This story first appeared in Thursday’s print edition of the Daily Post and has since been copied by other media. If you want the latest local news first, pick up the Post in the mornings at 1,000 Mid-Peninsula locations.
BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
A group of downtown merchants and property owners has sued the city of Palo Alto over its plan to develop parking lots into apartments, a week after the same attorney filed a similar lawsuit against the city of Menlo Park.
The plaintiffs, calling themselves “Downtown Vibrancy,” said they helped pay for the parking lots and therefore should have a say in what happens to them.
“The city’s laudable and long-over-due efforts to provide suitable sites for housing, including ‘affordable’ housing should not be pursued at the expense of demolishing the critically-needed existing public parking resources strategically located throughout downtown,” attorney David Lanferman said in the lawsuit, reiterating arguments he’s made in letters to the city since December 2023.
The city can’t comment on a lawsuit that it hasn’t been served, city spokeswoman Meghan Horrigan-Taylor said in an email.
“Council envisions a thriving downtown supported by affordable housing that brings neighbors to the area and a new parking garage,” she said. “We look forward to continuing to work with the whole community, including downtown property owners, to achieve this future together.”
Downtown housing plan
Council voted on Jan. 21 to work with Alta Housing to build apartments on “Lot T” at the comer of Lytton Avenue and Kipling Street, behind the 7-Eleven at 401 Waverley Street. On April 14, council voted to fit both a parking garage and 15 apartments on “Lot D” at the corner of Waverley Street and Hamilton Avenue, behind CVS.
Council committed to developing more parking lots in the 2023-2031 Housing Element, a state-mandated plan for more than 6,000 new homes.
A consultant will present a downtown housing plan to council on May 19.
Lanferman said the city’s plans are a “wrongful scheme to dispose of the publicly-funded parking lots to private developers.”
Assessment district
Downtown property owners have been taxed to fund the downtown parking structures. The tax is called an assessment, and it appears on annual property tax bills like other special taxes, such as the school district’s bonds and parcel taxes.
The University Avenue Parking Assessment District was established in 1975 to build parking lots, and 216 parcels have paid into the district every year since 1977, Lanferman said in the lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Monday.
Between 1975 and 2001, the assessment district paid for 20 parking lots and two garages, Lanferman said.
Although the city holds the title for these properties, it’s only as a “trustee” for the public, Lanferman said.
“California law requires the city obtain the consent of the majority of the assessed property owners to lease or change the use of Lot T,” he said.
‘Vibrancy’ members
Like in Menlo Park, Lanferman doesn’t name his clients in his lawsuit and didn’t respond to questions yesterday about their identity.
At least one of his clients is Roxy Rapp, 77, who grew up working in his father’s shoe store on University Avenue before opening up his own businesses and becoming a property owner. Downtown landlords Chop Keenan and John Shenk are also against Palo Alto’s parking-to-housing plans.
“Housing should be placed elsewhere in the city, parking should remain distributed throughout the area, and the sites and assets of the assessment district should be used exclusively to parking purposes,” Keenan said in a letter to Palo Alto City Council on April 14.
Keenan, who owns 12 buildings around downtown, said reducing parking will harm the “economic and cultural character of the area.”
Patty Irish, a resident of the Channing House, offered a different perspective at council’s Jan. 21 meeting. She said she supports downtown housing because employees drive from as far as Stockton to work at her retirement community.
“The site we are discussing tonight would be housing for such workers – saving hours of commute time, giving workers more time for family and nearby services to enhance the quality of their lives,” Irish said.
Related stories
• Feb. 11, 2019 — Council slams the brakes on plans for downtown parking garage
Chop Keenan said reducing parking will harm the “economic and cultural character of the area.” If Palo Alto’s culture is parking lots, you’ve failed.
In Palo Alto, virtue-signaling isn’t just a trend—it’s a civic duty, a status symbol, and an unspoken requirement for entry. Owning a hybrid isn’t about reducing emissions; it’s about making sure everyone knows you care more than they do—preferably with a bumper sticker and a smug nod at the stoplight. It’s Smug Alert! in real life: everyone’s too busy inhaling the scent of their own sustainability to notice the systems they’re propping up with their polished privilege.
It’s a place where compost bins and charitable donations are discussed with the same reverence as stock options, like virtue is a marketable commodity. The moral high ground here isn’t just an abstract idea—it’s a luxury, as desirable (and as expensive) as a mid-century Eichler with solar panels. And just like in South Park, the smug doesn’t stay within city limits; it’s airborne, infecting tech campuses, boutique wellness studios, and city council meetings, where discussions are polluted by a potent cocktail of privilege and denial.
Palo Alto doesn’t just gentrify neighborhoods—it gentrifies guilt, rebranding it as progress. It packages displacement as innovation and inequality as the inevitable side effect of “creating the future.” Everyone recycles, but no one makes room for the people who’ve been here all along. The irony is thick enough to cut with a Prius: the more you talk about saving the planet, the more you help destroy the community.
Want to turn this into a critique on how this impacts local workers, or maybe draw a contrast with the people who’ve been silenced in the name of “progress”?
Been over this city/disillusioned utopia for over twenty years…
Stanford owns thousands of acres of open real estate on the outskirts of Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Redwood City. While I’m grateful for all of the beautiful open space I see up and down 280, I’d be more than willing to see them give up a few acres, in a few spots, to develop housing for local residents. This seems seems such a simple solution–it needs to be implemented.
To give you another perspective. Having lived in Menlo Park next to Palo Alto, I know how difficult it is to find parking downtown. And it’s gotten worse since I moved out of the area. I’m a Senior now and walking for blocks to shop is more difficult. However, I know housing is limited as is open land for it so I understand why they are using parking lots for housing. We need both. I don’t know if homelessness is an issue in that area as it’s so expensive. I hope they find some equitable answer.
Downtown Palo Alto needs more people, not parking spots. Parking is the least efficient land use. It’s easy to get to downtown on Caltrain, SamTrans, cycling, walking. Make it easier to do those, provide housing downtown, and business will boom. Focus on parking spots, and it will wither.