Menlo Park residents, business owners organize opposition to city’s plan to build housing on downtown parking lots

A group of Menlo Park residents and business owners have organized a movement to urge the Menlo Park City Council to reconsider its plan, up for vote in January, to build affordable housing on three city-owned parking lots in downtown Menlo Park. 

A change.org petition created by the group, which goes by Save Downtown Menlo in the petition and on its social media handles, outlines concerns about loss of business due to reduced parking and increased congestion and loss of character due to “towering structures” that will “destroy the village charm of (the) downtown.” The petition asks the city to explore alternate city-owned sites such as the city’s civic center for affordable housing, to conduct impact and traffic studies before anything is constructed in the downtown area and to halt the declaration of the three parking lots as surplus land — a legal step that needs to be taken before development can occur.

The petition went live on Dec. 10, and as of the morning of Dec. 11, it has over 380 signatures. 

“Downtown Menlo Park is the heart of our city and requires careful stewardship to thrive as both a commercial hub and a gathering place,” says the description of the petition. “Let’s work together to responsibly provide affordable housing in a way that does not sacrifice our downtown.”

At its Nov. 19 meeting, the Menlo Park City Council voted to postpone taking a vote on a plan to build affordable housing on parking plazas in the city’s downtown, after dozens of residents and business owners expressed concerns about the plan and told the council that they felt they hadn’t been properly notified about the changes that could come to the downtown area. The council directed city staff to conduct more public outreach about the proposal. 

The council is scheduled to discuss the issue once again at its upcoming Jan. 14 meeting, and could vote to declare the three lots “exempt surplus land,” and to release a “request for qualifications” to initiate the process of choosing a developer for the site. 

Menlo Park hopes to add at least 345 units of affordable housing on three city-owned parking plazas between Oak Grove and Santa Cruz avenues by 2027, to meet its state-mandated regional housing needs allocation (RHNA) numbers for 2023-31. A feasibility study highlighted these three lots as the most suitable for housing out of the eight city-owned lots downtown as they are the most regular shape and have the fewest ownership and utility easement conflicts. 

The group’s website, savedowntownmenlo.org, argues that the council should consider using Civic Center land instead of downtown parking lots for housing — specifically the area of the Civic Center where the historic Gatehouse, the oldest building in Menlo Park, is located at 555 Ravenswood Ave. 

The city considered this option during its yearslong housing element update process that began in 2021. The council and city staff opted to not move forward with housing development on the Civic Center property or other city-owned parks “given the importance of green space and community space for all residents.” Menlo Park’s Director of Community Development, Deanna Chow, confirmed that the “entire Burgess (Civic Center) campus” was considered in the housing element process, including the Gatehouse site. 

Alex Beltramo, a local business leader and member of the Menlo Park Design District, said that the group and website are a grassroots endeavor that have been put together by a “variety of concerned Menlo Park stakeholders,” and that there is no formal structure to the group other than the common goal of “working in parallel to protect the downtown from a disastrous plan.” Beltramo, along with other members of the group, feels like the process the city used to plan for housing in downtown was opaque, and didn’t involve enough outreach to businesses and other residents. 

Much of the decision-making about where to place affordable housing in Menlo Park was done during the city’s public housing element update process. 

“The downtown parking lots meet a number of the goals and requirements for potential housing,” said Principal Planner Tom Smith at a webinar for business leaders about the downtown parking lots hosted by the city and the San Mateo County Chamber of Commerce. “Because the city owns the land, it lowers the costs of building housing, especially housing in the affordable categories that I described earlier, and that makes development more likely to be built. In addition, the sites also meet the state’s housing location factors … so it is an ideal spot to locate housing.”

During this process, the council discussed plans for housing on downtown lots across multiple meetings in 2022 and 2023, however the proposal only recently came to many residents’ and business owners’ attention in November. 

“A few weeks ago, most people didn’t even know about this … it’s important that (the council) knows that the businesses oppose it,” said Beltramo. “When you think of the housing element process, you think of rezoning, and you think of residential areas changes, you don’t think, ‘Oh, the downtown is going to be completely changed, and parking lots sacrificed.’”

The city has an ambitious timeline for development: it aims to complete the selection process for a developer and issue development entitlements by the end of 2025, and have the housing built by the end of 2027. 

City spokesperson Kendra Calvert said the city intends to use the RFQ process to solicit creative proposals from developers to find solutions that could use the three parking plazas to fulfill housing element requirements, provide replacement parking for the spaces lost and add additional features such as pocket parks or retail. 

Elisa Spurlin, the owner of Peabody Gallery on Santa Cruz Avenue, said that she thinks that some of the frustration from business owners and residents stems from a lack of understanding of the process that the city is using to solicit proposals for the parking lots. 

“They want to pull the trigger now and then figure out the details later,” she said. “Why would you declare this surplus land, and then go get development proposals and then decide how to do parking? Everything seems backwards from a business logic.”

Beltramo agreed, saying that the lack of certainty about what exactly the housing in downtown will look like “terrifies” the downtown businesses. 

“They’re not going to wait around in the hopes that somehow this could end up with convenient parking for them,” he said. “We understand that there is certainly a desire to provide as much public parking for the businesses as possible; I believe that the city council members sincerely want that. But at a practical level, it is extremely hard to understand how that would actually happen.”

An FAQ prepared by the city addresses some of the confusion over the RFQ process. According to the FAQ, the development program for each of the three sites will be determined through a collaborative process between the city and the selected developer. There will be opportunities for community input on the design throughout the process. 

Business owners and residents are also worried that the city will not require new parking in the developments to replace the 556 parking stalls that will be lost across the three lots. In its FAQ, Menlo Park says that replacement parking will be provided, but that the number, location and configuration of the spaces will be determined through the RFQ process. 

“We have heard feedback since our past couple of meetings that post-pandemic (parking) patterns are lower than what it was pre-pandemic, … so we’re looking back to the pre-pandemic numbers too, and we’ll consider that difference as we get into the development selection process,” said Smith. “If feasible, we’re also requesting that all 556 existing spaces be replaced, if all three lots are developed.”

Next steps

To initiate development, the City Council would have to declare the three lots to be “exempt surplus land.” The council had intended to vote on whether or not to designate the three city-owned parking lots as “exempt surplus land” in November. This would allow the city to begin the process of soliciting bids from developers for the redevelopment of the three parking lots. 

“If enough people speak up about it, hopefully they’ll realize this isn’t a good idea. We want people to know there’s alternatives,” said Beltramo. “This is not about whether to have affordable housing, it’s about where to put it.”

If the council opts to move forward with declaring the lots to be surplus land at that meeting, Smith said the city anticipates releasing the RFQ in spring 2025.

Menlo Park is not the only city facing opposition to proposals to place housing on city-owned parking lots. The Palo Alto city council is meeting in closed session next week to discuss possible litigation from business owners over a similar parking lot housing plan. 

Menlo Park has ramped up its public engagement about the downtown lots in anticipation of the Jan. 14 meeting. In addition to creating the FAQ, city staff hosted a question and answer forum for downtown business owners on Wednesday morning, Dec. 11, and have deployed light up signs that say “housing planned here, learn more at menlopark.gov” in the parking plazas slated for development. 

Learn more about the proposal at menlopark.gov/downtownhousing.