Dear Menlo Park City Council,

Please do not give up on our downtown as a center for commerce.

Our 200+ downtown businesses are serving people through Menlo Park and surrounding communities, but only because they are accessible by car. A ring of dense housing on the parking lots will deter anyone who does not have the luxury of being able to walk or bike into town.

The amount of parking is not the issue, as I assume the number of parking spaces for the businesses will stay the same. The issue is accessibility in general. The congestion caused by residents (whether they are driving, walking, biking, or playing) will get in the way of everyone else who trying to get in and out.

The housing presentations paint a picture of the downtown filled with baby strollers, dog walkers, kids playing, and elderly folks out and about. But that idyllic view does not mesh with people driving cars into and out of the downtown. People will not want to drive through other people’s backyard, and they will reluctantly take their business elsewhere.

The housing advocates claim that businesses will benefit from the increase in foot traffic from residents. But businesses rely on people who have come specifically to patronize their business. Unless you sell coffee or sandwiches, you gain little benefit from residents walking by every day. Rather, these residents will crowd out your actual customers.

If the downtown businesses are not easily accessible by car, they will lose their customers. And when businesses lose their customers, we will lose our businesses. We risk losing our pet store, hardware store, toy store, drug store … until Santa Cruz Avenue becomes little more than a food court for the surrounding housing.

So, please, do not pursue this monumental task of using the public parking lots for housing. Instead, provide the support which the downtown so badly needs from our City, such as:


* Beautification, Cleanliness, & Lighting
* Repaving Parking Lots
* Assisting businesses with joint marketing & events
* Painting intersections to slow traffic and give visual identity to the downtown

Let’s work on revitalizing our historic downtown to be a resource that is accessible to everyone in and around Menlo Park. Turning it into housing development would be a terrible, irreversible mistake.

Thank you,

Alex Beltramo
Menlo Park resident