This article has been updated to correct who heads up Sares Regis Group of Northern California.
BY STEPHANIE LAM
Daily Post Correspondent
Palo Alto’s Architectural Review Board has given a thumbs up to plans for a seven-story housing development at El Camino Real and Curtner Avenue, so long as developers make improvements such as adding off-street parking locations and more elevators.
Sares Regis Group of Northern California is responsible for the application on behalf of Palo Alto developer Vittoria Management. The application calls for demolishing existing buildings along 3727-3737 and 3773-3783 El Camino Real, 378-400 Madeline Court and 388 Curtner Ave. to make room for a 183-unit, 190,132-square-foot development.
The area is located near the Barron Park neighborhood, which is filled with single-family homes. In that neighborhood, small businesses line El Camino.
The seven-story project is allowed under a California Law called the Builder’s Remedy, which lets developers to bypass local zoning rules to build housing, so long as a portion of them are affordable. The Builder’s Remedy is invoked when a city fails to complete an approved housing plan that shows where new homes would be located in the future.
The units will include a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, with around 23 set aside for low-income households. The space will also include balconies and parking and bike spaces.
Plans call for:
17 studio apartments, 475 square feet each
68 one-bedroom apartments, 720 square feet
50 two-bedroom apartments, 900 square feet
34 three-bedroom apartments, 1,100 square feet
The board wants more details about the courtyard section with a proposed spa and landscaping, expanding the third-floor balconies, improving the parking garage screening to neighbors, and adding another elevator to the northeast side of the building.
The developer will need to incorporate the comments into their application before eventually sending it to City Council for approval.
Sares Regis Group, based in San Mateo, is a real estate development, investment and management firm that specializes in multi-family residential, commercial and industrial properties in the Western United States. It was co-founded by managing partners Mark Kroll and Rob Wagner and headed by Dave Hopkins, co-president and Chief Investment Officer, Drew Hudacek
Ugly pile of unrelated architectural periods and styles all stacked up into a huge block bulging out onto the sidewalks. Inadequate parking. 300+ new cars on El Camino. Tenants parking in neighborhoods and clogging up retailer parking lots. Los Angeles real-estate developers getting rich transforming Palo Alto into Little Los Angeles. All enabled by state government fraudsters in a corrupt relationship with the real-estate industry.
(Sigh) There goes one of our favorite restaurants, Da Sichuan, at 3781 El Camino & Curtner. Great place and lovely people I’d hoped they’d survive the loss of the El Camino street parking as people discovered their back parking lot but alas not.
Many thanks to Palo Alto’s Architectural Review Board for approving these new homes. We need them! And this is a great place for new homes, near transit, amenities, and more.
Make Palo Alto a cheaper place ,
Great. Another 300+ cars pulling into El Camino real every morning.
An important way to reduce traffic congestion in the bay area is to build new homes near jobs. The bay area has longer average commutes than most other areas of the country because we have failed to do this. Palo Alto has the jobs, and now we need the homes, too.
Garbage. Sad to see.
How many businesses are being destroyed for this? Remember Palo Alto had a 41% decline in sales tax revenue this past year while Redwood City, for example, saw a modest 2% rise.
At the same time, watch how the developers of “affordable” housing are buying their ways out of providing affordable units with in lieu payments to cities who will then waste our money on meaningful virtue signalling.
Such destruction and hypocrisy and no proof this reduces housing prices.
Hundreds of new customers will be good for local businesses.
Many empirical studies show that construction of new homes will stabilize and sometimes reduce the price of homes. It is simple supply and demand.
The irony is… most of the people that make the “supply and demand” argument, don’t even believe in private property, free markets, or “supply and demand”. None of these real-estate projects with BMR units would be possible without government intervention at every level. In a really free market there would be zero BMR units built in Palo Alto. People who cannot afford to live in Palo Alto, would live, work, and build a financially sustainable lifestyle in a more affordable area.
I believe in private property, including the owner’s right to use it to increase the number of homes on their lot. I believe in supply and demand, including the truism that increasing the supply of a good (such as homes) will tend to stabilize or even reduce its price. I believe in free markets, and also the appropriate role of democratic government in regulating markets, which can include requirements that new multi-family buildings include some homes set aside for lower-income people at below-market (BMR) prices. The status quo is artificial scarcity, created by inappropriate government regulation of home construction (for example, by means of overly strict zoning), which by design prevents many people from being able to afford to live in Palo Alto. That is not the free market at work.
Adam, are you aware how outdated the housing targets are and how Bonta and Newsom imposed an 8 — EIGHT — year ban on even reconsidering the targets that were drawn up during an economic boom? Communities in fire zones have protested against new developments because their roads can’t handle safe evacuations but we’re told safety doesn’t matter. That’s anti-democratic AND dangerous. And that’s just one example of where the rich lobbyists like the YIMBYs with NATIONAL AND GLOBAL chapters are undermining democracy and local control with illogical fairy tales.
NEVER forget that in the past PA City Councils with well-funded stooges all kept pushing for more and more offices and less because the landlords and developers funding them could make more $$$$ from offices than homes.
Building new homes in Palo Alto is safe, democratic, and logical.
That’s the thing. It doesn’t really make it affordable for the overwhelming majority of people! Each of these apts is going to be well out of the price range of middle class earners or younger people. The Law of Supply and Demand does not work in the Bay Area Housing market. Yet, this meritless argument keeps getting thrown out at us.
Businesses will always be destroyed in favor of more housing. Look at The Fish Market and McDonalds; housing will be built there. As of now, both lots are still empty. It’s called PROGRESS!!!
People who live in subsidized (public) housing never make good customers for local businesses, unless you sell hard liquor. Anyone who says different has never been in retail.
The shoplifting at stores near public housing is enormous. You can’t make a profit. That’s why you see “neighborhood serving” stores fail so often. And you can’t stop shoplifters and wait for the police. You’ll be accused of racism.
This is a pernicious stereotype. Government studies show there is no correlation between alcohol abuse and income. BTW, I’ve worked in retail.
So happy to see more housing is coming to Palo Alto but we should also consider more of affordable housing. The AMIs in Palo Alto are significantly higher than the surrounding cities and sadly most folks who work in Palo Alto area cannot even afford living in affordable housing. We need more of 30% and 50% AMI units in this area.
Bella. right you are that we need more truly affordable units. But that’s never been what the developers and their lobbyists have been pushing and what the cities are now allowing as they just rake in the money while the developers buy their way out of their obligations.
In the same way they claim that more $$$$$ market rate units will suddendly make units affordable, they push their “no one wants cars” fairy tales so developers can increase their density by not providing parking.
Too bad there’s no public transit — or funds for public transit; they’ll just keep dumping more cars onto the roads WHILE replacing traffic lanes and parking
with bike lanes just in case someone’s nuts enough to bike on El Camino Real!
There is public transit at this location; for example, the VTA #22 bus runs four times per hour. Though of course, I’d like it to run more frequently, and thus support new funds for public transit.
There’s no NEW funds for public transit when there’s not even funds for EXISTING public transit. Read about the state budget cuts. Read how Trump ain’t a fan of funding transit or housing or health or anything else in California.
So what about that single bus line? It doesn’t get me to the places I need to go regularly like to Mountain View dentists, Menlo Park doctors, friends in Sunnyvale and Woodside and Burlingame…..it doesn’t get workers to school drop off and then to work in distant communities.
Stop spouting platitudes and start thinking logically.
Are you even aware of how big the California budget deficit is?? $12.8 BILLION and rising.
Adam, if there’s a government study saying there’s no drinking in ghettos, then that settles it! Why do I need my own eyes when there are government studies to tell me what to think?
On Martin Luther King Day, you have blown a racist dog whistle (“ghetto”) while asserting that residents of “subsidized (public) housing” purchase nothing but “hard liquor” from local businesses.
For the record, many Palo Altans want their community to be a welcoming place for new neighbors of all economic and racial/ethnic backgrounds.
I hope someone will comment on this: Builders Remedy does not apply to Palo Alto as of August 2024. Was this proposal really filed before that event?
Frank, Adam did not say that there is no drinking in any neighborhood. He said that there is no correlation between alcohol abuse and income.