What would happen to the Martial Arts Studio and the Contractor's Office. Are they going to be able to find suitable alternative premises in the area without huge increases in rent?

It is not a reasonable thing to do to evict businesses that are serving the community. We are losing everything useful in Palo Alto, and Mountain View. We need these businesses.

We. Need. This. Housing.

Is the Palo Alto Council aware that there is a train station at San Antonio? And that it has several bus lines crossing it? Why not encourage Caltrain to offer more stops at San Antonio and VTA to increase its bus service? That could offset additional traffic.

To me this looks like a good corridor for high density housing, especially if the development comes with thoughtful coordination with VTA and Caltrain.

San Antonio road is already gridlocked with all the new apartments added. It is a terrible idea to inject more traffic to this road by building more apartments.

Since we have been adding so much housing to South Palo Alto, as well as hotel space, I suggest adding retail and other services for residents and visitors to that area, not taking it away as this project suggests. We should be adding housing to North Palo Alto, where there is (was) a downtown, which we can hope will have useful retail again some day. Both Paly and Addison have received large sums of money in the last few years, and they will have some extra capacity. Medical services are nearby, etc. South Palo Alto is a residential and hotel wasteland. Let's not make it worse.

Not sure how Studio Kicks qualifies as retail. But speaking of retail there are two shopping centers nearby ( of course they are in mountain view), plus there is the piazzas area close by also. Plenty of retail nearby. [Portion removed.]

Make them all below market rate or deny the permit. This is just more sacrificing Palo Alto livability so developers can make bank on highly paid Google and Palantier engineers.

We need housing. We don't need THIS housing.

And is anyone insane enough to think that Caltrain and VTA will ever offer a viable alternative to private transportation? Might as well offer a free bicycle and spandex outfit with each apartment. :rolleyes:

Can't you find someplace to put housing in your own community? Seems like you are taking advantage of the fact you are MV adjacent to over-build without pissing off the PA nimbies. The hotels you forced on us are disastrous. Now you add housing in an industrial area. Don't give in to your guilt over Mayfield and stick to the rules.

Absolutely sickening. NIMBY north PA shoving all the development to MV while making ZERO efforts to improve transit/infrastructure. Anyone living within a mile of this area won’t be able to move 500ft in10 minutes.

Developers and the politicians in their pockets are destroying livability and we can’t stop it. Sickening.

Duh. Traffic on San Antonio is all transit, i.e. Los Altos Hills billionaires. Not local Palo Alto traffic. Building few condo complexes will not change that. Local residential generates little to no traffic. There are already two 100+ units each apartment complexes across the street (Greenhouse 1 and 2). Go and check one morning how much traffic they generate. It's like one car every few minutes. Virtually nothing compared to gridlock created by traffic to/from Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. Don't use traffic as argument against building more residential. It just doesn't hold water.

Is there any guarantee that the "retail" won't just become more app developer cubicles?

Will there be convenient in-out parking for the proposed retail? As we have seen in other mixed-use developments, people don't want to spend 10 minutes parking their car for a 3-minute shopping experience. I'm guessing that the ground floor will have app developers in it after the initial retail goes bankrupt.

City of PA seldom considered the traffic. Driving on San Antonio and El Carmelo Real around there during busy hours are already painful nowadays. Can't imagine when it's built.

Would like to point out some ethical dissonance here. The developer, Ted O’Hanlon, is married to Candace Gonzalez who was longtime Exec Dir of PA Housing Corp before, during and after the Maybell Sr housing debacle. After, O’Hanlon and this same partner bought the land and developed it with 16 pricey homes after the BMR Maybell housing project was nixed by voters, thereby enriching PAHC’s own Executive Dir. Candace Gonzalez!

Gonzalez then quit to work for one of the more aggressive developers around that has its Edgewood Plaza market appeal mess up again for the city to deal with.

Re Traffic's comment above. The City of Palo Alto can't do anything about traffic on either El Camino or San Antonio. Almost all of that traffic is not local Palo Alto traffic. It's mostly transit traffic. Especially in the case of San Antonio. Even if the city allowed a dozen (or two) 100-unit condo complexes on San Antonio to be built, it wouldn't change traffic on it much. The additional traffic all those housing units would generate wouldn't amount to 1% of total traffic in that part of Palo Alto. Because almost all of the traffic (and gridlock) is from the transit traffic going between US-101 and Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. San Antonio being major connection between those cities and the US-101.

Complaining about traffic to block residential development sounds "plausible" and "convincing" to people who don't know anything about traffic (other than how to complain about it). But the reality is different. I'd challenge anybody pulling those arguments to actually (and literally) go and count traffic entering and exiting any of the existing 100+ unit condo complexes on San Antonio, and compare it to the total volume of traffic on San Antonio. All those condo complexes contribute very little to the total amount of traffic on that street. It's like drop of water in the bucket. Literally.

Seriously, don't argue it with me here. Go out there and count it for yourself. You'll quickly prove your "traffic will get worse" argument to be bogus.

What does generate traffic gridlocks is increasing the distance people have to travel to/from work.

Hey Menlo Park! If you are looking for big housing projects, PA is showing you the roadmap: Shove it all in on the border of your town, so the affects are felt by the neighboring town more-so than your own town.
Remember, Go Big!

Vice Mayor Adrian Fine and Councilwoman Liz Kniss both supported the project as presented.
What a surprise. Developers have their steady supporters.

Ted Ohanlan is the husband of Candace Gonzalez who now works for Sand Hill Properties (now opposing the Edgewood grocery). She still appears at events as an advocate for below-market housing, like at the MidPen Community Cable Roundtable this week, along with several PAForward development supporters.

@ ethically challenged

Get a life, friend. This isnt a conspiracy theory.

Developers know each other. They build homes. We need homes. There are developers and business interests in this world that you should actually be afraid of. Save your evergy for when they come around and actually threaten your fragile hold on your 1% wannabe community

@Rick,

I like your idea, but it will never happen. Developers don't build any more BMR units than they have too and sometimes they skirt any ordinance dealing with that by offering devious alternative proposals and relaxations on parking, etc., to allow pack and stack. I think PA's CC is trying so hard to reach that 300 new housing units per year goal that they will cave easily to developers' proposals, proposals that will do little or nothing for affordable housing for the very low income, low income, and median income people wanting to live here in our community to be near their places of employment...in our homes, restaurants, hotels, retail shops, salons, grocery stores, shopping centers, etc.

It's been a while since the VTA site development proposal and discussions surrounding it took place, before it was eventually approved. It was always confusing, to me at least, when it was discussed then, so would someone who is knowledgeable explain to us all again what the terms market rate, BMR (below market rate), and AMI (area median income) mean...with real current numbers and examples for Palo Alto... and how it was applied on the VTA project then, and how, and if, it will be applied on this project.

And one more question...what are the anticipated rent rates? I'm guessing they will be close to the rates at Carmel Village up the street...$3,200-$4,500 per month. So much for affordable housing for minimum wage earners. Techies and coders will do fine living there.

Years ago when the downtown north & downtown south residents began complaining about the flood of traffic and parking in the neighborhoods, there was a considerable cry from many Palo Altons about nimbys but it seems the "nimbys" are the canaries in the coal mine. Complaining online doesn't help much but neither does reelecting Councilmembers who support unimpeded growth.

@Ray, I live downtown and have no issues with traffic or parking. There is predictable traffic coming in during the morning and going out in the afternoon, but otherwise the streets are calm. There are cars parked on the street during the day, but I’ve never not been able to find a spot. In the evenings, there is ample street parking. The parking and traffic problems are caused by lack of residences, not too many of them. If there were more homes downtown, fewer people would need to drive and park here. Saying “no” to more homes causes the very problems you seek to avoid.

@Not flooded downtown: Just to review the data I presented to Council last October: At my residential corner in Professorville, traffic has increased steadily each year from 4200 cars/day in 2013 to 5600 cars/day in 2018. Traffic exceeds 200 cars/hour for 14 hours of the day; the average noise level is 80dB (similar to a garbage disposal). There is no hour of the day or night with zero traffic. The air quality index is never better than 130 ("unhealthy for sensitive groups") due to PM2.5 concentrations.

I should start a pool to bet on the first month we'll exceed 6000 cars/day. Probably it will happen late this year or early next year.

Because most vehicle trips are close to home, building housing doesn't reduce traffic near the housing; it actually increases it. A good recent discussion about this is in the Stanford GUP EIR.

The only practical way to reduce traffic is to develop a transit system that's an effective alternative to personal cars. This is certainly doable, but would require decades and tens of billions of dollars. Designing and funding such a system would be a major undertaking both technically and politically.

It sounds like Professorville has become an unlivable hellscape Allen. Perhaps consider a move to a remote hillside or rural area? Strangely, when I walk around your neighborhood, it strikes me as positively tranquil. I’m confident my street is much busier than yours, but I haven’t counted because that seems like a massive waste of time. I wonder what you attribute the increase to...new housing? Seems like we have very little of that around downtown. I’ve seen more multi-family being torn down for single family than I’ve seen new multi-family. Last year, we lost more housing than we gained downtown. Surely, traffic must have gone down...

I’ve read plenty of studies that predict that new housing development can decrease traffic. Although people may still make car trips, they are not at peak times and not as long as they would drive if commuting from further distance.

However, if traffic is your main concern, you should be advocating for housing with 0 parking spots and regulation of on-street spots. Ban the cars, not the homes. See the President hotel for evidence that people can indeed exist without cars. People who don’t have cars exist and more of them might move here if we made spaces for them.

There should be hundreds of these developments fast-tracked across PA and MV but specifically for this, it would great if the following changes were made:

- go much taller, add more housing
- dedicate more retail (possible by going taller)
- add underground parking

Note: NIMBY’s who oppose housing should move to Mars where there is no housing crisis.

@Not flooded downtown: If you're trying to make good-faith decisions about which policies to support, data matters. In general, more data helps, and (as @Ray's comment about "canaries in the coal mine" suggests) it can tell you about developing trends as well as the conditions of the moment.

I believe most of the traffic increase over the period I've measured is due to increasing job count downtown. This has several causes, including construction of new office space, conversion of retail and service spaces to offices, and increasing the number of employees per square foot of office space. One other factor that seems to be important is navigation apps routing traffic around congested arteries and through neighborhoods; particularly on Lincoln Ave, which is the most direct traffic-light-free path from the University/101 area to the Stanford side of downtown. Finally, some of the increase is probably due to the rise of Uber and Lyft, as noted in San Francisco: Web Link .

The vast majority of jobs in range of downtown Palo Alto are outside downtown Palo Alto, so it makes sense that the majority of employees living in downtown Palo Alto would commute to work elsewhere. This would be true of employees living in any new housing for the same reasons it's true of those in existing housing. And in fact, Census data offers some support for this claim. Roughly 8% of people living in Palo Alto actually work in Palo Alto, and this has remained pretty stable over a fairly long period, including times at which new housing was constructed. For an introduction, see Web Link .

So long as people need cars to get around, I don't think it works to insist on parking-free housing. Ride-hailing use will increase, and that adds more traffic than personal cars (due to cruising and the empty trips between fares). People will also game the parking rules, as they already do today. Yes, some people can get by without cars (I do, most of the time), but life circumstances can change, and as you can see from the data above the odds of car-free life here are low.

To say this architecture is atrocious is an understatement.

We allowed the HUGE Hilton to slide by us, and look at that monstrosity! The Hilton overwhelms the neighborhood and looms over the street blocking all views of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

This is much the same architectural overreach. The condo project runs curb to curb and has little reference to the corridor as a whole.

We get that the developer wants to maximize the number of units on the property for the biggest profit possible. That is their prerogative, and fair enough. However, it is up to the community to say that this piece of architecture is not appropriate as currently depicted. I am embarrassed for the architect who was engaged to present this project.

Currently, San Antonio Road becomes a parking lot twice a day. When thousands of new apartments across from San Antonio Plaza come on line, the street will become impassable. This is actually very dangerous as the cross streets get blocked at San Antonio Road.

My vote is to shrink the project and move it off the sidewalk. For self-preservation reasons the number of units must be decreased.

Save our skyline.

I hate to break it to you folks, but, as much as we all love retail, it just so happens that (effective, profitable, etc) retail generates a lot of vehicle traffic. The San Antonio center has seen a big uptick in retail, and, traffic.

Web Link

"Roughly 8% of people living in Palo Alto actually work in Palo Alto"

A startling statistic, but ambiguous as stated. Does "people living in Palo Alto" mean the employed population of Palo Alto, or is it ALL people living in Palo Alto including infants, toddlers, students in school, non-employed adults (e.g. stayathome parents), and retirees?

@Curmudgeon: That's a percentage of ALL people living in Palo Alto.

The latest information I have on-hand is for 2015; at that time, 72% of Palo Alto residents employed in any capacity had at least one job outside the city.

So another way to look at the data is to say that for every 4 workers you put into new housing downtown, plan for 3 of them to commute outside the city.