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Palo Alto’s Crescent Park residents have strong feelings about the transformation that their neighborhood has undergone over the past decade, as Mark Zuckerberg went on a homebuying spree on the 1400 block of Hamilton Avenue.
They have been vocal about suffering through years of construction, the zoning violations and the constant presence of the Meta CEO’s security guards, who occasionally intimidate visitors. Some have also been dismayed by the changes in neighborhood character, with families moving out and homes remaining vacant for months or years.
Michael Kieschnick, who lives on the block, warned that similar problems may soon befall other neighborhoods as other billionaires proceed with “copycat” compounds.
“What has happened in our neighborhood has left a blueprint that is easy for anyone else to follow,” Kieschnick said.
But while the Palo Alto City Council acknowledged the problem, members are struggling to come up with a solution. On Monday, council members debated a proposal from Vice Mayor Greer Stone and Council member Keith Reckdahl to address the Crescent Park complaints. The two proposed in a memo new laws that would require owners who aggregate properties to space out their construction projects, clearly identify private security guards and ensure that home vacancies don’t stretch out for more than six months.
“Properties within these aggregations are often left vacant for extended periods, either awaiting redevelopment or maintained as non-primary residences,” their memo states. “This practice reduces the availability housing stock in Palo Alto at a time when the city is trying to accelerate housing production and address affordability concerns.”
“In some cases, aggregated parcels have been converted to non-residential uses, such as private institutional facilities or private security offices, raising additional enforcement and zoning concerns.”
Stone, who has been particularly critical of the Zuckerberg compound, framed the issue as a way to preserve Palo Alto’s quality of life at a time when income inequality across America is increasing.
“Neighbors are telling us clearly: This is changing the character and social fabric of their blocks on our city,” Stone said.
Reckdahl emphasized that the goal is to protect neighborhoods, not punish wealthy people.
“These wealthy people bought in Palo Alto because they like the same things that we do. They love the parks; they love the quality of life,” Reckdahl said. “And unfortunately, some of their actions are degrading the very things that attracted them to Palo Alto.”
“So we really want to protect the neighborhoods and keep it livable, but we don’t want to be punitive.”
The council generally agreed that the city should address some of the most conspicuous problems relating to Zuckerberg’s compound creation, most notably zoning and code enforcement violations. Most members concluded, however, that these problems are neither unique to Crescent Park nor urgent enough to require immediate intervention.
Rather than embracing the proposal from Stone and Reckdahl, the council majority settled on a list of broad points for staff to explore to address the problem of property accumulation, even as members acknowledged that any law changes to address this problem likely won’t happen until next year at the earliest.
Mayor Vicki Veenker noted that lengthy construction projects that impact the local neighborhood are a citywide problem, citing such projects around her own neighborhood as an example. Council member Pat Burt rejected the notion that the proposed changes relate to wealth and inequality and suggested that the best course of action is to address the compound problem as part of a regularly scheduled zoning update some time in the future.
“I don’t see how this has anything to do with income inequality,” Burt said. “We’re talking about a neighborhood that has been impacted in their quality of life. These homes on Hamilton are $5-to-$10-million homes.”
“The notion that this is somehow an issue of income inequality is disingenuous and we should dismiss that and focus on other zoning and quality-of-life-related issues that have been brought forward,” Burt said.
The council ultimately settled on a list of issues for staff to explore, including ways to address “ghost homes” that are purchased as an investment and often left vacant for extended period of times, methods to address the impacts of construction on neighboring properties and the possibility of requiring security guards to place hang tags on their vehicles that identify them as such.
The proposed changes stopped well short of what Stone and Reckdahl had proposed. Their memo recommended, among many other things, requiring private security personnel to obtain city-issued permits for their vehicles and explicitly prohibiting them from harassing or intimidating members of the public.
“It does not prohibit private security, it simply establishes standards of conduct and transparency so that all members of the public, in the public right of way, feel comfortable and safe,” Stone said.
Among the memo’s more contentious recommendations was a suggestion that neighbors should bear the primary responsibility for enforcement, namely through legal action. Stone and Reckdahl suggested establishing a “private right-of-action” that would give residents standing to sue, an effort to address concerns about the city’s enforcement capacity.
Some of their colleagues were put off by this recommendations, which they suggested would further tarnish neighborhood dynamics. Council member Ed Lauing said he would not support the proposal for private enforcement, a function that should be handled by the city. The problem, he noted, isn’t exactly widespread. Even though staff doesn’t know exactly how many compounds Palo Alto currently has, they estimate that the number is in the high single digits.
“For us to be doing enforcement there, even if it’s called to attention by our citizens, I think that’s in our bailiwick,” Lauing said. “I don’t think we should be promoting disruption of the neighborhood by having to encourage lawsuits. I think that’s the wrong way to go.”
The council largely agreed that ghost homes are a major problem, though members noted that it’s not limited to Crescent Park. After a lengthy debate, the council unanimously agreed to add ghost homes to its list of topics that warrant further exploration and possibly zoning changes. Veenker was among those who lamented the high number of homes that remain unoccupied around the city, even as the city is scrambling to meet its housing goals.
“It’s offensive to leave them empty when we have such a shortage,” Veenker said. “It troubles us in some sort of instinctive sense.”
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