Dear City Council,
I have been following the local news the last couple of weeks about converting the downtown parking lots to housing. Our community absolutely needs more homes. However, they cannot be at the expense of existing businesses downtown and they cannot drastically contribute to traffic that already comes to a standstill throughout multiple times during the day.
I head down Santa Cruz, Menlo Ave, and Oak Grove multiples times a day. Whether dropping kids at Menlo Academy of Dance, buying groceries at Trader Joe’s, having a work meeting at Coffeebar, or parking to go into the art gallery where I work, there is insufficient parking as is. The idea of tearing out multiple parking lots is a bad idea unto itself. Adding hundreds of additional homes, which will most realistically be accompanied by 1-2 cars per apartment, will turn all of Menlo Park into an absolute parking lot with cars unable to move and no one will want to deal with parking to come and shop.
I am aghast that this project has not been thought through more thoroughly, that there has not been a traffic study commissioned, not one to look at the impact on businesses.
Please SLOW DOWN and do right by Menlo Park residents.
Thank you,
Katherine Glass (MP resident)
