Menlo Park apparently owns the parking lots between Santa Cruz Ave. and Oak Grove downtown. Instead of wiping the parking and building multi-story housing, consider the needs of the shops and businesses. Consider the needs of the people in Menlo Park to have a shopping district where its easy to park. Our city needs revitalization of the downtown by adding more retail space and it needs more parking to access it, not less. For years the council has been talking of a parking garage. Here is a better idea and you can see it in person.
Take a field trip to San Luis Obispo. San Luis Obispo historic district and shops were dying when big department stores were built out on Madonna Road. Go there and look at SLOs 2 brick blocks where 2-stories of shops, eateries, and a movie theatre have been built. One is on Marsh Street and called Downtown Centre - movie theater, Barnes and Noble, Jamba Juice, lots of shops whose names you would recognize. The other is on Monterey near the Mission. Here is a link to view Court Street on Monterey. https://maps.app.goo.gl/k9A9haZqCMMoJdzi6
SLO doesnt have great parkingl and should have put a parking garage below ground for the two retail centers. Our parking garages can be built 2 stories below ground (witness Palo Alto Ramona Street) with 2 stories of shops built above ground level. I believe there is even some housing included in the Court Street block in SLO so look at that when youre there.
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Revitalize Menlo Parks downtown, dont kill it. As for providing more housing, Menlo Park could certainly make it a lot easier and less expensive to encourage property owners to add ADUs. I know. Im going through the process. The people at planning and building are super helpful and arent the problem. The problems arise from expensive requirements and rules, some of which could allow for the play of common sense
Respectfully,
Louise
Louise Sturges DeDera cell 650-642-1422 Compass, 1377 El Camino Real, Menlo Park,
DRE 00409938 Louise.dedera@compass.com
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Louise DeDera >
Date: Sat, Nov 16, 2024 at 3:03 PM
Subject: Downtown parking
To: >
II strongly urge you not to drive a death knell into retail businesses on Santa Cruz Ave. by putting low income housing downtown. I have asked in the past, but I don’t think anyone responded that you look at what San Luis Obispo did downtown. They brought in Chicos, a bookstore, coffee shop,restaurants, pottery, barn, and other shops and made a two level shopping district with both wide elegant stairs, and an elevator. They also in one of the blocks put in a movie theater, the kind that can show six different movies at once in different rooms. And then parking either underneath or close by. I would suggest two levels of parking underneath and two levels of shopping above ground. This would revitalize Menlo Park.
I do hope you will consider this and I thank you for serving our city.
Louise DeDera
Sent from my iPhone
