Change of plans: Research campus to leave Menlo Park, make way for more housing

Menlo Park’s third-largest employer could leave the city, making way for a significant expansion of new housing on its redeveloped campus. 

Newly filed documents outline dramatic changes in the Parkline development at 333 Ravenswood Ave., the research campus SRI International has occupied since 1947. 

Lane Partners, a Menlo Park-based developer that’s been working on the redevelopment of the 64-acre campus since 2018, submitted a revised application to the city in May that calls for taller buildings, less office space and nearly 400 units of for-sale housing in addition to the already planned 800 rental units.

The city previously approved a development agreement allowing Parkline to add more housing to the project with an expedited review but capped office and research space at 925,000 square feet. Lane Partners’ initial proposal, submitted in October 2022, included almost 1.4 million square feet of office and research space, a number that has dropped significantly in response to residents’ concerns. 

The newly submitted plans shrink office space even further, down to 900,000 square feet, after SRI officials decided to move all research and development activity off of the site. Previously, SRI planned to maintain three existing buildings on the campus. 

According to the application, SRI will relocate off campus but is interested in occupying one of the newly built buildings on the redeveloped site. 

SRI was founded in 1946 at another site in Menlo Park by Stanford University. Then known as Stanford Research Institute, it is responsible for major technological innovations over the ensuing decades, including developing the computer mouse and Siri personal assistant, familiar to users of Apple products. In the 1970s, it was renamed SRI International after parting ways with Stanford. It currently has 582 employees in Menlo Park, making it the city’s third largest employer, after Meta and Snowflake. 

SRI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans to leave its longtime headquarters. Menlo Park resident Mark Murray, Lane Partner’s lead on the project, said that, while he didn’t know SRI’s plans, the company may be interested in staying in the area. 

“Having existing buildings there before was actually a pretty big design challenge,” Murray said in an interview. Without having to keep those three SRI buildings, developers had more of a “blank canvas” to work with, he said.

Townhouses, condos and single-family homes

A major change in the revised plans calls for increasing the number of housing units from 800 to 1,082. Rather than adding apartments, the new units are townhouses and single-family homes for sale, Murray said. 

In total, the project now proposes 108 townhouses and 220 single-family homes, which includes 98 houses on small lots. The plans for 754 for-rent multifamily units are unchanged. 

Across all categories of housing, 15% of the units will be set aside at below market rate. Lane Partners is giving 1.6 acres of land to a yet-to-be-chosen affordable housing developer to build an estimated 154 below-market-rate units, which was already a part of the plan. Murray said Lane Partners is close to finalizing a decision on the affordable housing developer. 

10-story offices, ‘retail village’

The old plans called for a “campus amenity building” offering fitness and conference rooms to office space tenants and food and beverage service to the public, Murray said.

“We really moved away from that. We heard throughout the process that people wanted more of true-blue, organic retail amenities, so we created this retail village, which will be over 40,000 square feet,” he said. “We’re anticipating that it will be service-oriented, so food and beverage, fitness and things like that.”

Other so-called community benefits would expand as well. Under Menlo Park’s rules, the project is now required to include over 19 acres of open space, 9 acres of which must be publicly accessible. Lane Partner’s revised proposal has nearly 27 acres of open space, with more than 13 acres accessible to the public. 

Of that, Lane Partners will give the city 2.7 acres for recreational uses. Murray said that the location and shape of that parcel was modified to accommodate a potential regulation-size soccer or lacrosse field, which city residents said they wanted. 

To make room for all of this new development, the commercial space on the SRI campus will get taller and denser. The office buildings, located near the center of the site, will be as tall as 10 stories, or 150 feet high. The multifamily buildings will range from three to six stories (40 to 70 feet) On the previous plans, building heights maxed out at 110 feet. 

The offices will share 1,800 parking spaces in two garages. Multifamily housing residents are allotted approximately 1.25 spaces per unit. The townhomes and single-family homes will have two spaces each, plus visitor parking. The affordable housing building is projected to have one parking space for every two housing units and one visitor parking space every three units. 

Getting approved 

Murray said that Lane Partners is hoping that the city will be able to review and approve the updated plans within the next 12 months. The goal is to begin demolition before the end of 2027

“I think the city’s very aligned with us to move this forward as quickly as possible because they want to see not just the units approved, but actually built,” Murray said. 

Menlo Park’s expectations for new housing construction were recently dealt a blow from the recent pause of Willow Village in the Belle Haven neighborhood, Meta’s $3.5 billion project with 1.6 million square feet of office space and 1,730 new residential units, plus community benefits like a grocery store. Meta shelved the project on May 1, citing market conditions and its own changing needs. 

“Things are improving in the commercial real estate development industry, but it’s still very challenging,” Murray said. He said that Lane Partners developed the amended plans with financing in mind to ensure that the project can come to fruition. 

“The goal is to not only get approved but have something that really works. So we will get our approvals, move to building permits, move to demolition, and hopefully deliver a lot of this housing in the near future,” he said. 

As of June 12, the city had yet to post information online about the revised plans on the Parkline project’s page.