Living in close community with our teachers strengthens our bonds through shared experience. The same holds with first responders, service workers and members of the trades. Today, these critical threads that have made our community fabric so vibrant are going missing due to the lack of affordable homes throughout Menlo Park.
Because the housing crisis is statewide, California mandates that cities plan for increasing affordable and other housing. The first step is submitting a roadmap for how the city might, over the course of years, approach reaching affordable housing goals. In response to Menlo Park's plan, concern over including a single parcel in Flood Park as a potential place for increased affordable housing has brought us Measure V, a proposal that would make the current affordability crisis even worse.
It is important to remember that Menlo Park's current planning process works, especially when concerned neighbors actively participate. It includes four Planning Commission reviews for major developments, each with an opportunity for public input. It has consistently allowed neighbors, city staff, developers, and seven volunteer planning commissioners to work together toward the best solution.
Potential project-scale concerns can be remedied by wonderful design, potential traffic concerns addressed through parking and alternate mobility policies, and potential impact on the natural environment mitigated with plans to protect mature trees and plant new ones. We have shown, time and again, that this approach can work as it provides ample opportunity for interested parties to sort through the complicated issues raised by individual developments to find the best solution.
The Flood Park parcel has yet to move through any of our city's current community engagement processes, and now Measure V would have the effect of throwing it all out, circumventing the opportunity for residents to participate thoughtfully to address concern over not just a project on the Flood Park site but many others across the city.
Measure V is a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed. It creates an unfair two-tier process for planning depending on the zoning status of a property with uncertainty for property owners, increased workload for a city planning staff already stretched thin, and most importantly, it increases the potential that Menlo Park will be found non-compliant with state law.
Noncompliance would trigger the state to strip local control over our land use decisions, with extremely broad latitude for developers to move huge projects. Just look to cities like Santa Monica, found out of compliance and who then had no say in the size and scale of housing development because local zoning rules no longer applied.
Asserting that affordable housing will look like big-box housing projects found on the internet is simply not true. We are in an affordability crisis because we are missing housing of intermediate size — housing like the four apartments from earlier zoning rules on a corner lot down the street from my home that nestle nicely in our single-family zoned neighborhood. Those apartments are slated to be torn down and turned into a single-family home. That would work just fine under Measure V. But where will those displaced community members now live?
The affordability crisis is impacting all of us and, left unaddressed, will make our once vibrant community a shell of its former self. At a minimum we shouldn't put Measure V in place to make it worse.
Chris DeCardy is chair of the Menlo Park Planning Commission.
This story contains 660 words.
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