Atherton City Council selects a handful of single-family properties for potential multifamily housing development

The majority of seats in Atherton’s council chambers were filled Wednesday night as residents packed the July 19 meeting to make their voices heard about the future of affordable housing in the town.

Atherton City Council was set to discuss which properties in town would be most suitable for multifamily housing developments, and vote on sites that could eventually be added to the city’s housing element, which has yet to be approved by state officials.

One resident, whose property appeared on the list that council was considering, said he was “perplexed” to see his address up for discussion, and that the parcels chosen felt “arbitrary.”

“I’m not opposed to multifamily housing,” the Selby Lane resident said. “What I am opposed to is the selected inclusion of my home and my neighbors’ to meet the housing element. … We previously have stated that we’re not interested in selling.”

The housing element is a process jurisdictions must undergo every eight years to prove how they’ll meet housing standards set by the state. Each town or city must list properties that could reasonably be redeveloped into housing in the next eight years, in order to meet their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), the number of net new housing units that each jurisdiction must accommodate. Atherton, which regularly tops lists of the priciest zip codes in the country, has a RHNA of 348 units, and more than half of those are required to be affordable.

After the Atherton City Council adopted a draft housing element just shy of the Jan. 31 deadline and sent it off to the state, the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) sent the town back to the drawing board in early April.

In an April 4 letter from HCD, officials wrote that while the town’s housing element addresses many of the state’s requirements, it still falls short of affordable housing requirements.

The state requires that jurisdictions “affirmatively further fair housing,” which means they must create programs that proactively increase affordable housing and their residents’ access to it.

HCD’s letter called Atherton “a concentrated area of affluence (that) predominantly consists of households with the highest median income, a stark contrast to the rest of the region.”

“These conditions and circumstances warrant significant and robust actions (not limited to the RHNA) to promote housing mobility and increasing housing choices and affordability throughout and beyond the town, including in lower-density neighborhoods,” the letter stated.

As it stands, Atherton’s housing element relies heavily on homeowners building backyard accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, to meet its housing quota. But according to a July 19 staff report, reliance on ADUs could present an issue because they’re “limited in size and generally not as accessible to rent as multifamily rental properties.”

“Therefore, ADUs as the town’s primary low-income housing program may not provide adequate fair housing choices for low-income households, Black households, and other people of color, and large families, which consists of five or more individuals,” the staff report added.

During a public meeting last month, most community members were opposed to any type of multifamily housing, with the exception of developing housing on local private school campuses like Menlo College and Menlo School. The current version of Atherton’s housing element relies heavily on this idea to fulfill its affordable housing requirements.

But because such housing would be limited to faculty, staff or students of these schools, “the program is not a fair housing choice,” staff wrote in the July 19 report.

Atherton’s planning staffers, who are contracted through the company M-Group, recommended that the City Council review and vote on 10 properties to include as potential multifamily housing sites in the housing element project description. This step is required as part of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process, and staff emphasized that just because a site is added to the project description does not mean it will necessarily be included in the housing element the town resubmits to the state.

“The goal is to include enough properties in the review to have some options and then to narrow down the list to two to three properties, if needed, to include in the Housing Element,” staff wrote in a July 12 update ahead of the council meeting.

The 10 sites identified by staff included two on Selby Lane, both along the El Camino corridor; two on Victoria Drive, also along the El Camino corridor; one on Santiago Avenue, along the Valparaiso Avenue corridor; one on Polhemus Avenue, along Alameda de Las Pulgas; and finally, one on Ringwood Avenue and three on Bay Road, all along the Bay Road corridor. The parcels range from as small as 0.3 acres to as large as 1.7 acres.

All of these properties are currently zoned for single family homes, so the town would have to rezone them before they could be included as multifamily sites in the housing element – a concept that residents present at the meeting did not favor.

“We oppose the rezoning of any private properties which are currently zoned (for single family homes),” said Atherton Housing Coalition member Jeff Morris. The coalition was formed to make sure the town “fulfills its RHNA obligations in a thoughtful manner to maintain the character” of Atherton.

Morris argued that these properties are unlikely to be redeveloped into multifamily or affordable housing because the cost of land in Atherton is too high for such a project to be financially feasible for developers.

“The state mandates are that we plan for 204 low-income housing units,” Morris said. “To achieve this, we must use ADUs, new housing at the schools and city-owned land, as these options to not require the purchase of land at $12 million per acre.”

Council member Rick DeGolia agreed that developers don’t want to pay “Atherton prices” to build affordable housing, which he believes is evidenced by the fact that no builder’s remedy projects have yet come forward in Atherton.

“Builder’s remedy” is just one of a slew of penalties that jurisdictions like Atherton face for failing to adopt a compliant housing element by the Jan. 31 deadline. This state law allows developers to skirt around local land use rules in jurisdictions that are out of housing element compliance.

“Believe me, I’m not trying to avoid complying with the requirements that the state has set for us. I believe that we are 100% committed to complying with this. But we have to do it in the context of the town that we have,” DeGolia said. “… How can we obtain real affordable housing in this town? I don’t see it from a developer coming in and building it.”

The council voted against adding the Selby Lane, Victoria Drive, Santiago Avenue and Polhemus Avenue properties to the town’s housing element, citing residents’ strong opposition and concerns that the chances of these properties actually being redeveloped are slim.

However, the majority of council did support adding a handful of larger single-family properties along the Bay Road corridor, emphasizing that this wasn’t a final decision to add these parcels to the housing element, but rather, simply allowing them to be included in the CEQA review process and potentially added down the road.

“They’re larger lots and I think we could create more setback requirements,” opined Council member Elizabeth Lewis.

Lewis said that while “no one wants Atherton to change,” it’s something that’s inevitable.

“Change is going to happen. Change has happened in Atherton,” Lewis said. “… We can either do nothing and let things come at us that we cannot control, or with design criteria, we can kind of take some control in a rational and thoughtful way.”

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