Greystar triggers builder’s remedy to add 140 units to Menlo Park project

Greystar Real Estate Partners wants to employ the legal provision of builder’s remedy to squeeze another 140 homes into a 355-unit apartment complex approved in Menlo Park.

The South Carolina-based developer, led by Bob Faith,has filed plans to use the state housing loophole to add a second apartment complex to its project site at 104 Constitution Drive, CoStar News reported.

The firm’s Menlo Portal Project had been approved for a 355-unit, seven-story apartment building and a 35,500-square-foot, three-story office building with 1,600 square feet of shops. Greystar paid the city an in-lieu fee of $9.4 million to build affordable housing off-site.

But because the Silicon Valley city failed to certify its state-mandated plan to rezone for 3,000 homes by 2031 by a certain deadline, it became vulnerable to builder’s remedy. 

The remedy, a decades-old provision of state housing law, allows developers to bypass local zoning rules in cities that fall short of their required plans, provided projects include at least 20 percent affordable housing.

Greystar has now invoked builder’s remedy to add a second, 140-unit complex to its 1-acre site, about 2 miles from Meta’s 1 million-square-foot headquarters. 

It’s also on the same street as Luma, a 441-unit apartment complex Greystar opened this year, with average rents of $3,468 per month, higher than Silicon Valley’s average of $3,071.

A decade ago, rents in Menlo Park were 10 percent below the typical rents across Silicon Valley, according to CoStar.

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Demand for apartments, driven by tech employment, has this year caused the region’s multifamily vacancy to sink to a seven-year low of 8.5 percent, according to CoStar. 

Silicon Valley cities that serve as home to such tech firms Meta, Google and Apple have the highest apartment rents in the region, according to CoStar. 

Google’s home city of Mountain View has the highest average rents, at $3,310 per month, Menlo Park’s average monthly rents are $3,138 per month, up from $3,040 last year. The national average is $1,689. 

Greystar, founded by Faith in 1993, is the largest apartment operator in the nation, managing almost 1 million units, and has more than $36 billion in projects under development.

— Dana Bartholomew

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