|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Ask around Menlo Park and you’ll hear some version of the same story: the teacher who can’t afford to live in the district where she teaches, the caregiver looking after your parents who lives far from the families she cares for, the technician running your cardiac exam or the line cook plating your dinner. And then there is the longtime resident whose grandkids are growing up a plane ride away instead of a 20-minute drive because their kids couldn’t afford to raise a family here. Menlo Park increasingly doesn’t have room for the people who work here — or for the next generation of families who grew up here.
Downtown is the best place to build homes for the people who keep Menlo Park running. And the city already owns the most expensive ingredient: the land. The public parking lots between Santa Cruz and Oak Grove avenues sit within walking distance of Caltrain, in one of the state’s designated “highest resource” neighborhoods. Building homes on three of them means more residents within walking distance of downtown shops and restaurants — the steady, local customer base that keeps a Main Street business district alive, filling empty storefronts rather than leaving more of them empty. Neighboring cities like Burlingame, San Carlos and Sunnyvale saw exactly this kind of boost after adding downtown housing.
This isn’t a site the city chose casually. Every California city must show the state, concretely, where new housing can be built in a state-certified Housing Element. Menlo Park began drafting its plan in 2021 and studied more than 72 potential sites across town. Eight downtown public parking lots stood out: they are city-owned, currently used for parking rather than housing, and the closest thing to vacant land in a built-out city.
We know this process firsthand from our years on the Menlo Park Planning Commission. We heard from deeply caring neighbors all over the city, who — along with the commissioners — had the opportunity to question city staff, council members and city consultants. Terrific suggestions and important concerns were brought to the forefront, and the plans evolved in response to that input. That’s how good planning works: through public engagement, discussion, and compromise.
Measure P works in exactly the opposite way. It doesn’t just block the downtown housing plan, it also requires a separate citywide election before the city can make any change to any of its eight parking lots that reduces parking “availability, access or convenience,” and it never expires. Measure P invites costly disputes over what “convenience” means, replacing careful, adaptive planning with a blunt permanent veto. And it conflicts with state law, potentially triggering costly legal challenges — funded by taxpayers, at the expense of public safety, parks and libraries.
Menlo Park spent years building a thoughtful, balanced plan for downtown housing, parking and safety. We shouldn’t erase that work with a sledgehammer. Join Congressman Sam Liccardo, the League of Women Voters, every current Planning Commission member, Habitat for Humanity and neighbors across Menlo Park in voting No on Measure P this November. Learn more at noonpmenlopark.com.
Chris DeCardy and Cynthia Harris are both former chairs of the Menlo Park Planning Commission, giving them a front row seat to the planning process and the tough decisions the city needs to make.
These are well made arguments, and I respect Chris and Cynthia. But the “thoughtful, balanced plan” was created in 2012, not last year. The problem is not with the intent of downtown housing, its that the math doesn’t work, and it never did. That’s why all three responding developers (five others didn’t even submit bids) simply ducked the public parking issue and suggested the City fund it. At 60k-100k per space actual cost on the peninsula, 556 spaces, that ain’t gonna happen. What were we thinking? Even die-hard housing advocates have to pivot when it doesn’t work. We can do this – just not on the parking lots. And probably not with this City Council.