Dear Menlo Park City Council:
I recently reached out to Drew Combs via email and he kindly responded to my letter. Mr. Combs also recently attended our neighborhood Suburban Park Zoom meeting regarding the large apartment complex that the Ravenswood School District is planning for the old Flood Park school site next to Suburban Park. Thank you, Mr. Combs, for your response to me and for attending our neighborhood meeting. Today I wanted to share my concerns with the rest of the council members for the City of Menlo Park.
I am a twenty year resident of Menlo Park in the community of Suburban Park which sits directly adjacent to the former Flood School site which Ravenswood School District is planning to develop behind Flood Park. I am writing today to express my deep concerns with the proposed 100-200 unit apartment building design planned for this site. The Almanac reported last week that the Ravenswood School District plans to lease this parcel to a developer who wants to create a 3-4 story complex of 100+ rental units on this site in an area currently zoned for single family housing. This plan is ill conceived and I would strongly encourage the Menlo Park City Council to listen to neighbors' concerns regarding the proposed project. Here is the Almanac article on this project:
https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2022/01/21/ravenswood-district-in-talks-to-lease-two-of-its-properties?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles.
My personal concerns:
1. Zoning
We are zoned for single family homes and a 100+ unit, 3-4 story apartment building will ruin the character and charm of our walkable family community. Changing our zoning from single family homes to a massive 100-200 unit structure is a radical and inappropriate step for our dead-end community with no through traffic. Please reconsider any rezoning of Suburban Park and the Flood Park School site with the current 250 local homeowners/residents in mind. Please take a neighborhood by neighborhood approach when considering rezoning in Menlo Park and not a "one size fits all" approach to adding more housing to our city. Adding 100+ rental units in our dead-end community of Suburban Park is not an incremental and thoughtful re-zoning that takes care of the current residents and their needs. Please consider a series of duplexes, a cluster of townhomes or a smaller apartment complex on this former Flood Park School site.
2. Traffic
Ravenswood's current plan for this site has all traffic entering through our quiet dead-end community off of Hedge Road and a very short street called Sheridan where there is currently an old locked gate to the Flood School site. If each apartment unit has one car, that would mean at least 100 more cars on Hedge each day entering and exiting this apartment development. This would create a huge proportional increase in traffic in our tiny neighborhood of 250 houses. Why not have traffic also enter from the adjacent Flood Park public park and Van Buren Avenue which also border this project site? Please consider requiring a three-way sharing of the traffic load from this new large apartment project with Flood Park and Van Buren Avenue as additional points of entry to the apartments and not just allowing Ravenswood's plan to add 100 cars to Hedge Road and our narrow neighborhood streets only.
3. Pedestrian Safety
We are a friendly neighborhood where kids ride bikes, two seniors push their walkers in the flat street most days in front of my home, moms exercise with strollers and dozens of folks walk their dogs and stop to talk in the street each day as they stroll. Adding 100 rental units of housing far from CalTrain means these rental residents will need cars and those 100 or more cars will increase the chance of accidents for our walkers, our kids riding their bikes to school at Laurel, Encinal, MAHS and Hillview, children drawing chalk pictures in the street and chasing stray ▒▒▒▒▒ from their driveways. Please do not overwhelm our little neighborhood with cars so we don't feel safe biking, walking and playing in the streets in front of our houses. Please consider reducing the size of this proposed project, offer more road/street entries and exit points to this apartment complex or create other strategies to reduce the high volume of cars and traffic that this project will create.
4. Parking
Where will all of these renters park? Is this complex going to provide 1-2 spaces for each unit and every rental unit or will cars spill onto our Suburban Park streets? Can the city require the developer to create enough tenant and visitor parking to keep cars on the Flood Park apartment building site so cars don't park instead in front of our homes in Suburban Park? Right now our streets shrink to one lane when cars are parked on both sides of the streets here in Suburban Park. More parked cars from tenants and guests of these new apartments will have the potential of spilling over onto our streets and narrowing passage for cars, bikes and pedestrians.
5. No Public Transit
The train is over two miles by foot from the Flood Park School site. This is not a public transit friendly location to be putting 100-200 housing units. It is unlikely that tenants will walk four miles round trip each day to hop on CALTrain to work. Apartment renters are more likely to have cars at this site. It is unwise to build high density units this far from the train. Residents will need cars to live in these new units just adding to the traffic that backs up each morning on Bay Road as people leave Suburban Park and commute to school and work.
6. Emergency Exit
Suburban Park has two small streets that empty onto Bay Road; Hedge and Greenwood. Bay Road is our only exit from our neighborhood in the event of a fire or earthquake. Please examine how another 100-200 housing unit residents only entering and exiting from Hedge Road to Bay Road would safely exit our dead-end neighborhood in the event of a fire, earthquake or other disaster. Please work with the local fire marshall to plan safe exits for both Suburban Park home owners and future renters on the Flood School site.
I have an example of why I am concerned about emergency egress. About three years ago, a traffic light went out in Palo Alto during evening commute time and cars were backed up all the way through our part of Menlo Park on Bay Road to Marsh Road. We were trapped in Suburban Park and had to wait a long time to get out onto Bay Road and inch along in traffic. A few people were pulling u-turns on Bay to get out of the back up to Marsh Road and I personally witnessed one accident of a car pulling an illegal u-turn that night and getting hit by an oncoming car. If one traffic light outage can cause this kind of traffic jam that traps us in Suburban Park, what might happen in a fire or earthquake situation when we have 100-200 MORE housing residents trying to get out of Suburban Park?
I respectfully ask you to please complete an evacuation study and create a plan of how to evacuate t all current and planned future residents out of Suburban Park in the event of an Emergency. Thank you.
7. Four Stories
The Almanac story cited a possible 3-4 story apartment building on the abandoned Flood School site which would be an eyesore to the surrounding homes which are mostly one level homes from the 1940's with some newer remodeled homes at two stories. We have nothing close to Suburban Park, which is a 3-4 stories high apartment complex on our side of the 101 freeway. This building will loom over our little houses, create an eye sore in the day time and create night time light glare into nearby homes. Can you please consider requiring shorter buildings and address light pollution and glare issues with this project? Please ask the developer and Ravenswood School District to build a project that mitigates these negative effects on the surrounding homes.
Thank you for thoughtfully considering my concerns regarding this project. I don't want to lose the friendly, walkable community of Suburban Park that my family, neighbors and friends have loved for twenty years.
Cordially,
Jill Olson
Email: JillPrimuthOlson@gmail.com
Phone: 650-330-1795
