Naturally, these projects will have no environmental impact or increase traffic congestion and further stress our antiquated Cal Water and PG&E grid. Please stop the group think and virtue signalling. Sacramento politicians are using the fig leaf of equity to line the pockets of the real estate lobby - and they have no qualms about destroying our quality of life on the Peninsula. When will the madness end? Only when people stop voting for the Blue fascists. Wake up, people!

Kari:

You are correct. We will never satisfy the zealots that run HCD until they have destroyed all differences between neighborhoods in CA! The only solution is to fight the requirements & vote out Becker & Berman as a message to the State.
Otherwise we will all be living in high rises & taking the bus to work. If I wanted that, I would have stayed in New York!

Sorry but I want my kids to be able to live around here. Sad to see people focused on preserving Menlo Park into increasing unaffordability. I'm in favor of Menlo Park evolving into a higher-density, more vital and more walkable hometown. More young people and fewer R1 curmudgeons ;) !

Kevin:

More housing in Menlo Park and more density won't make it "affordable", just less expensive. There's a BIG difference.

"More housing in Menlo Park and more density won't make it "affordable", just less expensive."

And it will drag down all of the existing property values with it. Y'all thought Measure V was about one neighborhood. It never was. The YIMBY Coalition and SF dense housing advocates NEED the city council to be able to change single family zoning unfettered if they will achieve their goals.

And worse yet the voters sent Nash back to the city council.

The Dems in Sacramento know they have permanent jobs. That's why they don't even really campaign. Why should they? The county regularly votes 80-20 Democratic. These are the people that are destroying your city and your investment.

Here's a thought, Big Tech companies should cut salaries by 75% and housing prices will decline rapidly. Problem solved! {wink, wink}

BTW, how many of you "curmudgeons" go around town and wish there were more people, cars and housing. Not that many, I suspect. So vote accordingly!

Menlo Lifestyle: Well said and spot on!

“The cost to build affordable housing is unsustainable in the long term,” said Muhammad Alameldin, a policy associate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. “And that cost needs to go down to get us out of the housing crisis.” A Sacramento Bee analysis of more than a dozen affordable housing communities recently opened, under construction or in advanced planning stages found that it almost always costs at least $500,000 to build a single unit of affordable housing in Sacramento. More recently, that price tag has frequently eclipsed $650,000 on substantial projects."

Read more at: Web Link

The LA Times did its own study putting the figure closer to $1M. Web Link There's a pay wall. It seems in their article that "apartment" means "unit." They say the highest subsidies are in our area.

I did read online somewhere that Santa Clara County's housing bond was responsible for creating some number of affordable units. When I did the math it put the subsidy much lower at about $350k or so, which I thought was pretty good. They don't say whether or not their bond partially or fully funded those units.

Menlo Park first subsidized housing in Belle Haven using RDA funds to buy land along Hamilton Ave through eminent domain. At that time I was very curious and pushed staff to figure out what the per unit subsidy was for that project. What I learned then was that staff just doesn't think like that. I never got a number from them. My best recollection is that I did some back of the envelope and got estimates from $350k-$500k per unit.

Estimates put homelessness in CA at 170k people, and the rent burdened population in the millions.

At $.5M per unit, it would cost $85B to house just the homeless while providing no subsidized relief to the rent burdened.

From Peter's Bee article:

"In a series of interviews with The Bee, prominent affordable housing developers and housing policy experts said it can take years to assemble the public financing for affordable housing communities, and that builders often have to cobble together funding from as many as eight or 10 different sources. That effort doesn’t just take time, it can also add millions to a project’s budget, as teams of lawyers, bankers and consultants negotiate the terms of each financing piece. Meanwhile, developers are forced to sit on land they’ve purchased, all while continuing to pay taxes and insurance on those properties."

We cannot build affordable housing in CA specifically because of Chuckleheads who codified Article 34 in the State constitution in the 50's. You can drone on and on about it not being possible to build affordable housing here like its some sort of theoretical math problem when the truth is we legislated it to be the outcome. Repeal Article 34 and build like its our job. The only thing that brings any kind of equitable sustainability is density. Housing should not be a store of value.

Michael:

If you think public housing is the answer, I suggest you visit the projects in Hunters Point or the projects in New York so you can see just what kind of a sewer they turn into. That is one of the reasons why California codified not funding public housing.

@menlovoter if only we could live in your revisionist history land. If you eminent domain peoples neighborhoods, raze their properties under the guise of urban renewal, poverty island people in concrete towers away from literally every opportunity you end up with the projects of which you speak. Article 34 was codified with its well understood racist motivation in order to keep POC out of the suburbs once you could no longer write that into the CCRs. You drone on and on about land being too valuable here for affordable housing, I offer the solution that the State can just print more money, buy land and provide public housing. It’s time to own why we are here and how we can be more equitable instead of locking the gate and telling everyone to get off our lawn.

Michael:

You need to go back to civics class. The state doesn't print money the federal government does. What you suggest is raising everyone's taxes, which we all know means overtaxing the middle class. So you can find housing for people that can't afford it because they don't earn enough money and DON'T PAY TAXES. Sorry, but we're already the most heavily taxed state in the country. I pay enough already. I'm not interested in paying more. If you think that's such a great idea give the state some more of your income.

The progressives have been doing their best to turn this state into a socialist heaven for the last 30 years. You can see where it's gotten us. There's a reason people are fleeing this state. And it isn't going to stop as long as there are folks like you that think people like me should pay your way in life.

If you think more housing is going to solve the homeless problem, you're sadly mistaken. 75% of the homeless population are homeless due to drug addiction, mental health issues, or both. San Francisco just yesterday got a ruling from the 9th Circuit (not exactly a bastion of conservatism) regarding the ability to move the homeless off the streets. Why? Because they couldn't take them off the streets before if they were involuntarily homeless. So, SF built more shelter space and guess what? When offered, at least 50% of the people living on the streets REFUSED to move into housing. Because they're mentally ill and addicts and would have to follow rules in the provided housing. Rules they don't want to follow. They'd rather live on the streets.

The answer to the majority of the homeless problem isn't more, cheaper housing, its putting the mentally ill into institutions where they can be cared for and putting the addicted into recovery. Whether they want to go or not. The answer is not overtaxing an already overtaxed state to pay for some socialist nirvana.

@menlovoter By State I mean the government, specifically the Feds who also cannot contribute to public housing. We've been round and round about this and that is just silly to say that more housing is not the answer to homelessness. The vast majority of homeless is not just the Fox News feeds from skid row but families living under bridges, in creeks and in RV's. All of this is not the result of Progressive policies but the inevitable end game of Ronald Reagan and Co neoliberal nonsense. We have lived your way for 60 plus years now, those times are over, one more 4 year cycle and Gen Z will remove all of us over 30 from any harmful positions we may hold and get all this right. I'll just sit back, pay my taxes without whining and watch how all this unfolds. BTW, I love Nirvana ;)

Michael:

I'm sorry, but your wrong. Look up the statistics from the feds, 75% of homeless are mentally ill, addicted or both. That's not Fox News statistic its a federal statistic. I didn't just make it up. More housing will not solve homelessness as SF has already demonstrated. Over 50% of the people on the streets offered shelter REFUSED. That's not made up or Fox News either, it's from the SF city government. So please, tell me, if 50% of the homeless refuse shelter, how does building more housing get those people off the street. Simple answer, it doesn't. And in case you haven't looked this little stat up either, older people vote in far higher numbers than gen Z's. Oh, and when your taxes go up yet again, I expect you won't be minding that either.

@menlovoter sorry for the delayed response, I have a job that takes up much of my time. You should read through the HUD report before spouting off your incorrect numbers and assessments. Again, the horrible, in the news cycle videos of the conditions of the inner cities throughout the country are not representative of the enormity and scope of the problem. Building more housing would indeed solve the vast majority of the homeless problem that you just don't see. You underestimate the vitriol Gen Z is harboring for anyone over 30 at your own peril; sound familiar, almost like a Crosby Stills and Nash remix :) Web Link

Strange. Most Gen Z I know, including my own kids, want the same living situation their parents and grandparents have had: a single family home. (I remember hearing similar predictions about the millennials 15 years ago -- that they'd all want to live in dense highrise housing. Sure they did...until they hit 30 and got married and had kids.)

Michael likes to overlook the fact that most of the unhoused population is male and congregates in urban areas. As Menlo Voter noted, this population's problems tend to stem from mental illness, drug addiction, or both. Those are the issues that need to be prioritized, rather than destroying the quality of life for the rest of us. The unhoused population in particular requires social services and unskilled jobs; good luck finding those in Menlo Park.

The bigger question, of course, is how to pay for construction of housing that is going to cost at least $85 billion according to the estimate provided by PH, noting that others sources suggest a much higher price tag. And that's not including upkeep -- who's paying for that? Printing more money is not the answer, unless you want to destroy our economy along with our neighborhoods.

Frozen:

Apparently Michael doesn't care about destroying the economy by printing more money. That's his solution to producing more housing. Typical progressive mentality, print more money or raise taxes, or both.