Guest opinion: Who is Menlo Park? The answer is in our values

By Rachel Horst

A lot of people talk about Menlo Park as if we’re collectively headed to hell in a handbasket. I don’t see it that way.

Like many cities in the Bay Area, Menlo Park faces some daunting challenges, from income disparities to traffic congestion. Still, I believe we can address basic needs and quality of life without sacrificing the core of our community.

Menlo Park is a place where residents patronize local businesses with preternatural fervor. Lawn signs with value statements celebrating diversity, science, and truth abound. People fret about the safety of their streets, the reunification of pets with owners, the empathy levels of their children.

Our most recent general plan, the city’s planning document for land-use and development decisions, was written to be both the guiding star for steering the future growth of Menlo Park and a statement of these collective values.

What’s troubling to me, when I look at our recent development and transportation record, is that something is getting lost in the translation from plan into practice, from principle into policy. Instead of leading with our values, we’re leading with bad intuition, and then making excuses for it later.

What does not living up to values look like? It’s prioritizing parking over density, or pedestrian and bike safety. It’s taking a passive attitude towards both market-rate and affordable housing. It’s disregarding the character and stability of one neighborhood to preserve the character and stability of others.

Take downtown Menlo Park, which many consider central to the vibrancy and character of our community. So many conversations on projects there start and end with where folks are going to park. But there’s nothing as devoid of “vibrancy and character” as the image of cars spilling out of soulless lots into pedestrian and bike traffic. The empirical evidence shows, however, that that is what you get when planning decisions consistently focus on how to make parking easier, as opposed to on principles like sustainability or safety.

We must check ourselves: It is impossible to create parking for every single individual who lives, or who may live, here in the future. The de-prioritization (not elimination!) of parking might indeed change how some people experience coming to downtown Menlo Park — but that is for the good. The assumption that accommodating cars is a sensible downtown retail strategy, let alone an equitable one, is long overdue for questioning.

Fretting over parking also steals airtime from a more urgent problem: our regional housing crisis. To some of us who sit through daily traffic jams, the city might already feel overcrowded. But at peak commute times, most vehicles on the road are on the same route: where people work (Menlo Park) to and from where they live (not Menlo Park), which is often far away and connected only by a handful of major thoroughfares. Keeping potential residents out of Menlo Park does nothing to curb traffic in Menlo Park. It’s exacerbating the problem.

Far worse, some of our neighborhoods are losing residents at an alarming rate, and many residents are struggling just to stay housed. If we care about equity, inclusion, diversity, and empathy — as we profess to — then our discussion must place the needs of our entire community first. Menlo Park must do its part to ensure that at least some new individuals and families of varied incomes can live here, and those who already do can stay.

Other Bay Area cities have attempted to relegate growth and change to a sliver of town; it hasn’t served them well. We must also start a conversation about how to more evenly distribute housing development across all of our neighborhoods.

To accomplish these goals, housing affordability needs the full attention (read: prioritization) of city leadership, but so far, that hasn’t happened.

I know how easy, and somewhat unfair, it is to see the shortcomings of city decisions in the aggregate. And I appreciate how difficult it is for officials to go to bat repeatedly for certain principles, when there are so many vocal and conflicting interests on projects big and small. But that, I believe, is what it means to lead with values.

Local government comes down to making a countless series of decisions on often mind-numbingly small details. But these choices add up to what and who a city is. It is my view that we should expect nothing less from our city than the kind of transformative planning and policymaking required to make a meaningful dent in the challenges we face.

We have commissioners and informed citizens standing at the ready to help, and, of course, residents to serve as a resource for city leadership. New organizations, like Menlo Together, of which I’m a member, as well as many other well-informed and well-respected grassroots groups, are contributing to the robust movement towards a more unified and forward-thinking city.

With a new year, a new council, and new key staff on the horizon, this can be and must be the moment to realign the quality of our private lives with the greater good of our city. Preserving the “character” of Menlo Park is a core value, but it’s vital that, as residents and citizens, we never forget that the character of a town is only as good as the character of the people who are living in it.

Rachel Horst is a member of the Menlo Park Housing Commission and of the new community group Menlo Together. She is a senior policy analyst at University of California.