Mayor Combs and City Council,
I enthusiastically oppose the Downtown Parking Plazas Citizens’ Initiative.
Menlo Park depends on increasing housing supply. The infamous housing
crisis is mostly a simple, basic matter of economics 101. Menlo Park is a
beautiful place with amazing weather and people, so demand for housing is
high. But, supply has barely budged in fifty years. *Now, our citys
children are priced out and cannot afford to live in their homeland. *I am
a university student and I have lived in Menlo Park since I was a child,
and Id love to live in Menlo Park forever. But as a renter, I cant afford
it.
Downtown will never be able to grow if Menlo Park does not grow. Who else
will shop there? Everyone is worried about losing customers from lost
parking, but what if downtown could gain customers? The only way is to grow
the city; else, downtown will continue to die. The problem is the delayed
effects. Increased housing supply will not impact housing prices and
downtown activity for many many years; and even then, itll only work if A
LOT of housing is built. Like 3,000 or 30,000 homes, not just 300. On the
other hand, removing parking lots has immediate and visible effects --
naturally, people focus on those effects. But they miss the bigger picture.
Yes, the city should build housing on these lots, but they also need to
build even more to see the benefits. Look at cute cities all over the
world, they have residential housing over commercial spaces -- that means,
build three more floors of apartments on top of all those vacant shops.
Those little baby apartment complexes on live oak and roble etc? I live in
one of those. It is not enough! That is prime real estate, *I walk to
downtown and dont use any parking!* Upzone them to make cute dense
neighborhoods like Elfreths Alley or other nice apartments in paris or
netherlands or japan or barcelona or vietnam. Then, more people can walk to
downtown Menlo Park without using up parking spaces -- it will address our
gobsmacking housing costs, too.
one more thing, menlo park is super close to palo alto. and palo alto is
popping with all kindsa cool places. if im driving, i might as well drive
like, ten more minutes to go to the epic cool downtown (PA) instead of the
small dead downtown (MP). so, relying on parking for downtonwn stimulation
is a bad idea. foot traffic is what you need. obviously like, ace hardware
needs a parking lot for people buying obscene quantities of dirt or
whatever ( i worked there one summer), but any cool places like posh bagel
boba (mid boba btw) benefit from local foot traffic and young ppl biking
around. palo alto has that big bryant lot, but it i bet its hella expensive
and we live in captialism so good luck getting that built in tyool2025. it
aint happeing. jsut builf the damn housing
Menlo Park is not the first city to face these issues. Will it resist
change and die, favoring the easy route today? Or will it do the hard work
of upzoning residential neighborhoods, so that it can grow vibrant
tomorrow? Can you tell I scored poorly in English class?
Thank you,
Ishan Chawla
Resident* of 783 roble ave apt 2
*until I graduate and have to move out, somewhere far far away with more
reasonable rent prices :(
