New voices join Palo Alto’s debate over growth

Thoughtful observers of Palo Alto’s planning process have long been urging better collection and analysis of data as a preliminary step in evaluating alternative solutions to challenges we face regarding parking, traffic, housing and other elements of the Comprehensive Plan. In creating or updating a plan, the first step should be to gather the relevant information, then match the situation analysis with community values and priorities, position local goals and resources with regional realities, crunch the numbers, and ultimately propose a Vision for the city’s future.

The “horizon year” of the 1998 Comp Plan followed shortly after the Great Recession. A decision was made, regrettably, not to incur the cost of engaging in a public process to initiate the updating of a plan from the 90s in which the city had great pride. Thus, only now, with the economic recovery and intense development pressures looming, and after a voter referendum on affordable housing for low-income seniors, the city has begun to do what it might have done even prior to the 2010 horizon year of the Comp Plan, essentially six years late.

Ironically, the Council decision not to lead by going to the public has precluded Council members from rolling up their sleeves and providing detailed input to or leadership of the Comp Plan update process. Speaker after speaker last night made excellent comments — expanding the debate, illustrating possibilities, exposing valid concerns — and one could sense the Council members’ eagerness to have their own few minutes at the microphone. It makes one curious about Wednesday’s special meeting.

The “ready, fire, aim” sequencing of the Comp Plan update has put the city staff in a very difficult position, particularly as it faces the legal requirement for preparing an Environmental Impact Report on a Comp Plan update which hasn’t even entered the starting blocks with a consensus regarding how to manage change or control growth. This caused more than one person to urge simply hanging on by our fingernails to the venerable plan from the last century. Other public speakers, together with Council members who were restricted to “clarifying questions” hinted that as yet unidentified scenarios might be far more appropriate to the actual challenges and opportunities for Palo Alto’s future.

The City Council assigns one of its members to act as liaison to each of the boards and commissions, except the Planning & Transportation Commission, which provides a PTC liaison to attend Council meetings. Last night I served this role and listened to important commentary from the many public speakers. Gennady Sheyner’s latest article alludes to the five years of work by the PTC with the staff to review and propose updates for each of the Comp Plan elements. As noted in the article, when this work and each these drafts were reviewed in public hearings, aside from a handful of tireless residents who provided consistent support, the PTC hearing chambers were virtually empty.

It is gratifying that the public is now engaged, although disappointing that such engagement was not the first step in the process. There is a not inconsiderable risk that belated public arousal, and even tardy intervention by the Council, will precipitate a decision simply to start over, or give up and put a new expiration date on a 20-year old document, due to what Council Member Burt recognized as the “consequential nature of the Comp Plan.” In my comments, I am attempting to focus solely on the update process and not on the vision, policies, programs, or content of the Comp Plan. Of course, these are what really matter to the residents and the future of the city.

The 1998 Comp Plan begins with acknowledging that “each of us” may have a different vision for the city’s future, but that we share common values and aspirations. A few of the speakers last night made courageous attempts to articulate a Vision for the city. No single Vision will please all of us; however, a clear focus and a strong Vision would be instrumental in keeping Palo Alto special through the 2030 horizon year of the updated Comp Plan.

“after a voter referendum on affordable housing for low-income seniors”
There was no referendum on affordable housing for low-income seniors, that was illegal bias inserted into the ballot by the City Attorney. The act of law that was at issue was zoning, and had we an impartial ballot process, the referendum would have correctly asked whether to allow the many ways the law had been changed. Low-income seniors were not being voted on and using them was a cynical ploy by Council and developers. (I wonder if there’s a term, like Brangelina there – City Developcils …? Sounds like developer shills?)

Hey Palantir – there’s lots of space in Nevada, and it’s looking a lot like a third world country these days, I’m sure you’d be most welcome. New building will not make it easier or cheaper to live in a desirable place, move to
Manhattan if you don’t believe it – it only raises average rents and pushes out more lower-income residents who can’t afford to live there anymore. If you like big cities, there’s lots of room in San Jose.

Most residents have learned to avoid the circus. We won’t put up with a hijacked output, though. The Developcils appeared not to have learned anything.

Great to hear about all of the constructive comments last night.

Here’s a blog post I published yesterday on the topic. Sounds like it may be roughly in line with the heretofore silent majority:

http://numeratechoir.com/how-to-bring-innovative-not-insanely-wealthy-people-back-to-palo-alto/

At “What of the duties of civic life?”

Thank you. My words, exactly. They are ruining at because they are here for the short term and want to walk away not empty-handed. Otherwise, what is the motivation behind the insanity?

Palo Alto is not an isolated housing and jobs market. The market includes the entire Bay Area. Building more market rate housing in Palo Alto will not lower the price so that the Palantir employees who have been priced out of the market can suddenly afford to live in Palo Alto. The Palantir employees should collectively bargain for hire wages from their employer if they want to be able to continue to live in an expensive community like Palo Alto.

The comments along the lines of “why don’t you all just move somewhere else if you want density” all seem to miss the essence of what Palo Alto is. Palo Alto, given its proximity to Stanford (and its supply of young workers and nascent research), Sand Hill Road (and its VCs), and Research Park (and its legions of experienced tech workers) is a natural mecca for start-up companies and has been so for decades. Sun, Facebook, Tesla, HP, XEROX, Pinterest, Paypal, VMware, Apple, Google…. they all spent at least the early parts of their existence right here. If you kill off that mecca, it’s entirely uncertain where or even if another place could have such an abundant confluence of factors that lead to such an incredible amount of entrepreneurship.

By strangling this place, you are not only harming Palo Alto, but you are threatening the success of Silicon Valley as a whole. Silicon Valley – which is most of what allows California, if it were to be a country, to have the 5th highest GDP in the world.

Consider that other states and other countries have poured billions of dollars into creating their own “Silicon Valleys” and have largely failed because getting all the necessary elements in place is a very difficult chicken and egg problem.

If the only value you see in Palo Alto is that it’s a low-rise pretty suburb- THAT can easily be replicated elsewhere. The heart of Silicon Valley can’t.

> By strangling this place, you are not only harming Palo Alto,
> but you are threatening the success of Silicon Valley
> as a whole. Silicon Valley

What gobbledygook! Most of the companies in Silicon Valley did not start in Palo Alto. Obviously some of them did—but there is very little magic about this place that causes companies to start here—other than the nearness to the Stanford Campus. Most companies quickly realize that the town is too small for them, in every conceivable way. HP started here. But it’s now a worldwide company, and there is every reason to believe that at some point it will move out of Palo Alto also. It’s hard to believe that any company that starts here will not move on–having contributed nothing much in the way of public benefit to the town.

Given that most tech startups fizzle out before the get to be very large—there is little value destroying the fabric of this town to allow the VCs and developers access to land that they will use to create wealth for themselves—at the expense of the rest of us.

Mark Michaels trys to spin Measure D as “after a voter referendum on affordable housing for low-income seniors”. WRONG! It was a voter referendum on increasing zoning density along a safe schools route as many posters on other threads have stated. And that has always been the problem with many of the Planning & Transportation Commissioners – they spin, and they don’t review the effects of past decisions.

I don’t see why Planitar employees must all live in Palo Alto. Do all Google employees need to live in Mountain View? all LinkedIn employees in Sunnyvale? all Cisco employees in San Jose/Milpitas? all Oracle employees in Redwood Shores? of course not. And given the average length of employement at a start up, in 4 years many of these Planitar employees will be working for a different start up, probably at a different city. By this logic are they expected to move when they change to a different company?

Plantir insisted on moving into a very dense and congested small city and now is contriving to push for even more development. The act of sending their employees to the council event was so contrived and predictable, and I was not surprised to read someone on this thread claiming that the “residentialists” sounded ridiculous and resembled an old cantankerous neighbor wanting the neighborhood children to keep quiet.

There are many depressed areas in the country that would greatly benefit from a company like Plantir relocating in their midst. I would strongly encourage Plantir and other Valley companies to relocate to such areas and help those who need help. Palo Alto has already too much wealth as it is and is grossly overdeveloped and overpopulated. What’s goof for Plantir and its employees is definitely not what’s good for Palo Alto.

These voices and many of the faces are not new. They all kept referring to “Mr. Levy’s email.”

They sat together, knew each other, and in the case of one group they seemed to be the 20 somethings children of a developer who recently had something appealed, then approved by council – not coincidentally by those young voices from the family who spoke at council.

More importantly, some of the council members looked at them with a mix of recognition and deep longing for their words.

The gist of what they all said was.

1. I may have to move from Palo Alto because I can’t afford the rent increases. One lamented that he was forced to move to the border with Menlo Park.
2. I would like to see more housing and tall buildings “on University and Cal Avenue.”
3. I’m upset and dismayed that Palo Alto is not doing something for me to be able to “live where I work.” One also asked for more jobs where she lived.
4. We need a more aggressive growth option, which Pat Burt seemed to tee up for discussion before the public comment. Burt seemed almost giddy about this whole topic, and went weird on Sheperd for some unknown reason. I’m not a fan of Sheperd necessarily but Burt and his thundering voice needed some attention apparently.
5. It is the Council’s “civic” duty to plan for more aggressive growth.
6. The benefit of having more housing is that the businesses can do better at night.

Keene who looked back at the young speakers with the same mix of pleasure and excitement that Klein usually reserves for the voices for growth. Stephen Levy had held a “leadership” event for young voices in Palo Alto, I would not be surprised if these are the graduates of that program.

Adina Levin who has been outspoken about the missing young biking walking voice in the city’s growth plans was also there.

Given that “Our” Palo Alto is a mystery to the average resident in Palo Alto, it is not a coincidence that these “new voices” came out in full force.

If the Weekly is actually reporting, they could at least draw the connections more objectively.

Kate Downing@ Ventura –

when you use the words “we want” six times in one paragraph, in my opinion, that’s entitlement.

My impression is you want, without having to earn it, and are expecting for everyone else to pay for it through taxes, and giving up their quality of life.

> It’s also not clear to me how you can say that companies
> leave without contributing any benefit to the community.
> They and their workers pay taxes just like everyone else in Palo Alto.

Actually ..they don’t. Let’s look at a few facts, OK?

Companies that own their own land, and offices pay property tax. Companies that lease do not pay property tax directly. Some portion of their rental goes to paying the costs of owning/maintaining the property—but it’s unlikely that anyone associated with startups that lease/rent have a clue how much of their rental ends up going to the City to fund necessary services.

Moreover, State and Federal income taxes go to those respective agencies. There is some trickledown to City governments, but these dollars are very small.

Local companies do pay: sales tax, and UUT (Utility Users Tax) and possibly a few other mostly hidden taxes—but for the most part, no matter how much money the company makes—virtually none of it goes to Palo Alto via direct taxes.

Employees who live in other towns don’t pay rental fees in Palo Alto, or property taxes—so the flow of dollars is limited to those who actually live here. Renters don’t pay property taxes directly, so the number of dollars they contribute is also thought to be rather small. So, when bonds are floated to pay for infrastructure—most companies, nor renters, contribute in a meaningful way. The burden for these expenses falls directly on property owners.

It pays to fully understand the how Cities in California are funded. It’s pretty clear that most people in this town don’t really have much of an idea as to how this mechanism works.

Wow, quite the negative reaction to people finally standing up to those who want to micromanage their own personal housing choices… I get it though, if they can afford to move here and end up displacing someone, its the evil tech money, if they can’t afford to live here, its “entitlement”. I’m not a Palantir employee, but if there are any in this thread I suggest not spinning your gears trying to reason with the “residentialist” types.

This report must have been written in haste, or it was a canned piece to say there are “new voices.”

Missing is the fact that Stanford had a spokesperson, who brought up the “regional” growth plans. Translation – Stanford’s growth plans.

Connecting the dots – the youth political voice plus Stanford + Stephen Levy + Council pressured to do their civic duty = property rights out the door.

It’s good to get this out in the open. But at least be honest.

> Wealth isn’t created here at the expense
> of the current residents of Palo Alto – the residents
> of Palo Alto and the shop owners in Palo Alto have benefited in
> terms of property value growth,

Hmm .. according to the PAUSD, and its supporters, it’s the PAUSD that has been responsible for creating the high housing prices.

And in terms of shop keepers—have you noticed that downtown Palo Alto is slowing becoming devoid of small, mom-and-pop retail? Hasn’t been much of that for a while. Some of the changes are due to technological change. For instance, digital cameras have driven analog cameras out of town, and off the stage. Amazon has driven many small book shops onto the pages of history. Property owners are always looking for the best return on their money—so renting to startups waiting in line for space is what’s been happening.

It’s very hard to actually guestimate how startups have impacted shop owners. However, when you see that a hamburger costs more than ten dollars at noon—it’s pretty clear that the startups have driven up the cost of everything. And it’s only a matter of time before that burger will cost fifteen dollars, too!

>Why should Palantir employees be demanding from me, a complete stranger for subsidies to live in Palo Alto?

That should be quite telling to most outside observers, now residents construe allowing market rate housing to be built the same thing a “subsidy”.

Oh, I forgot, University and Cal Avenue are closer to Stanford, and would be prime real estate for the developers.

Food Courts are nicer there too.

Hey Kate. You really have no idea about property taxes, do you?

By the way, you say you work at VMware, but your name doesn’t appear in the corporate employee database. What’s the deal with that?

I got married. Maiden name is Vershov.

High-tech workers Downtown populate the restaurants but not the retail shops. They are not the natural customers of these shops. The over-crowding, traffic congestion associated with the office over-development probably dissuades the real retail customers from coming Downtown. The massive office over-development, out-of-scale, out of character architecturally,under-parked, and the associated traffic, parking
overflow into the neighborhoods, the cut-through traffic, the construction zones, the hidious painted intersections and sign clutter- the City of Palo Alto is transformed and ruined. Then the final blow to the outlying neighborhoods- no compliance to Single-Family Review Guidelines for two-story houses with narrow setbacks, huge FAR’s, one car garages with 6+ bedroom houses and dewatering for basements with the water flowing to the Bay while residents are warned about new water conservation measures in effect for them due to “exceptional drought” conditions.

I am with Mark Michael, or this version of him, above, in that I am concerned with process, perhaps more than what the outcome is. In that context I would say that 75 to 100 people at the Elks Club scoping meeting or whatever is hardly a mandate. Even 30 speakers last night, and about 20 of them were this so-called “new voice” should not be over-emphasized in that these changes — fairly radical, and part of a pattern, a commercial real estate rout and push for dense housing — will impact thousands of Palo Altans, who already live here.

There seems to be a sense that our General Plan is obsolete — Michael says it is from a previous century. It is not. We use it all the time, it guides all our policy, like our Constitution (as my venerable college in dissent, 2009-2013, Tim Gray said last night).

Palo Alto has a 120-year continuity; Democracy has a 240 year continuity; they are not obsolete. But we have to push back and resist the significant recent pressure to change by special interests, the builders. Ninety-six percent of those pulled by PAN now agree with this.

Horizon year? The sun also rises, my friend.

I’d like to see ubiquitous on demand cars, to satisfy the regional transportation needs. Disappointingly, bikes only work as long as you are healthy. But when you get sick, have to care for someone-like kids or the elderly, or carry a lot of stuff, you’ll be needing that car.

Regarding development: I’ve raised a family here, and I would love for my son and his friends to be able to live here. But I’ve overcome the fantasy of ever making Palo Alto into a more affordable town. I sadly now believe that is impossible. Here’s the reason: those of you who have been successful at changing the world have also inspired the city to market itself as “the place to be”, and thus the world’s wealthy migrate here and make it ever more unaffordable. Just last year a property on El Camino listed at 6.5 million sold a month later for 9. I have been told by sources who are in real estate that this community–in fact the whole Bay Area– is used to launder money because the investment in real estate is so lucrative and safe. In essence what was a community in a beautiful region has become an investment bank, and those of us who care about the community mourn that change: the Palo Alto we care about has become an international phenomenon. We are not dealing with a textbook supply and demand condition. And my heart is hurting, not for “old ways” (which is a convenient marginalization tactic) but for the lack of capacity to offer more ease to people I care about.

Building more will increase migration, thus increase the cost of living so it STILL won’t be affordable: New York is a good example of more building resulting in higher cost of living. In Kansas City it might be different. Or Las Vegas. But this is Palo Alto and the vision of more affordable living and working spaces is not realistic as long as this is seen as an international destination for “the good life.”

Would that it were not so.

As a resident, I’d like to be held as someone who cares about our community, about family life. So I’m asking for understanding that this lovely place is worthwhile as a community. Not as a worksite with “workforce housing” (which is a term I find particularly offensive and dehumanizing).

What choices can be made? Limit the number of jobs here. Don’t build more commercial space. Spread the wealth to other communities, hopefully those that have abundant and reliable water supplies.

I think the article may be in error when it says the next discussion of this will be at the council meeting at 7pm Wednesday. This agenda says the meeting starts at 6pm:
http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/43242

Noticed a couple of typos– most important correction:

It’s hard to believe that another thousand students could be accommodated without another reasonably massive building program.

Since when did newly employed tech workers begin to think they had a right to live in Palo Alto?

Since when did tech companies begin to think it is was a good idea, to locate in a place where their employees can’t afford to live?

Dear Ms. Downing, I simply have to respond to your posts. I wonder if you realize how spoiled and childish the justification of your “wants” sound. I don’t blame you for having wants. We all have wants, but wants aren’t rights. At various points in my career I would have loved to live closer to were I worked too, but I never thought of it as a right. When I worked in San Francisco, I would have loved to live in Pacific Heights so I could walk to work and good restaurants, but I couldn’t afford it. When I worked on Sand Hill Road, I would have loved to live in Portola Valley so I could get to work in 10 minutes, but I couldn’t afford it. Somehow life went on. I found good places to live that I could afford, found ways to commute and advocated for better public transit, and was happy living within my means. Now I live in Palo Alto, but I’m thinking I’d like to live in Atherton where they don’t have as much traffic and seem to have kept growth in check, but, guess what, I can’t afford it. I suppose I could check out their next town hall meeting and complain about that. Would you seriously expect the local residents to rally to satisfy my wants? Wants aren’t rights.

Kate,

The problem is the revenue grows linearly with every new resident, but the “externalities” accelerate out of control. Trying to win the growth game, is like trying to beat the house in Vegas. You can go on a winning steak for a while, but in the long run the house always wins. In the end, the only winners in the growth game, are the real-estate developers.

What I’m advocating for isn’t just mere “wants.” What I’m advocating for is sustainable development.

Reducing our land use footprint in total (minimizing runoff- the greatest threat to water purity, and leaving more land to act as a preserve and a natural filter- marshes, trees, etc.), minimizing the use of cars, minimizing the paving of forests and parks for roads, minimizing watering and fertilizing lawns, benefiting from the energy savings that come from living in condos instead of houses- all of these are basic principles that cities around the country have embraced as part of a path toward a sustainable, environmentally friendly living.

So, yes, we can keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them because apparently the people who bought into this neighborhood at lower prices and locked in particular policies decades ago think that the opinions of newer residents matter less than theirs (and I am a resident, so this isn’t just about my “wants” – it’s about my own vision for a community I’m already a part of)…. or we can recognize that policies like the ones we currently have are directly contributing to global warming, pollution, run-off, deforestation, and all the human illnesses associated with them. So the question for everyone who wants to freeze everything in time is- how do you propose to make this city sustainable over the long term?

I don’t see that happening so long as this city 1) retains an imbalance of housing and office space and 2) so long as it’s not possible for people to be able to walk from home to work and to the services they need. So long as those two problems persist, your policies are going to keep encouraging a car-centric culture and all the environmental problems that that brings.

The more a city is developed, the less affordable it becomes. Look at Manhattan, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles-and hundreds of similar examples. Every additional person moving to Palo Alto cost the city about 2500 dollars more than he pays in taxes. A nearby house on my street that a few years ago wouldn’t fetch a million dollars was sold for over 5 million dollars with multiple bidders and has been standing empty for months because the buyers lives abroad. International investors and possibly parties wanting to launder money are jumping on nearly every Palo Alto property for sale and are outbidding everybody else, which would happen even if we allow more housing density, so even those who believe they have a right to imaginary affordable housing in one of the hottest real estate markets in the world, would not get their wish to live in Palo Alto, but those who do will be the real losers because whatever is left of this city will disappear in a tsunami of traffic, overcrowding, noise and pollution.

To everyone saying that Kate’s desires are unrealistic, selfish and even childish: take a hard look at yourself and check your privilege.

If you have a home that you bought years ago, how much is your mortgage? Probably less that Kate and her husband pay in rent in the Ventura neighborhood.

How much do you pay in property tax on it? Probably much less than what she and her husband might if they buy a one bedroom condo on a busy street.

I say this as someone who owns a home in Mountain View that would probably rent for 3x what we pay in monthly mortgage + property taxes. My husband and I probably make less than Kate and her husband. We were just lucky enough to get here first. It probably helps that we’re over 50, not under 30.

It’s not at all unrealistic to increase the housing in Palo Alto, especially if it’s done along transit corridors and done along with a comprehensive improvements in transit, biking and walking.

And from my own selfish point of view, I know that when that time comes where I’m too old to drive or bike comfortably, but too healthy to need a care facility, I will be first in line for a condo on El Camino. Living there, I be able to take the bus to the grocery store, the drug store, to my doctor and to dining and shopping downtown. When it comes to housing, what’s good for the young is often good for the old as well.

@boscoli

If pricing is all about how developed a city is, then please explain how Palo Alto has prices higher than Manhattan ALREADY.

Seems to me pricing is driven by supply and demand. If housing stocks are short and demand is high, prices are high. And that’s true of places limited in space by geography (Manhattan, Hong Kong), as well as places limited by housing policy.

As for concern about international investors- frankly I share them as well. I don’t want to live in a community of empty houses either. But again, if you want to put restrictions on international buyers, then that’s something worth talking about. But I see that as a separate conversation from growth in general.

I feel like everyone has made good points about things to consider. I think the point about making sure we have enough money to cover externalities is a good one and worth working on. I agree that international investors who don’t actually live in the neighborhood also merit consideration. These are all really good points and it makes sense to work on them as we work on our plan for the future. But if we can fix or plan to fix these sorts of concerns, then they are actually vital steps in our plan forward and not a blockade.

I think it would be really useful if we could concretely brainstorm what the steps need to be. Growth is coming. The state projections are clear and that population growth will affect us even if we don’t add any development- more people will cram into offices and homes together and more people will drive through our neighborhoods going to wherever they need to go. We already see the rise of roommates and multi-generational housing. If we spend a lot of time trying to deny the future or argue against it instead of coming up with concrete steps for fixing the issues that vex us about the future, we will all have missed an opportunity for proactively shaping this community in a positive direction. And once missed, I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to undo what will befall us.

@ Janet: Your point may be somewhat correct, but you fail to recognize that the current homeowners were new homeowners at one point and went through the same circumstances. It all evens out in the end. This is the same process that every town in California goes through – this is not unique to Palo Alto at all.

I am thankful that the *residents* of Palo Alto have the final say in all of this. Non-resident employees or commercial land owners can talk/whine all they want – but they can’t vote for the CC. And they can’t vote on the next “Measure D” — which will definitely come up if the current CC makes a decision counter to the residents’ concern for too much growth, height limits, etc.

@Crescent Park Dad, It’s always a struggle to buy a home, but it’s definitely harder now than when we bought 20 years ago. The numbers: market rate for our home is 4.5x what we paid for it in 1993. I’m estimating that Kate and her husband’s tech salaries are 1.5-2x what our similar high tech salaries were 20 years ago.

So I’d say it’s much tougher for them to buy now, and a lot of it is simple supply and demand. Low supply inflates prices in a high demand market.

@Orchestrated, Considering that I’ll be selling a 3 BDR home, I think I have a good shot at buying a 1 BDR condo in the same market, assuming that they get built in the transit-rich location I’m looking for.

The issue of international investors is very much relevant. They will just outbid, as they have been doing for a while now, almost everybody else (unless Larry Elison decides he want to buy a house in Palo Alto), so even if Kate gets her wish and there is a tsunami of new housing units, they will outbid her and buy up the new housing units and Kate will still not own a house or condo in Palo Alto. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, most young people who work in Manhattan don’t live there, and many don’t even live in the state of New York. They just can’t afford Manhattan, because no matter how much development takes place there, it just keeps pushing real estate prices up. Kate needs to realize that there are only so many sardines one can keep cramming into a sardine can. Palo Alto needs LESS residents, not more, we have passed the full capacity level quite some time ago.

It sounds like these young techies feel entitled. They’d probably like to have rent control in Palo Alto, if they could. Why do they think that they should be able to live in one of the most expensive cities in the USA, while still in their 20’s? They want handouts. It’s all about “them.” Maybe their rich employer should pay them a wage that would afford them to live in Palo Alto.

@Kate Downing: You wrote, “We want to be able to live and work in the same place. We want to not have to drive a car. Most of us don’t even want to own a car. We want to be able to walk from work to a restaurant where we can eat with our families. We generally don’t even want houses- we’re happy in apartments and condos where we can form the sort of neighborly communities where it’s normal to knock on a neighbor’s door for a cup of sugar.”

YOU want. Not everyone wants what you want. And tomorrow you might change your ideas of what you want today. Believe it or not, there are plenty of neighborly communities throughout Palo Alto where it’s normal to knock on a neighbor’s door for a variety of things. Should we give up what WE want for what YOU want?

Seems like you’re the one who feels a sense of entitlement.

@Mike Greenfield: You wrote in your blog, “… the city needs to increase its supply of both housing and office space, so that costs will decrease and more not-insanely-wealthy people can be accommodated.”

This supply/demand argument is routinely made for more housing. But what developer is going to pay $4M – $5M per acre to build low- to middle-income housing? It’s only through government intervention like the CA Density Bonus Law that developers are willing to trade a few BMR units for extra height or fewer parking places.

How many housing units do you calculate would have to be built before prices would come down?

BTW, Mountain View is going through exactly the same growth stress as Palo Alto. Just read the Mountain View Voice.

> “… the residents of Palo Alto and the shop owners in Palo Alto have benefited in terms of property value growth, safety, and revenues from workers spending money here.”

Long-time businesses are being forced out as landlords tear down buildings or remodel with the goal of attracting startups and chain stores. Just off the top of my head, in the past year we’ve lost:
Downtown:
– CA Yoga Center, Cowper Street (40 years),
– University Art, Hamilton Avenue (65 years)
CA Ave:
– Cho’s Mandarin Dim Sum (35 years)
– Farmers Insurance (45 years)
– Palo Alto Violin (23 years)
– Bargain Box (48 years)
– Avenue Florist (25 years)
– Know Knew Books (25 years)

Other people have posted some essential truths that need to be emphasized:

> “Palo Alto is not an isolated housing and jobs market. The market includes the entire Bay Area. Building more market rate housing in Palo Alto will not lower the price …”

> “Building more will increase migration, thus increase the cost of living so it STILL won’t be affordable: New York is a good example of more building resulting in higher cost of living”

Ditto San Francisco, in spades. Many long-time residents are being evicted from their homes after 30 – 40 years because landlords want new high-paying tenants. Read the SF Chronicle. Low rent districts which once housed low-income families, non-profits, artists’ lofts are being transformed by tech companies. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I guess it depends on which side of the fence you sit.

To all the cry babies at Palentir:

Why don’t you contact one of the founders of Palentir, Joe Lonsdale, and ask him for a raise? After all, Joe Lonsdale bought a $8,250,000 home in Woodside in 2012.
He seems to be paying himself enough money to live quite comfortably in this area.

Mark Weiss: Apologies for not supporting non-Facebook comments. I use Facebook for commenting because people tend to be more civil when using their real names; case in point this site 🙂 Glad you are using your real name here!

Pat: unless Palo Alto were to increase its population many times (i.e., to several hundred thousand), I doubt it will become affordable to low-income people. But I could see the following scenario with less restrictive zoning:

— small developer buys a teardown on a 7000 square foot lot for ~$2M
— spends ~$2M to build four 1500 square foot condos/townhouses, 2-3 stories high (certainly not skyscrapers)
— sells each of the houses for $1.25M, a 25% profit
— with $250K down, mortgage payment for this new property is ~$6K/month — significantly less than the ~$10K/month for a $2M house
— rental costs could be around $3800/month for the house, as opposed to $6000/month otherwise
— I doubt neighborhood property values for existing houses would be affected significantly. If anything, home values for houses on large lots might go up slightly, because of the option to build additional units.

@Robert: You wrote, ‘… now residents construe allowing market rate housing to be built the same thing a “subsidy”.’
What do you consider “market rate”? Currently, it seems to be what mid- to low-income (and even Palantir employees) can’t afford.
So let’s talk “affordable housing.” Who do you think pays for that? Taxpayers. It’s subsidized. Check out http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-mayor-calls-for-huge-boost-in-affordable-5521549.php “Mayor Ed Lee is proposing funneling $94 million in public money over the next two years into constructing affordable housing in San Francisco as the city grapples with stratospheric rents and increased evictions driven by a booming economy that is also causing a surge in tax revenue.”
@Getting Smart: Thank you for your post to Kate.

@Kate: I don’t know if you get a property tax bill, but there are many additional “taxes” on it: School bonds, sewer bonds, various other fees to pay for infrastructure and other costs that come with growth. Nothing is free.

You wrote, “What I’m advocating for is sustainable development.” Please check out this document: Dimensions of Sustainability
http://www.exurbiachronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Dimensions-of-Sustainability-Report-for-Elected-Officials.pdf

Ben Lerner,

Forgive me, but I’m not sure I follow. How would your 3-part solution stabilize housing prices at all? You claim it will, but then provide no explanation or evidence. I would think that freezing supply in the face of ever-increasing demand would cause the price of existing supply to increase further, wouldn’t it?

As for your comment about taking Caltrain, due to our region’s inadequate regional transportation (buses, shuttles, etc.) a Caltrain rider must both live and work near Caltrain to make it a truly viable and daily alternative. If Mr. Ash lives a few miles away from a Caltrain stop in a neighboring city, rather than drive to Caltrain, pay for parking at the Caltrain stop (or park in the surrounding neighborhood), and then take a 10 minute ride into Palo Alto, Mr. Ash is likely to just drive to work. If there’s available housing near where he works, he can simply walk.

Orchestrated, not new:

Please read Mr. Lerner’s post to understand the context of the comments I made, rather than pulling one statement out of context to distract from the point being made. Mr. Lerner took issue with Mr. Ash’s comments about driving to work, and speculated that since Mr. Ash works near Caltrain, Caltrain should therefore be a viable mode of transportation for him. My point was that we don’t know the specific address where Mr. Ash currently lives now that he no longer lives in downtown Palo Alto. He may live miles away from Caltrain in another city, in which case Caltrain is not likely a viable transportation option.

As for your question, I imagine “walking distance to work” depends on each individual circumstance. I’m open to other opinions if you want to offer one up.

Thank you.

@Sunshine You may be surprised to hear that people can actually live without owning a car in places other than New York City. If you’re willing to ride a bike a handful of miles for short trips and to connect the gaps in longer-distance transit like Caltrain, it’s quite easy here on the Peninsula.

As short-term car sharing like ZipCar and Car2Go expand it will become even easier. And then there are families that share one car between two or more family members, saving what AAA estimates as over an average of $8,000 a year.

How do I know? Because in the last 2.5 years I’ve only put 3500 miles on my car. I ride my bike for short trips and take my bike on Caltrain for longer trips, including my daily work commute to San Jose. It’s not that hard for a significant percentage of the population, even in Palo Alto.

Long Time Resident,

My 3-part solution is based on managing demand for housing and offices, in contrast to current mainstream policies of encouraging job growth to where its out of balance with housing. I don’t view Palo Alto as having a “housing shortage”, what it has is a jobs-housing imbalance. And to maintain livability, I want to solve this imbalance on the housing-demand side.

Regarding CalTrain, you don’t need to live and/or work near it to use it — you can bike to/from the train and use the bike cars. I’ve been doing that for years. My home and office are 4 miles from the nearest express CalTrain stations, and biking is a great solution to the otherwise lacking public transit.

On the “walking to work” topic, it’s often said that if only we would place lots of jobs and lots of housing near each other, everybody would walk to work and the world would be sustainable forever after. Realistically, what would happen is that most of those jobs will be filled by workers commuting from elsewhere, mainly by car, and most of the residents of that housing would commute to jobs elsewhere, mainly by car. Young singles may opt to find housing close to their jobs, but that model breaks as life progresses. People get married, have kids, buy homes, and become tied to their community, while jobs change and move around. People change employers and work locations much more frequently than they move where they live.

I hope that helps.

Long Time Resident,

The statement that I pulled out of your comment happens to be very important – the viability of public transportation as usable for transportation, and then extending this concept to growth policies for Palo Alto.

It seems to me that there is no need to have housing on University and Cal Ave except for the people who -as you suggest (to be viable) – must work near Caltrain.

Which tech employers are near Caltrain? Are there some numbers on commuting patterns?

@Orchestrated,
You are so right. Gennady Shayner is a great writer but he seems to have a blind spot when it comes to shiny young things.

Since Maybell, nobody really buys the astroturf. (There’s that turn of phrase again…)

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful…” – George Orwell

Improving Schools in Palo Alto

We have three high schools. What is Stanford agrees to take top 7 from each school and give them full scholarship regardless of income. They can afford it.

Then our youngsters will aim high and study harder to get into Stanford; our School Board has to help get the best teachers; our parents have to let their sons/daughters perform; our schools will get the recognition; home values will go up; parents will be happy; What do you think?

Who can influence Stanford to admit 7 top students from each high schools?
City Council? Mark Z?

This is how we keep Palo Alto highly ranked for good schools and value for being in a ‘heaven on earth – Palo Alto’.

respectfully

In Silicon Valley’s computer cluster, skilled employees move rapidly between competing firms, aka job hopping. Even if Kate gets her wish for a condo near CalTrain, she and her husband will very likely change jobs several times, so the wish for a life without cars is not realistic. Young people like Kate who crave development, density and an urban life style belong in San Francisco, assuming they stay in the Bay Area. They can use the train to commute to work, but enjoy the city life they crave so much. Palo Alto is not a big city and if we can help it, will never become one. Palo Alto has always been expensive. I purchased my house here years ago because I could afford to after years of saving and managing my money carefully and making many sacrifices to be able to be a Palo Alto home owner, I never expected or wanted the residents of Palo Alto to destroy their city character and diminish their quality of life in order to make buying a house here more affordable for me.

The mantra “development is coming and is unavoidable” is a clever little gimmick by the developers and those who have no problem destroying this formerly great small city. Development is not unavoidable. Palo Alto has been developed to the max over the last few decades, and now we are maxed out. Look somewhere else.

The meeting tomorrow Wednesday, Aug. 7 starts at 6 but there is a closed session such that the matter here may not start until 7. Might wanna be safe and come at 6 anyhow.

Also, people most probably have the right to speak at this meeting. I plan to for instance. Mayor Shepherd has some discretion on how to do this, and may limit the pubic speakers to those who did not speak Monday.

By the way, I wish Cheryl L had run for Council. I find her the most compelling figure coming out of the referendum / new pseudo-slate movement. We need more hands-on, yet smart Moms in the discussion. Right livelihood, integrating hands and mind and heart. Try it.

“the four alternatives on the table” I am already noticing the excessive blather of the Palo Alto process. It doesn’t have to be so complicated so as to exclude the time, interest, voices of regular voters here. But that’s how it always ends up, with excessive detail, scheming, and so it is difficult unless one makes a career out of it to understand all the ulterior motivations. The City of PA is an entity; it is also part of a region. Benchmarking with what other cities do about growth, etc., makes sense and can be and should be discussed in a straightforward way. Then consider what THIS city should do, in light of it’s “special”ness. Beyond that, there is too much political intrigue and tendency for certain voices like Stanford to dominate things here. The recent vote about ZONING not senior affordable housing and how this was all described by the city of PA is telling.

> Caltrain pricing does not help getting workers from where
> they want to live to where they want to work.

Perhaps. But Caltrain runs at a loss that is subsidized by the taxpayers of its service area, and US taxpayers in general. The taxpayers should not be seen a a big piggy bank for Caltrain, and the small number of riders of this antiquated, and massively ineffective system.

@Sea-Seelam Reddy:
You are mentioning our PA public schools:
I believe you wrote in public that your are new to Palo Alto.
Schools are a hot topic here and often discussed on individual threads on this forum for many years. You may like to browse through the history (not sure how many years retained online at this point, but check it out).
Many assert it is the PAUSD that leads to the high residential property values here; PA has not been thought of as a “starter” living community – whether for Palantir employees or any other young worker. Recently there has been a wave of international investment, unsentimental, and when that departs, property values will drop like a shot. They will recover to a good extent, then, because of our school system.
Plenty of kids here study very well, have very high parental support for education, and then attend major universities and other academic institutions all over. Stanford is not the center of the earth. News flash.
The public and private schools here are already very good…compared to most of the public schools in the state of California. This state is ranked low nationally, though.
Stanford is a private university with many local legacy and faculty kid applicants as well as “regular” applicants. They don’t need to be told to offer certain scholarships to “increase” the status of our kids’ educations here or to tempt our kids to study more.
I don’t see how this has anything to do with the “need” (?) to improve PA schools. That is a topic for another thread, no district is perfect, PA has it’s high points and low points. The context here would be excessive building/residential growth in already crowded PA WILL indeed result in more kids in PA schools. There has been a history of people renting 2nd residences (apartments) merely for the PA address in order to send their kid(s) to PA schools; these are people of means who live in San Francisco or the south bay yet covet our schools without paying our high property taxes (which here, as you may have found, pay for our schools unlike the funding in most other CA school districts).

sorry, that should be “trial run.” of the 49ers football stadium.
I can’t think of ANYTHING I am less interested in, but I AM interested in Caltrain, Caltrain parking lots for local residents, city parking lots and these should not be overwhelmed by “football fans” carousing as they transit to attend football games down near Great America.IMHO, to use an old phrase.

The speakers were clearly organized by their corporate leaders. Their message was: I want, I want, I want.
A uniform group like that doesn’t appear out of nowhere.

Sure, everyone wants to live in Palo Alto: homeless, seniors, young people, but we simply cannot house everyone.

Crescent Park Dad has it right: “I am thankful that the *residents* of Palo Alto have the final say in all of this. Non-resident employees or commercial land owners can talk/whine all they want – but they can’t vote for the CC.”

I’m voting for Filseth, Kou and DuBois to stop overdeveloping Palo Alto and keep it as a family city. No, it won’t drop off the Earth if we stop.

Sea-Seelam Reddy is too new and naïve to be elected to City Council. Every posting of his on these threads displays the fact that he’s only lived in Palo Alto for two years so he doesn’t know what’s already been done and how to solve issues. The rest of the City Council members would be educating him the entire time if he is elected – what a waste of time.

Example: Seelam’s suggestion about Stanford blindly accepting PAUSD top students. Gaining admission into Stanford has nothing to do with money, and has everything to do with connections. Stanford will only take a limited number of PAUSD students, and those students aren’t always the top students – they always have some connection, either a professor parent (being an alum isn’t good enough), a star athlete that the coaches want, having relative that is/was a powerful Stanford employee. It’s been that way for at least the last four decades. It’s easier for a non-PAUSD student to gain admission to Stanford.

And wouldn’t paying for and Environmental Review already imply that the current vision of Palo Alto will change?

Thanks for your comments

I agree I should not have posted my comments about schools on this blog.

Responding to ‘Native Palo Altian’:

I respectfully disagree with your comments.

I was a single parent and raised two daughter with different aptitude (a UC Berkeley and a CONCORDIA graduate).

DO not be ‘negative’ and sense that and be positive.

There is room to improve.We can lift up our schools even higher by aspiring higher. It does not have to be STANFORD; it can be CALTECH or MIT or for that matter.

As we see, Palo Alto high school students do well because the parents and the community take interest in their children’s education.

The last I talked to STANFORD and UCB admissions in 2000; there are several schools that rank high; WHITNEY, University HIGH and Elliot; so the list goes on; We can aspire higher/demand better teaching so Palo Alto graduates get into top schools and become starts in their life; invent things and change the world for the better.

I agree it is not the subject of this blog. We can always do better in every thing we do. That is what Peter Drucker and Boeing taught me and I am sharing my thoughts. Please allow to share ideas and thoughts whether one agrees or not.

Respectfully

> There is room to improve.

It’s difficult to believe that you really know what you are talking about. Sure–at some point, everyone can study more, stop watching TV and sleep less, so that they can read more. But none of this is going to happen, and is just the idle chatter of someone who seems to think he needs to chine in, even though he doesn’t really have much to say.

Have you actually taken the time to review the published performance data of the PAUSD? The schools are in the top 1% of the scoring range. If you are going to make suggestions about improving the schools, you are going have to push their performance even higher.

Best to stick to City of Palo Alto topics. Or maybe you should run for the School Board.

Kate,

You are bringing up Paris, and other cities which actually have public transportation. Palo Alto does not, and it has no money to do it alone.

I don’t necessarily disagree with many things you say, but it has too many IFs

If the comp plan would say if this, if that, if the other, only then……

But, that’s not how it will work. The vision will be interpreted and ordinances will be written paying no heed to the “if.”

Do you have numbers for commuter patterns for Caltrain to justify housing near Caltrain? I see people using Caltrain to come to work here. This station is the job station.

@Orchestrated

Sorry, if there isn’t adequate public transportation, you can’t blame the young people, you’ve had decades upon decades to invest, and have chosen not to do so. Even more recently, the outcry over Caltrain grade separations, or bus only lanes on El Camino, shows that the “wait until public transportation investments are made” plan is just a red herring to delay things further.

Robert,

What is old by the way.

Kate has already brought up the issue of government mismanagement.

Now, to delay what further? Development without adequate transportation or infrastructure?

Kate,

“It means that we need to get the City Council working on building alliances throughout the Bay Area to make that happen”

I disagree. The state, county and all the other levels of government should be taking the lead. Or break up the state as someone has suggested.

For now, you have surrounding cities with more land, space to build housing less expensively, at distances New York and Paris workers could only dream of having.

@Orchestrated

I’m pointing out just how disingenuous it is for folks of a certain age to say “we don’t have the infrastructure to handle new development”, as if they haven’t been the ones either not making, or actually fighting against making those investments in infrastructure in the first place.

This thread shows exactly what is wrong with growth in the Bay Area.

It is exactly that we have city by city demigods thinking of what is going on in one city and hoping that the problem will be solved by neighboring cities. Bad situation will only gets worse with this thinking.

What we need is regional Bay Area agencies, transportation, housing, business, roads management, etc. etc. This city by city, even county by county situation, is not helping the situation.

We need to look at the Bay Area as a whole region and make design plans to see where exactly in the Bay Area solutions can be realized to help the whole region. Where in the region is the area for housing improvements, business improvements, etc. eg, do we really need upscale shopping in San Antonio when we already have it in Stanford? Do we really need to have Caltrain and BART competing with each other rather than complementing each other in the upper part of the Peninsula? Do we really need to upset parking at Caltrain all over the Peninsula when we have 49er games?

Each of these situations are looked at as a city issue when in fact they are a regional issue. How can we look at say commuting to San Francisco by Caltrain/changing to BART with simply one fare rather than two fares for a simple mile or so trip? Are San Antonio Centre and Stanford SC competing for similar stores and similar demographic shoppers? Does someone wanting to spend a day in San Francisco have to compete at any Caltrain station with $25 parking because of 49er games?

These are real issues and yet piecemeal actions are not solutions.

We have to look at getting rid of city and county boundaries by decision makers, because sure as anything, those of us who live here are not defined by artificial City/County boundaries. If I make a decision to accept a job offer, I don’t look at the City issues of where it is situated. I look at how I am going to get there from where I live. If I decide to buy/rent a home near a Caltrain station, I don’t look at whether I am loyal to that City, but how many stations I have to pass to get to my job and how much that journey will cost me and how often the trains stop at the two stations I will be using.

The sooner we get some Bay Area regional authorities to look at the quality of living within the Bay Area rather than treating each little agency/city as sole entities, the better our chances of improving things.

Kate

You say “we have a vision for the future that concerns not just us, but all the people who will come after us. I want to make things better for them” – by the way many of us measure “better”, we think your vision will make things worse by my criteria: more traffic, less access to services, higher taxes.

You say “participating in civic life is an audacious and entitled act?” – we are exercising our 1st Admendment rights to critique ideas presented.

You say “A lot of what I’m hearing is along the lines of “I walked uphill both ways in the snow and therefore you should, too!” – that’s not what I hear; I hear that if you want a piece of property go out and earn it, and don’t ask the rest of the city to subsidize your ‘wants’.

You say “Palo Alto has basically externalized housing – you’ve made San Francisco into your bedroom community.” By far, the greatest number of workers in San Francisco who are commuting to Silicon Valley are with Google (Moutain View), Facebook (Menlo Park), Yahoo (Sunnyvale), etc. And many of those who live in San Francisco do so because they prefer the life style that seems to match what you want.

As a previous poster pointed out, there are places within 5 miles of work which are affordable. And why your company isn’t paying it’s employees a salary so that they can live within a reasonable commute distance is something that the employees should pressure their company’s management about, and ask the everyone in Palo Alto to change their quality of life. And if the company isn’t willing to step up, there are other companies willing to compete for good employees.

Tom Du Bois,

Using the argument about “the people that spoke will have an even longer commute than they will do now from the Menlo Park / Palo Alto border to downtown” to prop up a South Palo Alto agenda is concerning – as is the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. Palo Alto is bigger than 3 parts for housing. Especially if you want to avert traffic issues.

I guess if the focus of land use is adjusting the commutes of the Palantir employees from rolling out of bed to 10 minutes max, then the negotiating must have already begun. What happened to process?

Ben & Janet: Like many bike enthusiasts, you assume that everyone can do what you do: bike to the train, do without a car. How about those who are older, have health issues, are disabled or just can’t ride a bike? Or have to pick up their kids on the way home from work?

> The local businesses that went out of business didn’t do so because of “development” – they did so because there is a LACK of development.

Why don’t you talk to the owners of the businesses who were forced out? All those I listed had to go because the landlords wanted to (a)remodel to attract tech offices or higher-paying chains or (b) tear down the building to build something bigger.

Kate, you’re obviously a thoughtful person. No one wants you to walk through the snow. But, as others have pointed out, you lack perspective. I agree that many young people have it tougher in terms of college loans and expensive housing. But do you think it was easy for people who lived through the depression or WWII? Or the 1983 downturn? Or, more recently, the dot-com bust?

And how about age discrimination? How do you think people over 40 (or maybe even over 30) feel when they can’t get their foot in the door for an interview? Or when they lose their home after losing their job and have no hope of getting another because they’re “too old.”

Today Palatir is a hot company. Not long ago HP was a hot company, as was Silicon Graphics, Sun, 3Com, Juniper, Cisco.

Roughly 75 percent of startups fail to return investors’ capital. Some collapse. Others linger and die a slow death.

> “Sustainable growth”, is just a clever phrases that PR savvy developers have adopted to repackage and re-brand the same old unsustainable growth practices they have been pushing, and profiting from for years.

True. “Smart growth” and “new urbanism” are also deceptive phrases. For a more honest perspective, please take some time to read Doug Moran’s blog posts at http://paloaltoonline.com/blogs/b/a-pragmatists-take?i=10

Sorry, but those landlords wanted to remodel or tear down the building PRECISELY because there’s no more office space here for them to buy and you won’t let them build more. In fact, most of the Peninsula won’t let them build more and where/when you can do it, the added cost of dealing with City Councils and Planning Boards and repeated appeals and permits takes years and costs a lot of money.

They would have made way more money by buying a second property and getting two rental incomes than by destroying one and rebuilding it if it were possible to do so and if they didn’t have to also pay the “deal with the planning board for years” premium.

I’ve trolled through the comments. One thing that leaps out at me is that everyone is commenting in a vacuum – there is no data on most of the issues being discussed, or if there is, it is not being divulged or it is suspect (the traffic data). How can any decisions be made without knowing or having:
– the actual number of people employed at the business – Palantir, for example- which are located in Palo Alto
– how many people might be employed by business which want to move to Palo Alto or are currently in the process of developing offices
– how many of those employees live in Palo Alto
– how many commute, from where and how they commute
– how much housing is coming online from the developing units south of Oregon/Page Mill, and how much it costs
– how much parking is actually available downtown, and in other areas under development – Calif Ave? (PA staff probably knows this)
– how many people park in the neighborhoods (PA staff may know this)
– results of a comprehensive city-wide traffic pattern study which takes increased development and housing into consideration
– an estimation of the increase in the number of school-age children
– a discussion with PAUSD on how increased demand will be supported
– an estimation of the increased demand on the city’s support infrastructure – water, electricity, sewage disposal, parks etc.

I could go on . . . but my suggestion is that until we have a lot more, hopefully accurate, data, we need to put development on a hold.

Other comments:
We moved here in the early 1970s. Palo Alto was plagued by escalating housing prices then, and has continued to be since, although the frenzy now is over the top. I thought then, and haven’t changed my mind, that it is unconscionable to speculate on housing. If it could be prevented, it should be. But it will continue and unless the city establishes rent control, and perhaps other measures which control purchases by speculators, even 30 story apartments/condos will be subject to the same predation.

I agree with the comments that point out that at a certain point, Palo Alto is ruined and there will be no reason for people to want to live here. I’m already at the point that I shop in Menlo Park, Redwood City or Mountain View and avoid downtown Palo Alto and Town and Country at all costs. And eventually the businesses will be unable to hire employees at any price, and will have to seriously consider relocating. Stanford is seriously challenged now in hiring and retaining faculty and other staff.

ABAG – there needs to be more clarity about what ABAG mandates, and what is the downside if Palo Alto decides not to comply. As far as I can tell, it is an advisory group and cannot force cities to do anything. It’s website focuses on a mission of “affordable housing”. It’s not clear what, if any, carrots it provides or what sticks it can wave to get the cities to do their bidding. If they give the city money to provide affordable housing, how much? Does it cover the costs of actually developing and supporting affordable housing? Or does it cost the city money to comply? If so, then why should the city pay any attention? And what is the effect on/cost to the school district?

Finally, I don’t understand why, in this era of universal connectivity for content and for face-to-face personal communications, Palantir and other organizations, most of whose business is code related and electronically transmissible, cannot establish centers in cities that could use the jobs. Even out of California, perhaps in places that have sustainable water supplies. Our state is environmentally challenged, especially our water supply. It’s not clear that our continued business and population growth is sustainable on any front – in particular energy and food supplies, in addition to water. It would be interesting to have our Sustainabliity Officer weigh in on this.

Kate,

The externalities of a two man company in a garage are different than those of company like Palantir which has funding and beyond. Hundreds of employees for every company that wants to be here is impossible to sustain. The Bay area is big enough though- to the south you have the 10th largest city in the US and to the North the 14th largest city in the US. Both with substantial room to still grow and to have both housing and jobs. Oakland to the East can hardly be overlooked.

It’s not the end of the world for larger companies to re-locate. It is better for Palo Alto to retain conditions where the smallest companies can be given a chance.

This conversation is either about the employers or the City, and until there is a real regional plan, Palo Alto needs to be within its means. This doesn’t mean it cannot lead with good planning. The opportunities are there, but the interests are so far extremely narrow.

@Kate,

Are you even listening to yourself? In order to defend your selfish “I want, I want’s” you are now claiming you want to allow developers to exploit Palo Alto and change it to what you want – oh no, not for you – for OTHER PEOPLE who MIGHT want the same things as you want later? (And what of all the people who want what we have now? e.g. schools and yards and a natural environment? Remember the schools? They’ve driven prices here historically and protected them from tanking like everywhere else during bust cycles.) And then you mention other cities that you like so much better than Palo Alto, but inexplicably want to destroy what exists here rather than go there. (Personally, I would never want to live in Paris, and if I wanted to live in SF or SJ, I would be living there now.)

Palo Alto has a population of residents who don’t want your vision of Palo Alto, most of whom worked very hard and often sacrificed to be here for what was here and what they built here over decades. And yes, we are saying it’s not okay for you to march in here and demand that be destroyed or be given away for the short-term profits of a few developers and your selfish wants, especially since you can find your selfish wants so close by if Palo Alto is so awful for you. And especially since this is such an old story – the only thing new is the entitlement of the new people and their willingness to carry water for development interest.

You are even selfish in your revisionist history of this area. I knew a centenarian Palo Altan who came out to Mayfield in a covered wagon and used to tell anyone who would listen, “And people told me I was CRAZY to spend FIVE THOUSAND dollars on a house!!” of his beautiful home off of University. Real estate here has ALWAYS been crazy expensive except when there was a brief post-war expansion, veterans housing funds (and all those things you legitimately bring up like GI bill money for college, etc). Those conditions are long gone. Most of the 50-somethings in this area were also of the era that took on huge student loan debt , and it was at much higher interest rates and fees than yours, and we faced identical boom cycles here. Except without the benefit of it being easy for both wage earners to have good high-tech jobs, it was still very difficult for women even in the ’80s. (I’ll bet you’ve never had an older male engineer ask you to type a letter for him.)

You say, “Empirically, this is the first time that Palo Alto has been the most expensive place in the country.” Again, this place has always been expensive and difficult to afford; If your claim is correct that it’s a little more expensive than that now, you’re not making your point since it happens to coincide with the giant boom in overdevelopment and giving away zoning protections. That drew in developers who saw the properties as yet more exploitable. Again, making Manhattan and Hong Kong more dense did not make them affordable.

And now that we have a global economy, there is no way to create affordability through a supply and demand equation in any reasonable way, because this is an extremely small, desirable space. Others have pointed out places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Manhattan — you can’t build your way to affordability in a small space, and that’s not the future the existing residents want for this space. And yes, we have a number of state-granted rights to enforce what WE want, even if it’s not what YOU want.

Again, luckily for you, rather than continuing to harangue others that life doesn’t give you what YOU want on a platter (including Palo Alto), you have many options an easy commute from here to get what you want. If you destroy what existing residents worked so hard for through your selfish justifications, then you have destroyed something unique that will be gone forever.

You point to the jobs imbalance as a reason to destroy our city’s character. Why would you have any more right to do that than we would to tell the companies they can’t have employees? Most of us didn’t want the overbuilding of office space anyway. (I do think it’s time the City did have a business tax.)

If it’s jobs you want, look up the 10 best cities for job seekers on Forbes Magazine, Palo Alto is not one of them. All of them will give you that thrilled urban experience if that is what you so desperately desire.

You say we should have all these lovely things, like open space, and you ignore that your vision that is essentially carrying water for the developers would fast make that aspect of your “vision” impossible, if isn’t already. You ignore that your vision would push out any remaining economic diversity we have, and cost people in existing low-income housing their place in this community that they worked so hard for. This is a small space. Take a road trip Kate. This is a vast and once thriving nation, falling into disrepair. I can remember going to Europe as a child and seeing a place in decay where the US was beautiful and shiny and new, from sea to shining sea. Back then, there was a sense that we were thriving because we had the best social mobility, and stale old Europe was suffering from the economic and social stagnation of concentrations of wealth and power. Now (since Reagan), that equation has flipped.

Instead of holing up here and demanding of everyone else that they need to destroy what they sacrificed for in order for you to get what you want on this small space, why don’t you work to revive some of the rest of this great nation? Your generation doesn’t have jobs? This is the first generation with the kind of tools and easy opportunities that come from access to computer-based knowledge environments. Create them. When you’re young and have nothing to lose, that’s the best time to take the risks. And create the liveable space you want through urban renewal of places where all of that would be so welcome, in 50 years they’ll be arguing over whether to allow upzoning of New Kateville. (For the record, I’m not arguing that we don’t need better transportation and transportation systems here, I agree with you there, I’m arguing that this exponentially intense land use in the stupid — I think we can agree on that — way it’s been proceeding here is NOT the way to achieve it.)

You left out the disabled, who have been almost entirely shut out of the prosperity of Silicon Valley from a built environment that is virtually inaccessible. You argue for diversity but fail to mention that the upzoning your vision enables means high-density luxury condos and apartments that IS as we speak pushing out low-income residents.

Sorry, you can’t sugarcoat what is essentially shilling for developer exploitation of Palo Alto.

@Orchestrated, not new
In answer to your question,
Because it’s way to dangerous on a bike and takes way too long. Nobody is against biking in general. As a practical matter, you are not going to replace cars with many things we have to do. Time is money. There is weather. We have to carry things, like fragile laptops. Drivers here are crazy (look at other threads on this forum). I think we have to allow for people to have a wide variety of ways to go about their business and leisure. I would like to see more frequent and effective public transit in this region, but all our tax money seems to go to the south of Santa Clara County.

If you really believe that a community should just be frozen in time based on when you personally moved in- then don’t you feel bad for the people here before you who loathed your newly built house, too? Most of this land was farms and orchards at some point and before that this land belonged to the Native Americans. Do you send letters of apology to people who tended this land 50, 100, 300 years ago? Have you ever even thought about them? I don’t think you do. The question is why? You have done to them all the harms you are claiming the newer generation is now doing to you. You, too, changed the way this city looks and feels when you moved in and you seem to forget that, acting as if you had somehow discovered untouched land. You and your home also killed someone’s view, also created more traffic, also took up parking, also turned open space into concrete, also created more noise, etc. Just because you didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to build your house- because someone else did that FOR YOU at some point in the past – doesn’t mean that your additional presence here didn’t also alter this city and that you didn’t benefit from someone pushing for more development. Maybe most of the town didn’t mind the change, but I guarantee that just as you complain today, someone back then complained, too. Maybe they liked it being rural! They bought the property when it was rural and quiet and peaceful and now they’re “subsidizing” you and the growth necessary to meet your needs!

I’m going to go even further and say that if this place should be frozen in time as is, then lets get all the residents here to agree that if it’s ok to ignore changing demographics and changing populations sizes, and if it’s ok to ignore that there simply isn’t enough housing here (not just for young tech workers, but for anyone) then we will also completely ignore that our population is aging overall and that a larger portion of our population will be made up of seniors as we go forward, shall we? If we’re going to dump on the needs of the young, let’s be egalitarian about it! So let’s agree not to add any of the following either:

– more doctors offices, urgent care facilities, hospitals, etc.
– more sidewalks that are wheelchair and walker accessible
– more pharmacies, herbalists, accupuncturists, or anything of the sort
– more physical therapy sites
– more senior centers (I, for one, was very sympathetic to the folks talking about the YMCA and I’d support giving them a new facility if theirs was closed, but according to you, that shouldn’t be an option, right? We should just let them live out the rest of their lives in isolation because “parking”? We don’t want to “subsidize” them either, right?)
– adding ramps for existing private homes and other establishments in the area – we wouldn’t want to change the “aesthetics” here
– adding elevators to existing private homes or other establishments if they need to be added on to the dwelling externally- we wouldn’t want to violate any setback provisions!

Deal?

All this talk of making Palo Alto a “concrete jungle” and NYC – this is all a straw man argument. There’s really nothing you can imagine that might be in between? You’ve never visited another place on the planet that you thought was nice and livable? It’s all Palo Alto exactly as it is today, or bust?

No one is advocating for that and to say that is to purposefully misconstrue everything that’s been said. If some buildings were 4 floors and not 2 and if more shops were required to have an apartment on the second floor – that doesn’t turn Palo Alto into NYC. Not even by a long shot. But those are exactly the sorts of fights I’ve seen play out in front of this Council time and time again. I don’t see anyone trying to build a skyscraper here. I see people ready to explode about a family home that dares to have two floors instead of one.

We all like greenery and open spaces. No one is arguing against making more of that happen along with development. All we’re saying is that “no change” at all doesn’t make sense and doesn’t meet the needs of the community as it is today or as it will be in the future. More people will come here and more people will be born here. That’s inevitable. Even if you think you can prevent people from moving here (and you can’t- not as long as there is office space and jobs here), I don’t think you can reasonably believe that people will stop having children or that people won’t want to live near their adult children.

If the entire Peninsula says no to growth, like it’s been doing, you’re going to start seeing the homelessness problems of SF in the rest of the valley as well. You already see this given the rise of people living in RVs right here and you especially see that in San Jose. Not everyone can just move somewhere else- you need money to move and you need a job elsewhere. I’m not saying I’m going to be homeless or people like me, but I’m saying that you’re still going to see that because if you’re pushing out the tech workers from Palo Alto and they’re pushing out the middle class in South San Francisco and they’re pushing out poor people in Oakland, at some point the poorest people have nowhere else to go. Maybe you won’t see an influx of homeless people in Palo Alto, but that doesn’t mean you won’t bear responsibility for their existence elsewhere.

Anonymous,

“As a practical matter, you are not going to replace cars with many things we have to do. Time is money. There is weather. We have to carry things, like fragile laptops. Drivers here are crazy (look at other threads on this forum). “

The safety of the kids who actually do bike the a path you consider treacherous have indeed lost a quality of life measure- safety to bike in Palo Alto. The city is actually ideal for biking but the population pressure and the inevitability of using cars is destroying the little there was to count on, in terms of bike commuting.

If people advocating for a major population increase in Palo Alto cannot even contemplate carrying a laptop on a bike, in a commute to work, the green voices are empty.

Eric Rosenblum,

If you are a Planning Commissioner, would you have ballpark figures for the commuter pattern on Caltrain?

Also, how does a college town, with a graduate school, and one with one of the largest school districts in the state of California end up with “substantially” older people?

We are older and wealthier than Atherton, and Woodside?

It would be helpful if you provided actual numbers for all ages. The population metrics should also be driving the priorities for the vision. So far, it’s bang, bang, bang, bang about only one segment or another. Why does Planning need to work on the extensive data missing to make any sense of the issues? Shouldn’t this data be dripping out of the reports that are worked on year after year?

What I’m seeing is a very organized and orchestrated agenda which is missing actual planning.

Eric Rosenblum,

” I am in favor of expanded public housing, but that is a different matter.”

What is public housing?

Responding to Kate

You have many good points and observations.

We are not alone in discussing these issues/challenges.

I have lived in many California cities that come close to being as nice as Palo Alto and by the beach;

El Segundo: population 12K; day time employment 90k; should they need to pack up and build high rises because they are employer friendly? their answer was NO.

Newport Beach: population 65k; day time employment in 100k range. Limited growth as they have saved some space; Not many can afford Newport Beach either, specially the entrants into job market.

So, no major discovery; all ‘highly desired’ cities are coping with the similar issues; managed growth; do not screw it up any more; be kind and live a happy life.

Palo Alto residents are treating the same issues; let us have a healthy debate; do not go extreme and ask for El Camino Real road to be a mall; be reasonable; and let us live happily; hug our trees; no more tall buildings without everybody agreeing to it.

Respectfully

Sea-Seelam Reddy.

“El Segundo: population 12K; day time employment 90k; should they need to pack up and build high rises because they are employer friendly? their answer was NO. “

This was brought up in another thread, the daytime population vs night.

It’s incorrect that the town empties at night or weekends. It’s much busier than daytime.

Any data on that?

Eric Rosenblum,

“SLO, Davis, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara and Berkeley”

These are not job centers at the scale of Palo Alto or within proximity of Silicon Valley. Not comparable. Other than that we all have kids who move out and need a place to live.

I guess no reports from the City on commuter patterns or any ballpark numbers from you. I’ll take a look.

Eric Rosenblum,

That wasn’t my question. My question was, “how many more new units would it take to reduce the price of housing here in Palo Alto?”

You mean a meaningful reduction too, don’t you? Obviously 2% lower wouldn’t make much difference to those young people.

Yes, we would all love to live near where we work. There are few places where’s this happens unless you own a farm.
I first arrived here for work in the tech sector in 1964. My tech area was pharmaceuticals. I was paid well, but certainly not as well as those who now work for places such as Facebook or google. I did live in palo alto, by teaming up with two other women in an apartment.
When two took off for other areas I moved to Mt View. It was the only I could. Afford to live in the area. It was an old apartment but not bad. You may have lived a life of privilege up till now. Well it’s now over, you are in the real world. It’s time for you to make it on your own. This may mean finding some roommates or finding a place a bit away from palo alto.
There are many transit options for your commute. If you live north or south of here there is Caltrain. If you live in the east bay there is the bay express bus. There are local busses from rail stations to many work places.
When did I move to PaloAlto? When I married my current roommate. We used our combined incomes to afford palo alto.
We do not need ugly high rises in. Palo alto, nor do we want them. Downtown is already overbuilt. So are many of the palo alto neighborhoods, especially barron park/evergreen.
Learn to live with what is available rather than your dream best. Make do.

I prefer pursuing a net-zero aggressive growth scenario that:
* maximally-mitigates
* balances jobs-housing to reduce regional GHG/VMT. As a father, climate is a really big deal to me.

Maximal mitigation requires innovation:
* Maximize new low-child housing: market rate senior housing and microunits to subsidize PAUSD budget. 89% of recent PAUSD enrollment increase stems from single family home turnover.
* Maximize affordable-by-design housing (See SPUR’s report).
* Maximize 3 to 5-story walkable mixed use development near train stations. In Portland, miles driven per person is less than half of average Palo Alto driving. The Portland areas have the “convenience to walk to get a quart of milk.”
* For new housing of 10 or more units, require new residents to sign a Cool Cities Challenge behavior change pledge. Such green preference is legal under the Fair Housing act and creates a differentiated, green residential lifestyle with deeper human bonds.
* For new housing of 10 or more units, follow the example of Stanford West, where preference is given to new residents who will drive less. Green preference is legal under the Fair Housing Act.
* Taller buildings.
* Unbundled parking (e.g. pay $60 per month for parking space) for new multifamily residential
* Implement workplace parking charges for single occupancy commuters to cut commute VMT/GHG by 23%. Finally, there is support for collaborative government action from Mtn View, Sunnyvale, San Jose, VTA, MTC, SVLG, Sierra Club, Transform, SamTrans, and the Governor. Stanford’s main trip reduction policy dwarfs all the others combined: charge $3.60 per day for parking.
* Create microgrid areas maximizing commercial/government PV in Stanford Research Park and in the East/West Bayshore area (The city could partner with Clean Coalition in Menlo Park). Upgrade substations accordingly.
* Explore futuristic visions. Self-driving transit is coming sooner than expected.
* Increase public participation still further by leading design sprints, broadcasting interim results, and soliciting overnight vote-back. Consider bringing in the Stanford Urban Studies department in to lead an inexpensive, innovation-focused sketch plan effort.

PA vs. NYC – NYC is still more expensive (10%+)…

NYC: $1396/sqft http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/New_York-New_York/market-trends/

PA: $1263/sqft http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/market-trends/

Strike One:
And you have to factor in that most of Manhattan is high-rise living and has public transit options galore — exactly what the “smart growthers” are advocating. Yet the NYC housing cost/sqft is higher than PA.

Strike Two:
Water shortage. We can’t expand if we don’t have the water. We should be responsible and do our part to live within our natural resource means.

Strike Three:
Infrastructure – road capacity, electrical capacity, waste water capacity, public transit capacity, trash capacity, school capacity. It’s just not there. For example, you want to expand Embarcadero Road? You’ll have to remove housing (isn’t that a funny coincidence), take land from the park, take land from the schools, take land from the shopping center. Politically and financially impossible.

Niel,

Everything rests on the price of the 400 sq foot condos, and if in fact they are built. The mistrust of the current residents is misplaced. They are the best bet in getting to what you want. Look at the massive developments which have taken place recently, to which the City has been responding to hilly nilly – awful and useless for your demographic. If you put the control in the hands of developers or employers, their “bottom line” will keep you out anyway.

Sorry, all the issues you bring up aren’t caused by “development” as an empty apartment bulding isn’t going cause traffic, increase density, use city services and so on… its caused by people, so excuse me if young people take offence to your being put off by our existance.

@Pat My comments were direct responses to people claiming it was impossible to live car-free here. I was citing how I do it by riding a bike, which is something the majority of people are physically capable of doing. There’s even an elderly man in my neighborhood that rides a faster-model mobility scooter in the street just like I do my bike. The efforts to make streets bike-friendly help him too.

Besides, having more people riding bicycles actually makes it better for people who are not able to ride a bike (or mobility scooter). It means fewer cars adding to traffic and taking up parking. We don’t need everyone to ride bikes, we just need a significant chunk of people doing it.

In council chambers tonight it looks like Pat Burt had something to do with the orchestration of young urban professionals. When he took a KOOL-AID break, three young YUPS followed him out. Advice to the YUPS; Don’t drink the KOOL=AID!!!

There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that increased density via development can lower the cost of housing.

Yes, a “housing unit” in a dense development, if smaller than a nearby single family home, will likely cost marginally less to buy. Perhaps even if you include home owner association fees. But this lens, appropriate for much of the previous century, is no longer appropriate.

Family coherence, core family and extended family, has been reduced in favor of more flexible living. There simply aren’t as many stable core families anymore. There are many different types of living arrangements around who lives with who.

The better lens for measuring housing value in this new environment is something like, “how much does $2000/month buy us here?” And that is in terms of square footage, quality of construction, crime, schools, city and community services, open space, convenience and safety of transportation, ability and confidence that serious issues will be addressed, etc.

Through this lens, increased density through development brings *higher* costs for housing.

Yes, a single “unit” of housing will cost marginally less in a new higher density development, but the value per dollar goes down. For singles especially, this means that increased building density in Palo Alto will increase the cost of living here relative to other nearby places.

More dense development increases property value. It does not decrease it (unless there is a catastrophic failure such as blight). As a result, it requires more money to buy the same thing with dense development than it does without it.

Here is an interesting article:

“CIA-Funded Startup Palantir Denies Link to NSA”
Yahoo News – June 7, 2013 http://news.yahoo.com/cia-funded-startup-palantir-denies-nsa-both-prism-181900244.html

So, since when is it up to ‘I want to live THERE (choose one)’ and the world bends over backwards to make that feasible, affordable, accessible? I want to know, because I’d like to live on the shores of Lake Tahoe, in Manhattan, in the Hamptons… I’d like a lot of things. I don’t get them unless I pay for them, and if I can’t afford them then I don’t get them, but if its REAL important, I make a LONG term plan, and sacrifice, a lot.

My 18 year old daughter, home on summer break after her first year in college, working the several part time jobs she’s patched together, and having racked up already $25K in debt for her first year in college, announced to me that her and her friends are going on a vacation -3 day pass to Disneyland. That’s well over a $600 trip. That’s almost her entire summer earnings, the spending money she needs for this coming year. And big crocodile tears.. – I work so hard, I deserve a vacation, its not fair that other people (her friends) have means, have parents that indulge them, have better job, have access, and its so hard for her…

Its called life dear. Its called Life. Ain’t. Fair. Get a better job. Then get a better paying job. Repeat relentlessly. Pay your dues. Save your money. Set goals, work on a 10 year plan. The world doesn’t owe you a living.

And its absolutely ludicrous that we’re actually trashing a great place to live, a historically great place to live, a place that has been methodically protected for 150 years, for this;
“For young people, it’s less about money and more about the lifestyle we want.”

I grew up in Palo Alto – entitled right? Well when I grew up, got a job, went to Foothill at night, finished at SJ State at night, worked my way through an MBA at night, got a better job, saved my money, got a better job, and finally bought a CHEAP house IN SAN JOSE. Turned the appreciation 10 years later into a down payment on the cheapest property in Palo Alto – literally. A tiny little run down dump. And lived in a hole, paying more than I did in San Jose, for way less house, for 14 years before I could afford a remodel. It was 20 years after I graduated from Gunn before I was able to move back to Palo Alto, and continually sacrifice STILL to pay house payments and real estate taxes WAY more than I would elsewhere, sacrificing to get my kids in to Palo Alto schools.

Its a long term plan, and its not looking around for life to remodel itself to accommodate your preferences.

And these companies in and around Palo Alto – they KNEW what they were getting in to when they located here, In my opinion, they either buy real estate at market prices and hand their employees housing freebies, or give them housing allowances as a benefit, relocate a town or two over, or get over it.

The only thing more ludicrous than the entitled new crop of silicon valley workforce, are the scamming real estate developers (their union buddies, and their politician buddies) who are creating this real estate TOD/Affordable Housing/ABAG scam designed to rip off and cash in on prime real estate markets by forcing access to prime real estate locations, through forced changes building ordinances and market rates, which were locking them out of their get-rich-quick development scams.

There is no part of Silicon Valley that hasn’t experienced a housing shortfall in comparison to job growth. So, yes, I can move to San Jose, but what about the people I price out of San Jose? You’re just passing the buck to another city and not actually doing anything to solve the underlying problem- which isn’t that rent is too high- but that there’s nowhere to live. You just don’t see all the people who move out of Silicon Valley entirely because they can’t find affordable housing anywhere, but I assure that they exist and that I’ve known them.

If no one ever added more housing stock, while people keep having babies, in your ideal vision I’d price people out of San Jose, those people might move to Gilroy, but at some point you’ve pushed people so far away from their jobs that commuting to them and still having time for family and everything else in life becomes impossible. Unless you’re planning on shutting down all of Research Park, I don’t see those jobs moving to a different place and new companies may form elsewhere, but not at the rate at which they do here because of the confluence of tech workers, Stanford research, and VCs here. The further you get away from here, the more difficult it is to get access to those resources. Not impossible, but difficult, and that’s enough to create friction in the market that ends up affecting our state and our country’s GDP in the long term. Maybe you don’t care about anyone outside of Palo Alto, but many of us do.

Kate, I’m definitely all in favor of company’s moving out of the area, to other areas of the Bay Area or other areas of the state, if they can’t afford to pay their employees enough to live near enough to work for them.

Its pretty much that simple.

(What about the people you price out of San Jose?! Well a couple possibilities, San Jose has an appropriate urban setting down town, perhaps they would like to build more high rises in that appropriate urban setting? San Jose is also vast, and is partitioned into many Palo Alto size neighborhoods each with their own character, some of which are appropriate and designated specifically for this type of dense housing. And San Jose has the capacity and desire to build up their urban settings without ruining their suburban, historical neighborhoods. So if demand is so great, then housing will come to San Jose’s urban core. Now secondarily, those that can’t afford to live in San Jose… they don’t. Or they have the same coming to terms with the same math equations that the rest of us live with. Frankly, the answer is that jobs will move to places like Houston or Atlanta, and eventually the Bay Area will come back in to balance.

You’re definitely not understanding – its not the city of Palo Alto’s problem to solve the housing supply. Period. It can’t even if it wanted to. Palo Alto is not required to be a high rise, dense housing, bustling urban meca for entitled tech workers. It has boundaries and limited space. Its a desirable place to live – schools, weather and tree lined historical beauty, location. Palo Alto has a right and duty to preserve itself. Be clear, the more housing that is built, the more people will come, the more companies will come, the demand is insatiable. Stop the housing growth, workers will leave, companies will leave, more companies will fill those spots. Those companys that want to stay, will pay to play.

It’s no wonder that generations don’t fix anything more creatively with the logic of let’s stack and pack here and now immediately because we’re pricing people out of Palo Alto and Mountain View and then San Jose, and then Gilroy, and then, and then, and then. Newsflash, California is priced out for many reasons.

The requested housing dorms are a direct benefit to the businesses who are not paying employees market rates, and who cannot fathom not wasting so much money by going elsewhere. Even Gilroy whih has the same weather.

For every 400 sq foot condo is a car nightmare. Not to mention, kids will just stack and pack themselves in the 400 sq foot condos. And nobody (nobody) can be trusted to not use cars, or to have the “ideal” bed to employer commute – especially the likes of the person who thinks that 101 to Caltrain is a treacherous bike ride, and can’t carry a laptop on a bike.

Commuting and public transportation options have not been fully exhausted at all. Including, ask your employers to let you work form home in Gilroy. And until these are pushed to the limit, there will never be appropriate developments in transportation.

For starters, get the facts about the pressure local conglomerates are putting on local cities. Not to mention, they are killing innovation by squeezing the smallest players away from here. And will people stop saying that this could become Detroit?

But if you are going to mention Detroit again, like Council member Berman did last night, could you have some data to back up exactly how that could happen? These Detroit and Gilroy speeches are really unnecessary.

We get caught so many ways. I am worried about drastic new plans or schemes and would like a go slow approach.
There is insufficient housing here (of all types), and I KNOW that and wish there were small steps we could take that wouldn’t change the ENTIRE look of this city, the traffic is already bad, the schools are already filled, we don’t have emptily space.
Yes, current residents of Palo Alto don’t desire to block the sun with ugly tall buildings. A natural reaction. It took a LOT to afford a home here, certainly not our first home, and we pay astronomical property taxes! Home purchased in 2001, would be considered mid-range by most people/most areas of the country (not an estate). We are packed closely with our neighbors, even in a Palo Alto neighborhood, and I can’t see where high or mid density housing could be placed – even with downtown where would you put a housing tower (say, smaller less expensive condo units)?
But then there is tremendous new money locally, from international “investors” who are absentee homeowners to young Googlers etc. making bundles without the experience of traditional real estate moves (first home somewhere young people reside, then a second home, THEN third home in Palo Alto, a high-value costly suburb with top public schools). All these forces mix together, along with those of us who have been in the region long enough to have seen some real estate busts and the 5 or so years it takes to recover values. Those may be your buying opportunities…
Then there are the apartments put up at San Antonio Rd and El Camino Real – I am told they are 4k/month! I assume these are two income married couples with kids residing there. So there isn’t any good solution for very young single people around here unless they are Googler types.
There is an idea stated by some that elderly, inflexible people are “blocking” reasonable development here. I’m not elderly, rather I am middle-aged and I am all for reasonable development. We do need to be careful, as we have been burned by developers and prospective proposals such as the awful Arrillaga one that came to light and was seemingly under way without citizen approval. We need to think very carefully before granting select developers variances (whether flaunting the height limit, such as at the JCC, which I personally find an ugly tower) as these things set PRECEDENT. I merely suggest proceeding cautiously.
It is also correct there is space and opportunity in San Jose, seems downtown there has never quite “jelled,” and someone could perhaps make a there there for younger, single people.

I just want to point out that in the 80s,many parts of China were a bike commuters – if not paradise, at least as good as it gets, with bikes ruling the road. What happened when more people could afford cars? Guess what! And they have all those giant socially engineered buildings near work.

Cars are reality, if we stay a first world country. The paradigm will change when something even better becomes available, not because a place makes it harder for cars. That’s just causing more emissions.

Beautifully said, boscoli and anonymous.

I reject the Palantir employee who claimed that Palo Alto is “frozen in time”. It just demonstrates her ignorance of Palo Alto’s history. If you look at photos of Palo Alto from the 1930s through the 1990s and beyond, you realize how much development has been allowed and how much this small city has changed, densified and urbanized. Even the 1980s, when I bought my house, seem to have happened a hundred years ago, so much development has occurred since.

The Universe may be infinite, but space in Palo Alto is very much finite. We just ran out of space to accommodate more people, unless we want to allow single family houses to be torn down and replaced with high rise apartment buildings all over town, Manhattan style. Even this would be only a drop in the bucket because there are millions of people who would love nothing more than to live in Palo Alto.

I thought Tom DuBois stood for no new development but read his posting here which states he is okay with new housing. Isn’t that new development?

I’m looking for someone who wants Palo Alto growth to stop NOW. It should stay a family city, which is why families choose to live here. We have 1000 students biking to Paly each day. The traffic issues are non-resident commuters cutting through our city. We don’t need more non-residents clogging our streets.

One more point, and I believe someone referenced turning Palo Alto into a ‘disneyland’ company town.

As it already is – University Avenue is nothing more than a glorified Food Court for ages 17 to about 25. There another target group for some of the more expensive spots – approx 30 somethings. A Food Court, none the less.

Its scungy, grimy and crowded. Next time you’re down there, take a look down at the sidewalks. There’s an occasional high end clothing store, shoe store, a hair place, or a home furnishings – all closed while the hoards wander through the Food Court. I wonder if these business aren’t just there for window dressing much as Disney’s Main Street has a facade of little pretend ye old companies and fake upstairs residences.

Its a fad waiting to burn out. When the high tech industry cycles down (and it always does), these company’s get over the ‘status’ location, and check their bottom lines – move, as many others have before them, to Texas, Atlanta, or outsource their back offices to 3rd world countries. (Try iconic HP’s history for example)

And that whole little food court scene crumbles, leaving city of Palo Alto with a bunch of burned out fad restaurants going out of business, a dirty little down town, and a big housing glut.

Eric Rosenblum – you compare Palo Alto’s density to some other towns…

First question, what do you include in the density calculations for Palo Alto? All of the hills? The baylands? Which are within Palo Alto borders but are not buildable. How does the density in the buildable areas of Palo Alto compare to other areas – bordering from 101 to Foothill Expwy, between University and San Antonio. Lets have those numbers before further discussion of Palo Alto’s “density.”

To the Yuppies 2.0 above,

If Wikipedia is correct, East Palo Alto has seen a significant drop in population and population density between 2000 and 2010. It’s walking distance from Facebook. How many of your friends have taken up residence there, it looks like there is affordable housing, walking distance to work, often in apartments and high-density situations. I don’t mean on the little triangle on the Palo Alto side of 101, I mean the rest of East Palo Alto, much of which is still quite accessible to the downtown areas of Palo Alto and the companies off 101.

I’m guessing you could afford to buy a house. I’ve had friends who bought starter homes in East Palo Alto because it was where they could afford, and friends who have lived there long-term and still live there with far more property than you could own on this side of 101. The murder rate is now really no worse than any other urban area.

You could probably get a nicer place in a nicer area than the drug-dealer occupied home/ neighborhood we bought our first Silicon Valley home in (not East Palo Alto). See, you don’t have to walk 10 miles in the snow, you can live pretty close across 101 and bike to work. Much of East Palo Alto is quite close to Palantir.

Thoughtful and planned growth is not placing outsiders before residents.

Many in Palo Alto are renters. It’s being attentive to the reality that many current residents who rent are being pushed out of the city (and not by market force alone). Local public policies that limit growth influence prices along with market demand.

When you fear what the rent will be next year, common concerns like traffic aren’t as pressing (though it’s not a given that growth must equal traffic).

When people ask the city to take care of its current residents first, worrying about current residents who might not be citizens who can vote, who might be too busy working to vote are part of the equation of: “putting residents first.” They too should be included as “residents” in “residentialism.” The nation has long ago moved beyond placing landowners above others.

As an analogy: we make sacrifices on environmental fronts locally, even when we know it won’t alone change the world, and we do so even if no other city follows. Sacrificing to make a better community is part of our local DNA.

So is innovation part of our local DNA. Sacrifices we make in our homes to make them more environmental have been lessened by the ingenuity of design and technology. The same approach should be applied to housing.

Urbanism isn’t a bad word any more than environmentalism. Both equal change and a degree of sacrifice, but neither should concede that life is a zero sum game, destined for unbearable hardships. Around the world, housing models are being tried that create homes without more traffic or larger carbon footprints.

PA is approximately 25 square miles built border to border. There is some unbuildable open space, and many new apartment complexes on El Camino, West Bayshore, East Meadow Circle, downtown. You cannot tear down all of the new buildings, and you cannot tear down the single family homes that have new homes being built on the property to replace the older home.
The only place you can upgrade the city is by completing the in-process activities – the community center, library, and other buildings in process. We need to go underground for a while – finish the existing projects – then see what we ended up with. We do not have to be straining at the bit all of the time to be doing something – at this point unproductive It is like watching dogs straining on their leashes to get somewhere – usually to pee.

@Christopher Chiang,
Actually, if you are sacrificing to live in a place BECAUSE you don’t want to live in the urban areas like SF and SJ, then urbanism is a bad word.

Giving my house to a bunch of kids from out of town to trash and environmentalism also both equal change and a degree of sacrifice. I want to do the latter, and neither want nor have to do the former. What is this art of non sequitur justification that runs so strongly in this urbanist group on this thread? You’re twisting yourself into a pretzel and it’s not making a compelling argument.

When we say “residents”, we aren’t just saying landowners. Many of the apartment dwellers are here to send their kids to local schools and they aren’t particularly interested in having the schools so adversely impacted by the overdevelopment either. It is hard to put down roots in this place because it is desirable. In a global economy especially, you cannot build your way to affordability here. All the new apartments and new urbanism does is push up average rents which actually accelerates gentrification and pushing out of people living in low income housing here.

If you want things to get easier, you have to find a way to buy. That’s the advice I’ve given all my closest friends whether boom or bust cycle. It has NEVER been easy here. You don’t buy your dream house in Professorville, but a little fixer in EPA or Milpitas. You borrow from your family or credit cards for the down payment. You live through a bust cycle that drops the value of your house below what you paid. Then the next boom comes. Then you move up. But you choose when, because once you buy, you don’t have to fear the rent increases anymore. You can start planning. You can put down roots.

Again, if this place isn’t to your liking, you have options. You can rent in EPA. You can live along transit in SJ or SF. There are many communities in between on rail and bus lines. It’s a boom time, so you will be competing with other people for anything desirable. I think there are vacancies in EPA, though.

I think this is one of those Give and inch they’ll take a mile phenomena. Unlike Woodside or Portola Valley, Palo Alto has always had a more diverse population, and developers have realized they can take advantage. We just said ‘enough’.

Responding to how:
“Local public policies that limit growth influence prices along with market demand.”

The short answer is zoning and permits. Local governments throughout the region limit, ban, or steer new developments away from density to preserve quality of life (or are tired of being the only ones creating housing as other cities reap the benefits without the sacrifices).

At the square footage values in the Silicon Valley, unrestrained by local governments, you’d see a very different stock of housing (think NYC), if left to a free market that is. So anyone who argues renters should learn to be responsible and face the realities of the free market, should recognize we don’t have a fully free market. We have local government interventions that create shortages that that benefit homeowners over renters.

But the long answer is that good policy is messy.

The free market should never be unregulated. Unregulated markets lead to negative externalities that could hurt the wider community (like high density on a small street, away from public transit, suffered by the residents, but not the developers, or high density in a neighborhood with an over crowded school).

The messy part is recognizing that the local government plays a role in determining the winners and losers (homeowners, renters), and finding ways to protect all residents (homeowners & renters).

Zoning is crucial to prevent developers (whose incentives are all short term), but to conclude all growth must be stopped paints an overly simplistic zero sum game.

The city could attentively zone to protect areas where growth would destroy those areas’ livability, all the while keep an open mind to incentivizing housing innovations in areas that could flourish with the right type housing (dragging developers into a long term view and denying them the type of reckless growth that has given all growth a bad name).

What such a development (if any) would look like really depends on that specific neighborhood, so discussion of growth should not rely on blanket statements for an entire city.

As a non-Palo Altan, an example of smart growth from my town of Mountain View would have been MV’s approval of Google’s request for housing in the corporate corridor of North Bayshore, adjacent to their offices. MV’s city council rejected it 4-3, all while approving more office growth. Those policies further fueled the housing shortage.

SF is another well documented example, fyi:
Economist Web http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/04/housing-markets#comments
Techcrunch Web http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

Christopher,

Zoning and permits – which everyone has, including NYC are not “local” policies. Everyone has them, including for the interpretation you focus on, of using them to call winners and losers.

You made it sound like Palo Alto had local policies to limit growth, and designed to “influence prices” and market demand.

Zoning and permits have many goals, individual and collective rights associated with the citizens. They are generally used to balance growth according to needs, and resources (opportunities and constraints). Market demand is a whole different animal which is not only determined by supply of a particular property.

Legal protections from zoning and permits (ie. if you didn’t have them you would not be entitled to own your house or certain rights associated with ownership), do extend to the public areas of the city you belong to, pay taxes into. Some are free, some have a fee. Palo Alto is notorious for the open community space and things like Children’s Zoo, Children’s Theater, Gamble gardens, and parks. Today I saw a lovely scene of a corporate dinner in a park downtown, on Homer. 20 somethings laid out a long table, tablecloths and all, and were having dinner open air.

Residents pay to offer and preserve this; there are volunteer organizations which help tend the gardens, take people on tree tours. The feel of Palo Alto is not coincidental. Any credit for how welcoming and enjoyable this town has been to now millions over the years? Take that Atherton or even San Francisco.

As I’ve suggested before, your enemy is not the residents. The constraints are not meany local laws which don’t want you personally. In my view your demographic is putting the pressure on the wrong people, and worst of it is that you’re led with traditional developer and corporate interests with dumb visions of New York City, and fear mongering about Detroit and Gilroy.

Enough has been said about housing options and opportunities. In my view transportation solutions are more important than locating housing near transit. I mean how big is this town, to concentrate everything near two train stations? We have traffic lights that don’t work here. For these and other problems, real innovation is not going to come from buildings.

I think part of the problem may be that some of these young tech workers, recently separated from their parents, and well known for their arrested development, seem to have somehow imprinted on the Palo Alto City Council as their surrogate parents.

This phenomenon is well known in ducks and geese. If a young goose is separated from its parents at an early developmental stage, it will imprint on anything that resembles an adult goose (like a stuffed animal, or a hang-glider) and act like the hang-glider is its parent.

You may think this only works on ducks… not true. Military training also takes advantage of this phenomenon. In boot-camp young recruits are separated from all contact with their parents, and provided with all the necessities of life, then a stern drill instructor gets in their face and yells “You don’t have a mother, and you don’t have a father… the Corp is your MOTHER, and I am your FATHER!” Don’t laugh, it works.

I suspect this transference of parental imprint may have been facilitated by Palentir, in an effort to avoid the burden of having these young workers imprint on the Palentir executive staff.

It will be interesting to see if any of these young tech workers stay imprinted on certain council members, after they get the boot, or if the imprint is somehow associated with the city council chambers.

Le plus,

Are you referring to this?

“In 2010 Hunton & Williams LLP allegedly asked Berico Technologies, Palantir, and HBGary Federal to draft a response plan to “the WikiLeaks Threat.” In early 2011 Anonymous publicly released HBGary-internal documents, including the plan. The plan proposed Palantir software would “serve as the foundation for all the data collection, integration, analysis, and production efforts.” The plan also included slides, allegedly authored by HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, which suggested “[spreading] disinformation” and “disrupting” Glenn Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks.”

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

Getting Smart,

“If you’re not one of the big guys like Google or Facebook able to entice and keep employees with Disneyland-type campuses and lavish perks, just maybe you work very hard behind the scenes to turn an already attractive town like Palo Alto into your own publicly funded “campus” with publicly funded perks.”

or your own Gotham

For a company like Palantir, I think it is really important to keep these young worker within the Disneyland bubble. Contact with the outside could shatter their adolescent fantasy world. If they had to take the train to Mt View or Redwood City they might meet a Mexican, or a women who is more interested in sex than software. They might have to sit in a grubby little rented apartment, look out from a dirty window, and think about whether they are really “Middle Earth warriors Battling Evil” or just pathetic little peeping-toms slaving away at a soulless computer to provide the intimate details of somebody’s private life to some unknown agency.

“Palantir Director: We’re “Middle Earth warriors Battling Evil””
Valleywag – June 10, 2013 http://valleywag.gawker.com/palantir-director-were-middle-earth-warriors-battli-512299692

Eric Schmist,

“Companies will eventually have to look at their profitability, paying through the nose to operate in a very expensive land-space is not profitable.”

This would be logical, but some things aren’t.

I’d never heard of Palantir until now, but I’ve come across articles that tout it as the equivalent of Google and FB, one of largest in Palo Alto. It has over 200,000 square feet in office space, but the number of employees is 1,200.

Am I missing something?

I spoke at Wednesday’s meeting about putting a large park in Ventura, the most undervalued neighborhood in Palo Alto. Our Comp Plan — the topic of the public hearing — does stipulate that we want more parks.

I noted, however that when I ran my idea by “Ari” and his daughter, roller-skating at Peers Park on Park Boulevard, his reaction was “Good idea, but what I’m worrying about is my landlord just raised my rent $500 and I don’t know if I can continue living here.”

In my travels recently, collecting 65 signatures to qualify for the ballot, several other people told me the same thing: they may have to leave Palo Alto because their landlords are gouging them.

So why not study Rent Control? I love the speaker who said “I demand government build new housing but I don’t want rent control”. Doesn’t he realize the huge subsidies our government puts into high tech? Isn’t the war a subsidy of big business? (I am indebted to George Packer for some of this).

It’s still one-person one-vote here and there are roughly 40 percent of Palo Altans who rent, so I would think we should be talking about a measure that would help people who live here stay here, and not 2030 how much too much more to build.

This was also brought up by Edie Keating at the Housing Element meeting (she, like me, there as a guest). Ken Allen meanwhile started talking about it in opposition — fair enough. We should discuss these things more fully.

I made a joke to GS of the Weekly about “the age of Hobbits” I thought he’d print it somewhere hereabouts
http://markweiss86.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/speak-friend-and-enter/

Steve Levy strikes me as a Worm-tongue creature, that’s a Tolkien reference, to Saruman, who used the Palantir for evil, and is therefore fair comment, appropriate, and don’t delete me bro!

Mark Weiss,

Do people ever leave a rent controlled apartment though?

If properties can’t be sold, there would be no taxes.

I would think this is for the affordable housing category, and that has to be driven by employers. The reason people can’t afford Palo Alto is because of their pressure. Hilarious that we should also pay for the unaffordable housing.

No, hilarious is that we the people are spending $1.7 million to a consultant in Berkeley to sugar-coat and twist the current General Plan or Comp Plan to rationalize and mesmerize the fact that some powerful entity wants to build more dense housing and more office complexes damn the torpedos.

How much rent relief would that same $1.7 M provide?

I’m a Keynsian but I think this should be discussed. If not now, when?

I’m a Marxist, but only because I think that rhubards cooked like prunes taste more like applesauce than Gail Price does.

Mark Weiss,

City Council members like Scharff and Berman make the corporate interests powerful.

Palantir is more famous for Palo Alto office space than for what they actually do. So much for citizen input.

How does a “data mining” tech company -co-founder get to be on the interview panel and screen the City’s chief information officer (ironic name)?

See my three links above for connections between the “powerful” players

Orchestrated,

The Palantir contribution to Berman’s campaign raises a number of troubling questions:

1. Berman clearly needs to recuse himself from any participation in this issue, but what other issues does Berman need to recuse himself from, given the wide range interests of Palantir, its founders, and investors.

2. How do you determine the interests of a shadowy company like Palantir? (Perhaps Palantir’s technology could help them make a full disclosure of there associations and interests)

3. Given Palantir’s association with the HB Gary affair, the public needs to know if Palantir, or any of it founders, have provided Berman (or any other council members) with any non-monetary assistance?

4. Does the city of Palo Alto use any of Palantir’s products? If so, could a “back door” give Palantir access to City operations, workings of the city staff, or the movements and/or deliberations of the members of the City Council?

5. Palantir products have been used to trace and chart the progress of the Libyan revolution (see below). Is Palantir software being used in real-time to manage a political campaign based on a disruptive technology not available to all participants in the political process?

6. What other PACC members have received contributions from Palantir? If Berman is the only one, why did Palantir choose to focus their support on Berman?

7. What is the relationship between the City’s CIO and Palantir, and did Palantir’s participation in the selection of the City’s CIO in any way allow Palantir to gain access to City data, or to monitor city business?

8. Is Palantir using any of its spy technologies to monitor the political process in Palo Alto, or using its relationships with intelligence agencies, and/or police departments to gain access to information not available to all participants in the political process?

9. Does Palantir provide any technology, or services, or maintain any relationship with PAPD?

“The Libyan Revolution – An ISW & Palantir Project”
You Tube – October 19, 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twOR8ySfRX0

and not to be paranoid or anything

“Spy Chief Called Silicon Valley Stooge in Army Software Civil War”

http://www.wired.com/2012/08/palantir/

Ahem,

“4. Does the city of Palo Alto use any of Palantir’s products? If so, could a “back door” give Palantir access to City operations, workings of the city staff, or the movements and/or deliberations of the members of the City Council?”

Maybe also the front door. If Le plus had not brought up wikipedia, I would not have done searches which gives my handle a completely different meaning than when I started. This must be the material for a book or movie. Creeeeeeepy!

I would like to personally thank the “new voices” that so recently surfaced to joined our growth debate for turning us all on to the real powers behind this issue. I’m not of an age to remember WWII, but I do remember the phrase “loose lips sink ships.” Keep talking young ones, we’re all ears.

just in case,

PAPD,

I’d appreciate it if you would not use donated software.

Weekly,

Please be more investigative about the political connections between public speakers and corporate interests. People should disclose these type of connections. A full report on City connections with companies is also of interest. Especially if they are serving on boards, or are behind local initiatives.

Niel,

It’s not exactly hard to imagine all sorts of odd stuff when you stumble on words like spy, disruption, stooge, civil war, and revolution associated with software your local police may be using. Smirk all you want about people who aren’t as informed as you are. Whatever that means.

responding to Ahem:

“Reddy,I th7ink you would be a perfect city council member in a Disneyland Palo Alto.”

Funny you said that: let me tell you my experience with Disneyland.

We lived in Irvine and I took my two daughters Vanessa-9; Leila-7 and my nephew Neeraj-6 on my daughters birthday in 1989.

We go there, enjoying our visit; visit the bathroom; and found a set of eye wear (3D) on the counter. I begin to walk away with it in my hand; a group of 4-5 security guards surround me in front of my family. They wanted me to return it to them. I said I found it the rest room. We argued, me saying it was found on the floor; they calling additional security.

So, I have bad experience with Disneyland. I would rarely go back again.

I hate Disneyland for their ‘macho ness’ and ‘prove it to me that you belong here attitude.

I will never wish Palo Alto to be that type.

You got this one misjudged.

I like happy/tree hugging people in Palo Alto.. Nothing else.

I hate corporations like Disneyland security that bullied.
I am for freedom and IMAGINE song sung by John Lennon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVg2EJvvlF8

Respectfully

Im interested in City Council candidates with a black and white No Growth position for Palo Alto. How can one find out each candidates specific position on growth. Litmus test. Yep.

@Resident – I recommend you look closely at, and consider supporting, Eric Filseth, Tom DuBois, Lydia Khou, and Karen Holman (the only residentialist incumbent running). And consider making a donation, too.

It would be nice to know how Greg Scharff decided to suggest to include a representative of “a large business like Palantir” representing Palo Alto on a regional housing board. Including how it distinguishes itself as large, compared to other large businesses.

PAPD beat officers are claiming that statistics have become more important than good police-work in Palo Alto. Could the use of Palantir software by PAPD brass, be playing a role in this shift in priorities?

“Orchestrated” uncovered this quote (see above) from a participant at a recent PACC meeting:

“I work for Palantir Technologies, a software company based in Palo Alto. While the city is not one of our customers, we do try to partner with the Palo Alto on various projects including donating software to the police department, hosting events in our space, and consulting on water conservation.” https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/43248

“Corruption and cover up by Palo Alto Police Brass”
Shocked ~ August 13, 2014 http://www.paloaltoonline.com/square/2014/08/13/corruption-and-cover-up-by-palo-alto-police-brass

In a city document (see link below) about appointments to the Human Relations Committee, one of the applicants said:

“I work for Palantir Technologies, a software company based in Palo Alto. While the city is not one of our customers, we do try to partner with the Palo Alto on various projects including donating software to the police department, hosting events in our space, and consulting on water conservation.”

I wonder how this donated software is being used? Could it be used by PAPD to track and measure the performance of police officers?

City document: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/43248