BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
I can’t wait to see tomorrow night’s Menlo Park City Council meeting.
I hope to get an answer to a question that I’ve been wondering about: Why is the city government so gung ho about building high-density public housing in the parking lots adjacent to Santa Cruz Avenue when there’s an easier and more logical location — the City Hall campus on Laurel Street?
Wiping out 556 parking spaces in downtown Menlo Park doesn’t make any sense. Businesses in the area are having a tough enough time as it is. Eliminating their parking will be a death sentence to the mom-and-pop stores and restaurants.
Replace the parking
So far, the city hasn’t explained how it would replace those parking spaces. At a cost of up to $50,000 a space, that’s probably something they don’t want to talk about. But a plan to replace the 556 parking spaces should have already been rolled out.
City officials will tell the crowd tomorrow that state law requires them to provide more public housing. But it doesn’t have to be downtown.
The state is forcing the city to zone for a large amount of public housing because council made bad decisions in the past, such as approving the Facebook Village project with fewer homes than the jobs it would create. Kowtowing to Mark Zuckerberg has proven to be a big mistake.
Nasty surprise
The public is outraged by the city’s proposal. People are mad because this was sprung on them in November. The city made almost no effort to inform the public about this before it became an official proposal.
Council should kill this proposal. If it wants to provide public housing, consider places like the city hall campus or the underutilized VA campus on Willow Road.
If council moves this proposal forward tomorrow, opponents should put this on the ballot. The public will reject it overwhelmingly.
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Sidebar: Good intentions, bad results
High-density public housing projects have always been built with the best of intentions, a belief that cramming people into a high-rise building will result in utopia. Experience has shown it never works out that way.
Tomorrow night, if you go to the Menlo Park City Council meeting when they’ll consider building housing projects downtown, think about the U.S. cities where public housing became so crime-ridden that many residents are now calling for their demolition.
If you’ve lived in Chicago, you probably heard about the Cabrini-Green projects that once stood in the city’s North Side. Poverty striken tenants were confronted with violence and drugs every day. Nearby businesses closed, leaving empty storefronts. The Chicago Housing Authority demolished most of Cabrini-Green in 2011.
Other infamous public housing projects include Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses, Queensbridge Houses in Queens, Techwood Homes in Atlanta, the C.J. Peete Projects in New Orleans and Baltimore’s Johnston Square Apartments. Closer to home, San Francisco has the Sunnydale Projects, the Alice Griffith Housing Development, Geneva Towers and Bayview-Hunters Point apartments.
Of course, the proponents of the Menlo Park public housing projects will argue that things will be different this time. They’ll say that anybody who says crime will increase is a racist.
They’ll say anything to avoid discussing what went wrong in the past. But City Council should avoid repeating history.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
This is totally insane. They’re thinking that the low-income residents in this public housing will shop downtown, with restaurants where the tab for two is over $100! And what business can survive with no parking. The silly dream of cities with only bikes and pedestrians will never happen. Our city government is insane.
This has moved way too quickly and with no opportunity for the community to understand the scope of the issue and make an informed decision. What is the actual plan for downtown? What is the long term vision? Does this housing factor into that? Who knows?
What a bunch of drivel. You care about one thing and only one thing: Keeping the region filled with rich residents (and given socioeconomic divisions, residents of a certain complexion).
You lack any sympathy for those residents who keep your cushy city afloat, and would rather they live far away, with hour-or-more long commutes. You sow fear into the hearts of citizens in quite literally the identical manner that 60s and 70s America did in the era of white flight which killed our nation’s urban cores just with some new words. Your talk of “crime-ridden” public housing sounds awfully similar to the moral panic we see from the GOP despite the fact that all the data from across the nation shows that crime rates peaked decades ago and are not on track to come close to that peak again.
The “alternative” you proposed is to knock down a VA center, far away from the center of the city, amenities I have no doubt you take for granted, and transportation, not to mention being close to 101 leading to worsen air and noise pollution. You don’t want those “crime-ridden” places in your precious city at all, but if you must, you’d rather they stay far away so you don’t have to see them, and so you can preserve the neighborhood character in downtown Menlo Park, which three parking lots are doing so much to contribute to.
I hope the council makes the right decision and votes this up. If this city (and the wider region) is as progressive and forward thinking as our national voting statistics would suggest, they will. If not, it is a city of hypocrites, functionally no different from the GOP.
They won’t say this, but this is government funded housing for the poor, otherwise know as “public housing.” Thank you for calling a spade a spade, and not bowing to the progressives who want to call it “affordable housing”