Dear Menlo Park City Council,
I appreciate that the decisions you face on how to identify the best use of downtown parking lots is very complex. You are subjected to i) hard mandates for housing, ii) several different important community needs for downtown services, character and vitality, and iii) State housing bonus incentives designed to coax you to override other community objectives.
When faced with complex tradeoffs such as these, I have found that a simple process can go a long way to help organize thinking and arrive at an optimal answer. First identify who you represent; I believe that is Menlo Park residents. Then ask yourselves: what would be ideal for my constituents? Then see how close you can make reality fit that ideal. The final answer is often remarkably close to the ideal.
If you decide that a portion of downtown land is surplus, it is your duty to consider how to best entitle and disposition that land to meet community objectives, not just how to meet State objectives. There are many examples of downtown districts suffering decay because the economic vitality was diluted by having too much concentration of housing occupied by families who wanted the houses but cannot afford to use the businesses that they live next to.
Understanding that, you can ask how Menlo Park can best meet its AH needs and have downtown best serve the Community? That question can generate a myriad of opportunities. For example, putting market rate housing downtown could generate extra money that could be used to place AH in a location where the land is cheaper, and therefore the City could provide more AH at a lower cost. But this is just one line of thinking about all the possibilities that you owe the community to explore before making a decision on how to use the communitys property downtown.
In other words, even though the State provides bonus incentives and mandates, you should still optimize our community objectives for downtown.
Lou Deziel
Menlo Park, CA
