BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto’s Architectural Review Board wants to ensure the city’s first housing development east of Highway 101 is suitable for children, the elderly, the disabled and first-time homebuyers.
Michael Cohen of Strada Investment Group is proposing 145 for-sale townhomes on an 11-acre property at 2100 Geng Road, replacing four office buildings and surface parking.
The townhomes would have three or four bedrooms each, in 65 three-story buildings.
Board members Kendra Rosenberg, Mousam Adcock and David Hirsch yesterday suggested Cohen replace some of the townhomes with an apartment building to make the development more diverse.
Having one- or two-bedroom options would allow lower-income residents and smaller families to afford to live there, Hirsch said.
The apartment building could also go up to four stories, allowing for another 20 units, Hirsch said.
“It’s really, really important to have a mixed project here,” Hirsch said. “It makes it a better community. It really does.”
Apartments could also be a single floor so aging residents could move in, Rosenberg added.
“So that not everybody’s having to hike up these stairs of an internal townhouse design,” she said.
But Cohen said operating apartments would be difficult operationally, financially and from a construction perspective. He said his company has done similar projects in other cities east of Highway 101, including one-story stacked flats in San Mateo that were built with seniors in mind.
“It was frankly the most difficult product to sell,” he said.
Cohen said he wanted to keep the height to three stories because the development is next to the Baylands. An apartment building would be difficult to add because the property is on a floodplain, so underground parking isn’t an option, he said.
Plans show the whole property would be raised by three feet, and the property would be lined by retaining walls.
The development includes 333 street-level parking spaces.
Cohen said his company is proposing apartments elsewhere in Palo Alto, like around San Antonio Road, but they aren’t a good fit on Geng Road.
“Trying to shoehorn it into this project with its sets of goals, frankly, may be infeasible operationally for us. But I hear you loud and clear. We’ll go back and talk it through,” Cohen said.