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After he accused Menlo Park of illegally delaying a proposed high-rise development, Mayor Betsy Nash invited California Attorney General Rob Bonta to visit the former Sunset Magazine site and see why residents want the city to keep fighting the project.
Menlo Park and developer N17 have been in an escalating dispute over a proposal to build mixed-use high-rise buildings at the former Sunset Magazine campus on the Palo Alto border. Submitted in 2023 under the state provision known as builder’s remedy, the proposal includes 665 residential units, 332,000 square feet of office space, a 130-room hotel and 17,500 square feet of retail space spread across several buildings. The tallest three would range from 301 to 458 feet tall — meeting most definitions of a skyscraper.
With the Attorney General’s Office pressuring the city to move the project forward, a group of more than 40 people joined a demonstration Thursday, Sept. 10, at the intersection of Middlefield and Willow roads from 4:30 to 6 p.m., during peak rush hour. As cars headed to Highway 101 were backed up, attendees held signs warning the development would make the area’s traffic problem worse.
“It would make my life absolutely miserable. There will be constant traffic on Willow Road, which is already bad,” said Menlo Park resident Carla Loomis, who lives a few blocks away from the intersection on Willow Road.
Loomis said she could support a differently scaled project at the site.
“A five-story building would be okay, but a 30-plus-story tower is absolutely insane,” she said. “This doesn’t belong in Menlo Park.”
Builder’s remedy allows developers to bypass local housing rules when a city lacks a certified housing element. At the time of the project’s submission, Menlo Park was awaiting state approval of its housing element.
On July 29, the California Attorney General’s Office sent a letter warning Menlo Park that it was violating state law by requiring the developer pay certain fees and accused the city of using new reasons to find the project inconsistent with design standards.
N17 notified the city that it would sue if the project is not approved by Oct. 27, 90 days after the state’s letter.
Nash said the city’s lack of a certified housing element resulted from delays beyond its control. While Menlo Park submitted its housing element before the deadline, she said the state Department of Housing and Community Development required several revisions, leaving the city subject to builder’s remedy while they were being completed.
Nash, who attended Thursday’s protest, sent Bonta a personal letter dated Aug. 25 asking him to visit the 80 Willow Road site after his office issued the warning.
“Much of the delay was caused by turnover in the state reviewer for our file. A new reviewer introduced new positions requiring new revisions. Slow response times by the state reviewer further delayed approval, despite our best efforts to comply,” Nash wrote. “We were actually one of the earliest cities in San Mateo County to have our Housing Element approved.”
“I … feel so disappointed with your team’s recent impact on our city’s efforts to promote affordable housing and to resist exploitation by a greedy commercial developer,” she wrote.
Nash said the July 29 notice improperly characterized Menlo Park as “NIMBYs,” or people who oppose development in their own neighborhoods.
“I believe our record shows quite the opposite,” she wrote.
The notice from the attorney general has legal implications: It triggers Government Code Section 65914.2, which says that if a public agency is sued for violating housing reform laws after the Attorney General has notified it of the same violation, courts must impose additional penalties, including a $10,000-per-unit fine.
Nash told this news organization that the city is working to build more housing.
“I think that we’ve done everything we can to promote housing, to entitle housing. We’ve entitled thousands of housing units over the last few years, and we are on track to entitle hundreds more this year,” Nash said.
Palo Alto resident Michael Henehan said he sees the proposal as “an unintended consequence of Sacramento’s effort to force cities to deal with the lack of affordable housing.”
“It’s a well-intentioned idea to have affordable housing, and we need it, but I think this project in particular is so out of whack with what the state’s intentions were,” Henehan said.
Supporters of a proposal to build affordable housing on the city-owned downtown parking lots also attended Thursday’s demonstration.
Karen Grove, who co-founded Menlo Together which advocates for more affordable housing in Menlo Park, said that the 80 Willow Road project is a result of the city not supporting housing development.
“It’s a perfect metaphor for how far behind we allowed ourselves to get in producing the housing that we need,” she said. Grove says that if the city does not go through with the parking lot development, it may be subject to builder’s remedy again.
Opponents of the development argue that the city has other ways to remain in compliance.
Nash said she is also concerned that the state wants Menlo Park to process the application without an environmental impact report. In her letter, she asked Bonta to join her for a tour of San Francisquito Creek, which borders the 80 Willow Road site and is the boundary between San Mateo and Santa Clara counties
Nash said Bonta’s office told her it is reviewing her letter. The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
Menlo Park resident Will Oursler, who is chair of the city’s Housing Commission but spoke in his personal capacity, said he hopes that the city and developer can work together on a proposal that the community can support.
“As much as possible, we should find ways to get the developer to the table,” Oursler said, pointing to how Palo Alto found ways to incentivize the developer of the Mollie Stone’s market on California Avenue to scale down the size of its development.
“I don’t know what that looks like in this case,” he said. “I don’t see how we get to that point. But that’s what I would ask the city to aim for: How can we get to the table and make it worth the developer’s time to negotiate with us?”
The Menlo Park City Council has met several times in closed session to discuss how to proceed in light of the developer’s litigation threat and the Attorney General Office’s admonishment. Nash said the council will take up the project in open session later this month. In the meantime, she said councilmembers have received a flood of emails from Menlo Park and Palo Alto residents concerned about the project.
The council is set to discuss the project again in closed session on Sept. 15.
Kudos to Mayor Nash for not letting this go!
Land is expensive and limited. Towers can be more economical. Calling something “affordable “ housing when you are paying the costs with Other-Peoples-Money (or other people’s land) doesn’t really count as far as making them affordable…