Amid robust discourse in Menlo Park around proposed housing plans, mega-towers and downtown parking lots, Wonman Lee, a candidate for Menlo Park City Council, built a mapping tool that allows community members to visualize Menlo Park’s housing developments for themselves. The project represents a new attempt by a candidate for local office using advanced technology to illustrate policy initiatives.
Lee is running against James Rohr in the race for District 1. The winner will replace current councilmember Cecilia Taylor, who is not seeking re-election.
“Can you make Menlo Park’s housing plan work?” is a 3D, interactive map that simulates the challenging process of meeting the city’s housing goals. That includes Menlo Park’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation requirements, a state-assigned number of units Menlo Park must plan and zone for by 2031. The plan includes 740 units for very-low-income, 426 low-income, 496 moderate and 1,285 market-rate units. The resulting Housing Element is the city’s current plan for reaching its housing goals. But those concepts are arcane to some community members, Lee said. The simulator aims to gamify the complex housing policies.
“This tool is to combat some of the disinformation out there,” Lee said. “(It) maps out honestly where the projects have been, at least for our current housing element.”
Asked for comment, Lee’s opponent Rohr for the District 1 council seat critiqued the usefulness of the simulator.
“To me it appears the website and 3D simulator are AI-generated and he does not have enough information that is relevant to the issues facing District 1,” Rohr said over email.
By toggling buttons, users can view what happens when certain developments are added or subtracted from the RHNA requirements. They can also view how housing developments are geographically dispersed, including where in the city’s five districts the homes are located. Additionally, they can view where a housing development is in the process: zoned for development, pending or approved, inactive in the pipeline, active in the pipeline and built.
The simulator, which became live on Oct. 14, is available on Lee’s campaign website. It has since become “by far” the most viewed page on his website, he said. A simpler version of the simulator – a map that visualizes the location of housing projects – was launched several weeks ago and also attracted many visitors, Lee said, indicating demand for housing information. That inspired Lee, a software engineer, to make the simulator.
Three buttons representing key Menlo Park issues are listed on the bottom of the project. “If Measure P passes” simulates what will happen if the citizen-initiated ballot measure passes or fails. “With Willow Village” represents Meta’s Belle Haven mega-project which was suspended indefinitely earlier this year. “With 80 Willow” mimics the housing contributions of the controversial commercial and residential project at the former Sunset Magazine campus, which has prompted litigation and a flurry of letters from state Attorney General Rob Bonta, Mayor Betsy Nash and U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo.
Lee confirmed he used artificial intelligence as one tool to build the map, noting that AI use has become standard in his profession. He also used several layered mapping tools to create the simulator: OpenStreetMap, a map software that the underlying features of the map like roads and rivers; MapLibre, a software which defines the visual appearance of a map; and CARTO, which provides the software tools and design interfaces for styling and displaying the map.
The numbers in the simulator – which contribute to the tally of housing units in the different income categories of the RHNA requirement – are pulled directly from sources on the city’s website, including the city’s July 2026 progress report toward its RHNA requirements. Dozens of other sources are listed on his website under the “housing plan” tab.
Lee said he aimed to be as unbiased as possible when making the simulator, and he continues to iterate on the project by adding features like coyotes, ducks and airplanes that are designed to mimic reality. The goal, he said, is to model a range of city processes: traffic, commute patterns and daylight plane rules that limit how tall a building can rise next to its neighbors.
Editor’s note: This article corrects the attribution for Rohr’s comment. It also corrects the seat for which Lee and Rohr are running, which is District 1.
One citizen built a tool that lets anyone in Menlo Park model the housing element for themselves. It went live and became the most viewed page on his site, because people actually want to understand this stuff. This proves that visualization of important issues should no longer require your imagination.
One person did that, with open mapping tools and AI as one tool in the kit. Now compare that to what the city does: hire a consulting firm, wait months, pay hundreds of thousands or millions, and get a study in a few months – perhaps not even answering the real questions needed to make judgement based decisions.
That model should be over. If a citizen can build an interactive housing model in his spare time from public data, the city does not need to keep buying hours from firms to tell it what its own numbers mean (or what developers numbers mean). It needs a thin staff that can run the tool and own the answer. The rest is markup and wasted taxpayer dollars. Do people really think traffic studies/parking studies/shadow studies require some magical government trained analysis work. These are basically simply ratios. Multimodal traffic simulation is a bit more complicated, but most packages here are open source.
And every time council members (and council candidates) tell us citizens that the city staff is busy, overwhelmed, and cannot take on more projects, that is not an excuse anymore. And if I do hear it again, consider it a dare. A dare for people like Lee, and others, to just build the thing/analysis ourselves. Lee took the dare. He built it, and everyone can use it themselves. (my prediction: by the time the state asks for the next housing element, his tool will have already have all the analysis required, and will write most if not all of it).
I would even bet I could automate most of what “staff” claims is overwhelming them: the tallies, the tracking, the reports, the models, the summaries. That is not a job for a bigger bureaucracy. That is a job for a tool, run by a small staff that actually owns the answer.
The tools are here. The data is public. The only thing missing is a city willing to use them instead of paying someone else to be confused for it.
Appreciate the comment @RichardStevens
@Richard, the bigger question is whether you have tried this tool ? It pretty much shows that there is no way to meet all the BMR numbers if we remove Willow Village, 80 Willow and Downtown contributions. All the claims that “we have capacity” are false, if residents (or staffers) actually use the tool. That’s the more important lesson – we can build the tools, but people have to use them, instead of creating false realities.
Yes, I tried the tool and I love it. That is kind of the point and I hope it expands to model traffic. Would be fun to see what happens if 80 Willow gets built. And even the effect adding your imported extra thousand people to Oak Grove (also a 2 lane street – parts not wide enough for bike lanes). Don’t you think!
The tool truly demonstrates MP does not have many real options or much left. Are we really going to give away our parks and playing fields? Do people think we have too much of those?
This is why the housing element exercise is a joke, and it is a joke on any built out town with little to no city owned land. The state hands a built out city a number, the city points at a handful of sites it does not own or cannot fund, calls that capacity, and pretends the math works until one project stalls, one developer sues, or one plan falls apart. Then everyone acts surprised that the totals do not add up. All while activists and lawyers keep a “close eye” just waiting to send letters to HCD or our town through lawsuits. Fun!
Great, cannot wait until next HE in a few years, going to be a blast trying to “find” the next great opportunity sites, this time people won’t have to go on a bike ride to do it (like they did last time).
My response to the quote that I do not have “enough information that is relevant to the issues facing District 1.” I see it differently. Housing touches almost everything here:
• Willow Village, with 1,730 homes, 312 of them affordable, and our grocery store, has been on pause since May.
• The developer of the 39-story towers at 80 Willow Road is using the “builder’s remedy” to get around city zoning, and is now suing the city. The city has hired outside lawyers, and if it loses, it could owe $6.65 million to more than $33 million in fines, plus the developer’s legal fees.
• That money would come from the budget that pays for police, public works, library and pool hours, and youth and senior programs at the Belle Haven Community Campus.
• Measure P, the most hotly contested issue on our ballot, has drawn more than $420,000 in spending. It would require a citywide vote before homes could be built on eight downtown lots in the housing plan. If those homes can’t go there, they still have to go somewhere.
• The city’s affordable housing fund, the BMR fund, helps pay for new affordable homes.
• It also pays for new rental assistance meant to keep Belle Haven families in their homes. The fund is limited. If it runs out, both stop.
This is why elections matter. My opponent has no plan and is not aware of what’s going on in this city.
Kudos to Wonman Lee for actually taking the initiative to help people visualize the issues surrounding housing development in District 1. What does James Rohr bring to the table other than being a negative Nancy about it? Seems like the guy calling the map irrelevant is the one who claims to care about housing but yet he is poo-pooing a tool that is proving useful to the community. i’m curious what he is proposing that Wonman Lee hasn’t factored into his analysis? James Rohr didn’t give any constructive feedback so i think he’s just BSing because he doesn’t have anything better to add.