The City of Menlo Park and local housing advocates want to plant 483 affordable homes on three public parking lots in its downtown — but businesses of the pricey city are pushing back.
Save Downtown Menlo Park, a pro-business group, has collected at least 3,500 signatures and raised $138,000 in legal fees to block the project, according to its website and the San Jose Mercury News. More than 115 businesses signed an online plea to the city.
The businesses say they’ll lose money if their customers have no place to park.
Kevin Cunningham, a property owner and lead organizer, said the city’s decision has worsened frustrations among downtown businesses. He suggested other places to build homes, such as in the Civic Center, two blocks away, that wouldn’t hamper downtown parking.
“One business owner said that [the parking lot issue] is not the sole reason he’s leaving, but he’s had a lot of frustrations with the city lately,” Cunningham told the Mercury News. “He said he didn’t even want to see how this plays out and is just so frustrated with doing business downtown that the decision to pursue these lots was the tipping point.”
The city, home to such tech firms as Meta, parent company of Facebook, has some of the highest housing costs in the U.S., with a typical home priced at $2.6 million, and where rents rose nearly 35 percent last year. About 420,000 people who can live cheaper elsewhere commute into San Mateo County for work.
To compel Menlo Park to build more affordable housing, the state has required the city plan to build nearly 3,000 homes by 2031.
Enter the city-owned parking lots used by patrons of the shops and restaurants in its downtown, on Oak Grove Avenue between University Drive and El Camino Real.
A sign posted by Save Downtown Menlo Park said the city wants to replace them with 483 “low-income housing units” in buildings of up to 10 stories, displacing 556 parking spots, with no studies to measure the economic impacts to businesses, schools or infrastructure.
The city has given developers until today, March 31, to submit requests for qualifications to redevelop parking plazas 1, 2, and/or 3, according to assistant city manager Stephen Stolte. “No formal plans have been submitted,” he told the Mercury News.
A city staff report said Civic Center and other parks were excluded from housing development to preserve green space and community gathering areas.
Jordan Grimes, of Greenbelt Alliance, said 3,000 units in Menlo Park may be a “drop in the bucket,” but are critical for addressing the housing shortage.
“Menlo Park has added tens of thousands of jobs over the last decade, since Facebook took root in the city, and has added very few new homes,” Grimes told the Mercury News. “So it has created this really extreme shortage.”
Advocates for unpaving the public parking lots for homes said the city needs to build housing across the city, not just shove it into Belle Haven, a historically underserved neighborhood next to East Palo Alto.
Jenny Michel, a property manager at Cushman & Wakefield and an affordable housing advocate, emphasized the importance of a downtown location for workers who commute from as far as El Dorado County, three hours each way.
She said Menlo Park businesses and their customers will adjust, citing the example of parking garages used on California Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. It’s not clear what parking garages would replace the downtown parking lots.
“There will be parking. It’ll be a phased approach,” Michel said. “People may need to walk a block for a couple of months, but that’s OK. If they really like shopping at your store, they’ll still shop there.”
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