> > > Hello - > > My family, like many in Menlo Park,support the city-wide moratorium on nonresidential development. As well, we support the broader development moratorium for the Bayside neighborhood. > > Any commercial development should be enhancements to a suburb, with more affordable housing combined with small, independent shops, not more commercial office developments at scale. A residential suburb does not thrive with the type of atmosphere developed in Milpitas where semiconductor firms cover broad acres as far as the eye can see. With Facebook and Stanford alone active in our area, where we serve as a drive through, not as an included part of their endeavors, we're already allowing our neighborhoods to become painful areas of slower traffic. Traffic noise has risen tremendously over the past 20 years and Menlo Park in no way resembles the quiet, heterogeneous, safe, eclectic and well educated population mix from 20-30 years ago. > > Where I grew up, the universities were integral to the communities. We went to events there. The universities contributed students and faculty to community activities. The universities had an open and welcoming feel to them whereas Stanford is more and more emerging as a walled, self-sustaining megalopolis. > > There has already been substantial loss of the qualities that make Menlo Park worth living in. I hope that the council is pragmatic in understanding that many more blocks of commercial development is the antithesis of what is required to maintain a quality of lifestyle in Menlo Park. I'd rather see more walkable neighborhoods, more bikable interconnected little communities where children may travel safely, with more experimental artisanal type of businesses in little eneighborhoods so people can pick up their bread daily, shop daily for food, on foot, walk to social activities, versus us becoming cubicles in a facility that serves coffee and where we are cogs of the machine all day and all night, with no maintenance that we exist in some way to enjoy life and each other directly as opposed to work and then die and to stare at unknown people who might be our neighbors from afar, as our life experiences. > > One can look to new development in the nordic areas as one example of substantial, efficient, inclusive, healthy, and supportive community design. They even build integrated senior complexes and disabled complexes. Our neighbors and neighborhoods matter and right now we are doing nothing to build in that direction. It's a real shame. > > > > The kids don't turn out as well as result. Look at the rise in drug use in Menlo and suicides in Palo Alto. I look at the kids who have fallen out, how their are 2 tracks or maybe 3 at Menlo Atherton where kids are slotted based on their race and address (academic, middlin, and future drug dealers appear to be the 3 tracks. I've sat through one of each for each of the tracks at M-A for the core subjects perhaps 8 years ago and the automatic slotting that is going on is saddening. I've also hired nannies who were mostly in the lower 2 tiers from M-A and they had promise --- they just never had anyone tell them that and make them reach out to be more as adults. Results are a sorrow for me, since got to know them and their families well over the years they worked for us.) > > Really, children and families are fragile. We have forgotten what matters. I notice parks are not full on weekends. We don't even take off time to do BBQs in a park with our bowling teams or families. We have to decide if we're another Sunnyvale, or what Sunnyvale has become with Mountain View steaming in hard to become yet another one, or a city where we actually have a neighborhood. We should make some effort to not readily and de facto becoming an irritant "city" through which waves of cars pass each way daily during their commutes but where we are nothing as a group and where there is no infrastructure in which we have a stronger infrastructure. > > > We have plenty of funding. Most of the city dwellers are very well off. We do not need the income from the commercial developments. > > > Regards, Nora Ryan, Stanford HIls > Received on Mon Jun 10 2019 - 19:45:43 PDT
