housing allocation should be considered regionally. Using the boundaries of small cities like Menlo Park to come up with the 1:5 ratio does not make a lot of sense.
Given the realities of how Menlo Park’s housing deficit are computed and the ensuing consequences of that growing deficit, the city council is irresponsible when it approves ANY new project which increases the deficit.
Also, a lot of people sitting on pretty low property taxes are not going to want to add ADUs which will dramatically increase their property tax payments.
I’m quite skeptical that people working good jobs around here with families want anything less than a house with a yard. Our best bet to free up the kind of housing that people with families want, the best course is to remove friction from the real estate market as I have previously outlined.
@Vincent,
Appreciate your concerns. I’m with you on the unintended negative side effects of Prop 13 and on the downsides of Menlo Park adding commercial square footage, especially via new housing-negative mixed-used developments like 80 Willow, that are merely gift-wrapped as “housing”. FYI – Thee has been a small amount of “freeing up” in the Bay Area thanks to Prop 19 – the number of property basis transfers has jumped from about 1,000 per year in the Bay Area to maybe 3,000, from 55+ year olds mostly moving to smaller properties. But that’s not enough to really move the needle over the whole of the Bay Area which “needs” 444,176 nee housing units by 2031.
https://www.almanacnews.com/guest-opinion/2025/07/07/guest-opinion-here-are-the-stories-we-are-not-hearing/
Housing allocation IS done regionally. Our Menlo Park number comes out of a Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) for the entire Bay Area, done by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). Many other neighboring communities have been also been allocated housing responsibilities partially driven by Menlo Park’s surfeit of jobs, much to their chagrin. The methodology and numbers are all here:
https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-06/Final%20RHNA%20Methodology%20Report%202023-2031_Jun2025_Update_0.pdf
The numbers are mainly based on job growth over the last cycle and local resources (including things like transportation/train stations, retail/groceries and medical facilities). To put it in perspective, Menlo Park has a population / housing profile and growth history similar to Los Altos, but far more baseline jobs and far higher job growth over the last cycle. Los Altos’ housing target is around 2,000 units while Menlo Park is around 3,000 units. Bottom line is that housing allocation is already spread regionally.
I read the opinion piece and the comments and I have many thoughts.
The overarching one: instead of focusing on the substantive issues, those in power have done what people in power always do: pit one side against the other. In this case, it’s the west side of El Camino (“we’re not walking an extra block to go to the hardware store/grab coffee”) vs the east side (“can you not dump every housing project within a 6-block radius of our homes, oh, and destroy the city’s only real park while we’re at it?”)
Let’s not kid ourselves. If our council continues to approve projects that increase the number of jobs in our city, Burgess, Lyle, and every pocket park around will soon be leveled in favor of high density housing. Yes, they will pave paradise – if everyone can’t enjoy the Menlo Park lifestyle, then no one will.
To the opinion piece: the main reason to build housing in the parking lots in 2025 is that the housing is part of the approved Housing Element. If we ignore the HE, which required many painful iterations to finalize, the heavy hand of the state will fall upon us, and more projects like 80 Willow will be inflicted on us. Downtown merchants and neighbors had years to push back against the conversion of the lots – while the HE was being written and rewritten – and somehow they were not paying attention. That said, I’m also not swayed by the tales of the people we “need to include.” Really? We have to provide affordable housing for every disabled person, every new grad, every senior who somehow spent forty years not planning ahead? I’m not suggesting these people be out on the street, only that it makes no sense in any way to feel guilty that everyone can’t afford to live in a VHCOL area.
Many of us who own homes in MP lived in our share of vermin-infested studio apartments for years while we worked and saved. As long as MP remains a pleasant place to live, and that may not be much longer, we cannot accommodate everyone who wants to live here.
Next, re the desire to bring younger people to the area. Building high density housing is the way to do that…temporarily. But then they’ll reach 30 and they’ll leave their cramped apartment for a single family home where they can raise a family. I cannot tell you how many 30-somethings I know who have done just that – professionals with well-paying jobs who want what every generation before them had.
So the question then becomes: how do we provide more single family homes so that we can keep future generations in the area? And that’s a challenge that has to be solved at the statewide level, as suggested, by amending the third rail, Prop 13, or at the federal level, with changes to the tax code. Neither of which is happening.
In the meantime, our city council must do everything it can to prevent additional commercial development! The council is on the verge of approving the SRI project, putting us further in the housing deficit hole. This has to stop, and I sure hope it ends with this council.
Not sure why the east side vs west side boundary is now el camino? I know the current council would like to rebrand it that way, but sorry, east menlo park is east of 101. sure, there have been many new apartments built in east menlo park, and for simple reasons, there was/are undeveloped parcels and many single story small to medium sized businesses (light industrial) on large parcels, etc. that are/were empty and available (this is not some social conspiracy theory). Final point on this (there are many apartment buildings in west menlo park. I dare you to even travel to the far far far west menlo park and see all the apartment buildings in district 5.
RE: the housing element. be very clear here = all the parking lots are listed in it. not sure why the city has not been issued a lawsuit by yimby law yet as the city has chosen only 3 of the 7. yes, our council has one high priority – not get in trouble with HCD, but the reality of builders remedy has many very important factors – BR project owners bear full financial responsibilities, not sure how 80 willow road could even justify the financials given the limited ability for thousands of extra daily car trips to and from (perhaps they dig a private tunnel from willow to 101). It would be better in the long run if a BR project purchased a block on Santa Cruz in downtown and redeveloped the whole thing other than if this development goes through, menlo park will be left with a dead downtown, and hundreds of families living between empty 1-2 story retail/service storefronts.
finally, may you never know what it is like to live where companies and jobs are leaving…
@KK “That’s why I’m … for SRI/Parkline which already has 1.38M sq ft of commercial entitlements. …. But I also heard from folks … trying to roll back the commercial square footage numbers that the new CDP (development permit) would drop the employment cap of 3308 for the SRI/Parkline project. I wish they had gotten that crucial drop out in front of the community instead of trying armchair quarterback a new square footage number. That is a huge change that should draw outrage from the community (including from me).”
@PH I wrote documents describing this in excruciating detail during the EIR scoping phase to both PC and CC members. They were submitted in January of 2023.
Now you have to explain to us how lifting the CDP employment caps and allowing Lane partners to put ~3000 new, currently-illegal, non-SRI employees on the site will REDUCE the jobs/housing imbalance you seek to limit.
Yes, SRI has 1.38M sq ft of commercial entitlements. No, Lane Partners does NOT have an entitlement to USE them for non-SRI employees. SRI entitlement is NOT Lane entitlement.
The Lane project is not possible or feasible under the existing CDP, because it severely restricts non-SRI employment on the site and has a 40′ building height limit.
And now you know this.
We’re not trying to “armchair” new commercial entitlements, Kevin, we’re trying to estimate how much SRI commercial entitlement (~800k sf) that it cannot feasibly USE under the CDP.
And yes, you should be outraged, or at least concerned. And, no, it doesn’t matter when you learn a fact. Once you learn it you have the obligation that goes with that.
The 400-500k sf “feasible”, non-SRI commercial sf estimates we computed for Lane’s use under the existing CDP show 1.) what lenders/equity partners will likely fund given the severely restricted employment CAPs, 2.) what is feasible to build given the height restrictions, and 3.) how much raw revenue MP is gifting to Lane/SRI by lifting the cap and 4.) why MP has leverage if SRI/Lane pretend that they have leverage.
The cap will be lifted.
I did my part. Do yours. It’s your neighborhood in the crosshairs. Not mine.