Hello Menlo Park City Council,
We have been residents of downtown Menlo Park for 18 years and it has been the highlight of anywhere we have lived. It’s an incredible community of neighbors, schools, small businesses and medical offices that know us and our children as family. It’s a walking and biking community that both feels like a small village or town and has the diversity and accessibility of a city.
We are incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to live in this gem of a paradise and have recently renovated our home to make this our hopefully forever community and neighborhood. We believe it’s important for the vibrancy of this community and continued evolution of the future of Menlo Park to embrace new ideas, new residents and developments. However, like our own planning process to change our home — that took more than a year with the city with many meetings, socializing the plans with our neighbors for feedback, permitting, assessments — we request that city take the same care for converting the parking lots near Oak Grove, behind Santa Cruz Ave to ~ 450 housing units. The parking lots, streets around us are already packed and over subscribed on a daily and hourly basis. We are frustrated that a proper traffic and parking study has not been conducted to look at this holistically and with a broader overall vision for the downtown of Menlo Park. We should be celebrating the small businesses that choose to invest and open here, not squeezing them out by removing the parking and ultimately the customers that keep them in business.
We ask that you slow down and look at this holistically with adequate hearings, studies and other potential options for this development.
Best,
Courtney Brigham & Darren Ewaniuk
933 Millie Ave, Menlo Park residents
