In November 2019, the city of Menlo Park purchased a .67-acre parcel of land on Willow Road for $3.6 million with the hope to find a use for the lot later on. Six years later, the lot is only growing weeds and city staff doesn’t have a planned use for the parcel.
The lot is at 1283 Willow Road in Menlo Park’s Belle Haven neighborhood, next to a bus stop and grocery store and down the road from Meta’s headquarters.
The city purchased it from Midpen Housing, which built a 140-unit affordable housing development on a 3.4-acre lot next door. It sold the smaller parcel to the city for tax purposes.
When the city originally paid for the empty lot using surplus funds, the Menlo Park Fire Protection District expressed some interest in using the lot for a fire station, but no further discussion is documented.
As part of the housing element process, the city evaluated all of its parcels for use for housing. While the city found no constraints for housing at the site, since the parcel is in District 1, the lot was disqualified for housing due to previous developments in the area and combating housing discrimination.
The lot continues to sit vacant with no potential use in sight. The city planned to engage with the community to find potential uses.
The city also owns a lot at the corner of El Camino Real and Ravenswood Avenue that is currently an office building. The lot was disqualified for housing since it is in a long-term lease.
Could a Smart Person please explain how preventing housing from being built on a lot will assist with “combating housing discrimination”? Because to me, that just sounds like flat out nonsense.
Joseph:
They’d rather give away property downtown that is functioning quite well as parking lots than give away property in the less affluent part of town where low income housing already exists because it’s not “fair” to put more low income housing in an area that already has low income housing. Yep, nonsense.
I’d love to see the lot used to create a dog agility park. We have three dog parks in Menlo Park that I know of: Willow Oaks, which is a great place for dogs to socialize with each other, since the renovation last year added astroturf and a water fountain – but it gets very crowded at certain times of day; Nealon, which everyone complains about because of severely limited open hours; and the one at Springline, which is quite small. It would be wonderful to have a place where we can take our dogs for some human-dog interactive fun. The city could charge a nominal fee for use to recoup some of the funds used to build it, and have sign-ups like it does for tennis courts.