Greetings council members,

As Menlo Park grapples with its response to the State's unfunded mandate as represented by the Housing Element, I would like to share my thoughts.

The mandate to add roughly 3000 housing units translates to adding at least 7500 new residents of our city, under the conservative assumption of 2.5 residents per unit. These new residents would represent a 22% increase to the City's population, using the 2020 population count of 33,780 from the U.S. Census. Integrating such a large influx of new residents to the City is an effort that will require comprehensive planning in multiple dimensions, including not only zoning for housing, but also transportation, traffic management, access to public transit, parking, recreation, shopping, and schools. As a former member of the Las Lomitas PTA, La Entrada PTA, and Las Lomitas Education Foundation, I know from experience that our public schools already are under substantial pressure to accommodate their growing student bodies right now, paid for by an artificially low post-Prop 13 property tax base. As a former parent volunteer for the Mid Peninsula Strikers (now Alpine Strikers) youth soccer organization, I know that access to public parks and playing fields is already highly constrained. And as a 27-year resident of Menlo Park, I've seen the demand on our parks and open spaces reach an all-time high over the past 18 months.

As with the previous cycle of the Housing Element in 2014, this latest cycle has been met by our government committees with a mentality I can only describe as a frantic search for a quick fix. This quick fix has been to catalog the vanishingly small amount of publicly owned land throughout the City, and then decide where zoning can be modified to satisfy the need for new housing units, shoehorning these units in wherever they might fit. This approach strikes me as incomplete and short sighted, as it does not begin to address the other demands on our community and growing population as outlined above.

Certainly, the history of our community, like many of our neighboring communities and in fact like communities throughout our country, has been tainted by redlining and other practices that effectively told people, mainly people of color, where they could and could not live. This is an historical injustice for which we are still paying today.

I draw two conclusions. First, we cannot solve the historical injustice of redlining in a slapdash fashion as a response to the Housing Element requirements. Nor can we simply fill all the land now owned by the City with vast numbers of new housing units without regard to their locations and access to transit and services. A great deal of careful city planning will be necessary to smoothly integrate a 1/5 increase to our population within the City's existing footprint.

Second, it is clear that changes not only to zoning will be required to meet the demands of increased density, but changes in ownership of land will be required as well. These changes will mean that the City will need to begin to acquire what is now privately owned land, paid for most likely through increased property taxes on the residents and businesses in the City, to begin to meet the needs of increased population. These are the kinds of costs that are necessary to begin to repay the debt owed to those, primarily people of color, affected by past the racist housing policies we still live with.

The good news at this moment in time is that it appears likely that demand for office space is at least temporarily in decline, as the work-from-home movement has gathered steam. As a result, despite the still-high cost of land, perhaps now would be an economically advantageous time to begin to determine where privately owned commercially zoned land may be re-zoned and acquired in order to meet the demand for more housing, in both this cycle of the Housing Element and future cycles.

The recent change to district-based representation on our City Council has had the positive effect of giving voice to communities in our City that may not have been heard before. I fear that these changes have also had the negative effect of pitting one district against another, at the expense of levelheaded and holistic planning on what is best for our entire community at large.




Derek Marsano