Hi City Council,
I am writing as a Menlo Park resident, attorney, parent, and tax payer in response to the meeting tonight on the vote to turn three parking lots downtown into housing structures. While understand and respect the need to expand affordable housing, I strongly feel that downtown Menlo Park is the wrong location, and I would implore the council to find new locations within Menlo Park to satisfy the legal requirements. Our downtown has continuously struggled to keep storefronts full and bring in new retail and restaurants, and we are finally at a place with the opening of some new restaurants where our downtown is now getting more vibrant. Parking has always been difficult downtown and taking away the parking lots will strongly impact the businesses downtown. In addition, the small town nature of the downtown will be forever impacted negatively if we cannot park close by for local services. We cant afford our downtown businesses to shut down, we have worked so hard to bring in quality storefronts who make us feel like a community.
I have heard that tonight is only about naming these lots as “surplus” but I think this first step is going too far. Before we even consider reallocating these spaces we need many more studies on the potential impact on our community, on our businesses, traffic, parking and potential impact on our schools. I am strongly opposed to making this step prematurely, as our many of our residents. I believe minimizing this step is problematic.
Thank you for your time,
Andrea Henry
