Read the lawsuit here.
The developer representing a Russian billionaire who wants to build a 39-story tower on the former Sunset Magazine campus in Menlo Park sued the city today (Oct. 2), claiming he has the right to build the development under state law.
City Council voted Tuesday to reject the application of Oisin Heneghan of N17 Development. The property is owned by Russian billionaire Vitaly Yusufov, the son of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy minister, Igor Yusufov.
The proposal calls for three towers, the tallest would be 461 feet. That would be the tallest building between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The development would contain 665 apartments, a hotel, office space and a preschool at the intersection of Willow and Middlefield roads.
Heneghan sent the city a letter in August with similar complaints to today’s lawsuit and demanded that the city approve his project by the end of October and give him a refund of $300,000 in legal fees.
Heneghan’s letter came days after Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office sent the city a letter on July 28 saying the city improperly changed its reasons for rejecting the development at the former Sunset Magazine headquarters.
“The City Council believes it is important to get this right, even if there are financial consequences and service impacts for the city that may be triggered by our effort to vindicate out rights and protect the Menlo Park community,” Mayor Betsy Nash said in a statement Tuesday.
The city today (Oct. 1) fired off a response to the AG’s office, in part denying the demand to approve the project, but also asking if Bonta’s office has looked into the Russian owner of the property.
Last week, Congressman Sam Liccardo asked the U.S. Department of Treasury yesterday to look into potential sanctions against Yusufov and his father, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy minister, Igor Yusufov. Sanctions could stop development.
Yusufov is under sanction in Ukraine, while his father, faces sanctions in Ukraine and in Canada.
Liccardo argues in his letter that because the property is in Silicon Valley, with many major tech companies in the vicinity, Yusufov and other possible owners should be looked into due to national security concerns.
In his letter to Bonta, City Manager Justin Murphy asks if the AG’s office was aware of, or investigated concerns about Yusufov’s ownership of the property.
Councilman Drew Combs said earlier this week that a possible buyer with ties to the community has expressed interest in purchasing the property.
This is a developing story, check back for more details and be sure to pick up tomorrow’s Daily Post.
These top-down dictatorial housing laws from Sacramento need to be repealed.
That’s all well and good but it doesn’t help our situation today. This development is lawful under California statute, and brought to you by the Menlo Park city council not getting the housing plan in by the state deadline. This was no surprise, state law was clear. The city council just didn’t do their job. Now we have council member Combs distracting us from his incompetence with shiny objects (a possible buyer???).
I can’t wait for Betsy Nash to say no amount of taxpayer money should be spared to fight the incompetence on her way out the door.
These big projects are insensitive to the context and immediate neighbors that also characterizes the architecture of most tech facilities in the peninsula. They ignore that pre-WW2 big buildings (even utilities) were sensitively scaled and were considered to be beautiful–even multi-biilding complexes such as Rockefeller Center.
The Russians shouldn’t be allowed to launder their blood money in the U.S. I’m glad Liccardo is on this.
Lower-density, high-wealth communities should bear a greater share of the financial responsibility for the housing pressures their land-use policies help create. Atherton is a useful example: it is an exceptionally wealthy, low-density community with large-lot residential zoning and very limited multifamily development. Its current RHNA allocation is 348 units—94 very-low-income, 54 low-income, 56 moderate-income, and 144 above-moderate-income homes—but its adopted plan relies heavily on small multifamily overlays and accessory dwelling units rather than substantial new density.
Atherton has also repeatedly been described as one of the most expensive communities or ZIP codes in the United States. That combination—extreme housing wealth, very low density, and restrictive land-use patterns—supports the argument that communities like Atherton should contribute more toward the regional costs of housing production, transportation(Caltrains station has closed), infrastructure, and affordable housing in cities such as Menlo Park that are expected to accommodate substantially more growth.
The fairest policy would not necessarily be to force every community to accept identical density. It could instead require lower-density cities to provide more funding, land, infrastructure contributions, regional affordable-housing payments, or other measurable assistance when neighboring, transit-rich cities take a larger share of new housing. Otherwise, the system risks allowing wealthy communities to preserve exclusivity while shifting the physical and fiscal burdens of regional growth onto denser cities.
Fairness, wait what? Atherton should pay for the damage done to Menlo Park by real-estate developers who were given a license to loot Menlo Park by SB79? Yeah, that’s fair.
Cities on the Peninsula could start by nobody voting for Rob Bonta on Nov. 3. And city councils should point out that that’s their position. And nobody should vote for anybody who supported the builder’s remedy. This should be a long-term, not a short-term battle. Just get rid of these people.
Strikes me as a routine lawsuit, something cities get hit with all the time. What I find more interesting is how Vitaly Yusufov and Igor Yusufov have been able to avoid U.S. sanctions. If I were a city leader, I’d make pursuing that my No. 1 priority. All hands on deck. No days off until you succeed. Get somebody important in Washington to listen to you, and sanction these guys. That will make the lawsuit and the skyscraper moot.