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Meta’s package of community benefits for its Willow Village development in Menlo Park has dropped in value from over a quarter-billion dollars down to $170 million, but the city sees the smaller investment as better tailored to nearby residents.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has plans to build an ambitious development including housing, a hotel, 1.6 million square feet of offices, a 4.6-acre retail campus, a town square and a publicly accessible park in the Belle Haven neighborhood. The main development would be built along Willow Road between Hamilton Avenue and Ivy Drive across 59 acres, according to the application.
While there has been some scrutiny of the plans to build over the site of a buried Native American village, the project is moving forward with proposals for community amenities for Belle Haven.
The prior proposed package, valued at $295 million by Meta and $267 million by the city, was rejected because the Menlo Park City Council thought that the amenities favored Meta’s future employees too greatly.
The new plan is valued at $184 million by Meta and $172 million by the city. Despite the decreased dollar amount, a City Council subcommittee made up of Council member Cecilia Taylor and Mayor Betsy Nash recommended that the council move forward with the community amenities plan as revised.
“I’m excited about this, I think there’s going to be a lot of great things,” Council member Jen Wolosin said at an Aug. 23 study session meeting. “… This could add a lot of wonderful vibrancy to our town with these amenities.”
The proposal includes 1,730 residential units, of which 15% will be offered at below market rate, and a 193-room hotel. The plans also include a grocery store, bank and credit union, dining venues, job training programs, teacher housing, and publicly accessible open space.
Removed from the previous plan was a public bike and pedestrian tunnel under Willow Road, which Meta valued at $35 million and the city valued at $22 million. The tunnel was seen as offering a minimal benefit to current residents of the Belle Haven neighborhood and the subcommittee approved its removal from the plan.
The proposed mobile market and dog park were also removed from the list of community amenities. While the subcommittee approved of the removal of the dog park as it wouldn’t benefit the nearby residents, due to its proposed location off of O’Brien Drive, they said that they were disappointed in the removal of the mobile market and hope that Meta elects to provide the market until a grocery store is created.
The elevated park, the most expensive amenity in the package of community benefits, was also reevaluated and marked as being half a community amenity, as it benefits both existing residents and future Meta employees.
Twelve residents came out to voice their support of Willow Village and the amenities and asked for the city to push the project forward. One, Jenny Mitchell, said that she came out to speak not just as a resident, but as a recovering homeless resident.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the applicant is exceeding the statute requirements, and so, yes, we should just keep moving forward with this,” Mitchell said. “The scope is very comprehensive, and it will transform our region, and we will become a real leader.”
Added to the list of perks is a shuttle service throughout Belle Haven, which Nash requested be changed to be entirely electric vehicles, provide transportation for Belle Haven, Haven Avenue, and a future 432-unit development on Independence Drive, and provide transportation to the proposed grocery store.
The community benefits package also now includes $5 million in additional affordable housing funding for the city to develop low-income housing, and Meta will provide one air quality machine and one noise monitoring machine for the Belle Haven neighborhood.
The revised plan increases the office space from 1.25 to 1.6 million square feet. Any guesses as to how that will affect the next round of housing requirements? It’s likely that the 1730 housing units in this project will barely make a dent in the next allocation. And no surprise that the Menlo Together council majority finds the prospect “exciting” as they pursue their vision to transform our family-friendly city into high-density gridlock.
I’m not completely enthused about the changes. We have made a lot of use of the mobile market for several years, and it would be disappointing to see it disappear.
Why would the council even consider allowing more office space in Menlo Park when we are at such a deficit on housing? Catch up on housing and then once caught up only allow office space that includes enough housing to cover the added requirements by the office space they want to build. Facebook should be no exception, their massive office expansion is part of when got Menlo Park into this situation in the first place.
There used to be a tradition of prospective council members starting with a term or two on the Menlo Park Planning Commission. A stint on the Planning Commission educates members on zoning, navigating and adjudicating contentious housing and commercial applications and applicants. Drew Combs is the only current council member to have followed this path.
Another pre-council commission is the finance committee which also educates on the line items of revenues and expenses (naturally) and how their components and where inflows come from.
I don’t think any current MP council members (other than Drew) have these preparatory stints which help distinguish ideology from reality.
So there.
Going forward, hopefully Menlo Park considers candidates for council through clearer lenses.
@Frozen “Any guesses as to how that will affect the next round of housing requirements?”
Here’s the Housing Need Assessment for the project: https://beta.menlopark.org/files/sharedassets/public/community-development/documents/projects/under-review/willow-village/draft-eir/appendix_3.13_housing-needs-assessment.pdf
HNA’s were forced onto MP by EPA as part of its settlement over the ConnectMenlo EIR. They are a GREAT IDEA. Thank you EPA. An HNA should also be done for SRI (or any large project) but is not required by the EPA settlement.
It shows a net housing deficit of 851 units. Since the units can be targetted to different income groups it shows that there is a slight surplus for higher-incomes and a larger deficit (~1100) for lower incomes.
It does NOT pre-compute next-cycle RHNA impacts, which is something I would ask for were I king of the forest.
@Stu Soffer “There used to be a tradition …”
Three changes make your correct criticism even more pointed.
1.) The size of the projects are at the max range of anything the city has ever dealt with before. They city is processing multiple such proposals simultaneously. There’s a whole queue of many-story Tarlton Life Science projects also being processed.
2.) MP staff has many vacancies, and even were it fully populated, it is still understaffed. Contract planners are not the same as staff planners. Staff can hardly do anything beside process development applications right now.
3.) MP is still in pandemic slumber. The full impacts of development is not yet being experienced by residents. Amidst the slumber, new projects are asking for development agreements to get full entitlements to build out over a longer period of time, presumably to tie the hands of future councils to change course, once the pandemic anesthesia wears off.
This is happening up and down the Peninsula, including in nearby EPA and RWC.
@Frozen “Any guesses as to how that will affect the next round of housing requirements?”
The answer probably is worse than the conclusion of the Housing Needs Assessment. Already there is a local and regional housing shortage. Every city seems to assume that other cities will house most of the new workers that they think will fill all the office space they keep approving. It appears that the HNA assumes a similar portion of workers will live in Menlo Park in the future. Where? That’s not answered. The musical chairs game is broken.
I believe our town council could fend off big future allocations by stopping approvals of projects like this that don’t take care of all their new workers — and ideally some of those currently unhoused.
What would it cost to provide land for the 851 unit deficit? To build below market units? If the town council doesn’t require this, it isn’t stepping up to its duty.
@Iris “What would it cost to provide land ….?”
Realistically, “full mitigation” would likely require reducing employment density on the Meta site. But, the full mitigation directive could be given to Meta, and let it use its creativity and agency to solve the problem in its own way.
Meta could buy and dedicate housing facilities as Stanford did in downtown RWC. But this really robs Peter to pay Paul.
My tilt-at-windmill solution would be to have meta buy SRI land for housing, and work with SRI, (instead of Lane partners) to help SRI renovate its labs by monetizing its site for housing not office.
There is a new Senate Bill SB-6 which, I think, automatically rezones commercial sites for housing. There’s acres of low density commercial sites north of Marsh Rd. south of Belmont, west of El Camino and east of 101. Meta could buy up some land there and convert to housing.
My 2nd tilt-at-windmills solution is to convert as much of that acreage as possible to housing.