BY EMILY MIBACH
Daily Post Managing Editor
A San Mateo developer has submitted plans to replace a 16-unit apartment building in downtown Palo Alto with an eight-story, 82-apartment complex.
The project is for 332 Forest Ave., not far from the downtown library and City Hall. It is next to one of the taller buildings in the area, Casa Real at 360 Forest Ave.
In fact, an unsigned letter to the city states that the complex is planned so it will be at the same scale as Casa Real.
“Respecting the neighborhood’s scale, the design aligns with existing datum lines and maintains an 85-foot building height (plus parapet), which allows for it to achieve significant density without overwhelming the existing context,” says the letter, submitted in the develop- ment packet from Alex Giovannotto of VRent and Marissa Reilly of Sares-Regis. The project would have 16 units reserved for low-income earners. It will replace 16 already existing apartments.
The 85-foot-tall building is well over the 40-foot height limit for the area. In exchange for a variance of the height limit, the developer is offering a community room.
However, Giovannotto and Reilly point out that if this project is approved, it would take care of about a quarter of the homes slated by the city to be built downtown in the city’s housing element, where it looked for locations that some 6,000 new homes could be built in town over the next eight years.
The project will be pre-screened by the City Council, but no date has been set.
This might be a wonderful idea were it not for two essential problems that should be addressed.
First of all the reputation of the company that rents apartments is not great. Today for example Google has VRENT listed with a ranking of 2.7 stars from 79 reviews.
Secondly, the city needs rent control before we start to trust in huge new projects.
Will this be another under-parked project that will deter the rest of us from going downtown? How many parking spaces will it have?
There’s a growing rebellion to underparked developements throughout the SF Bay area that destroy nearby neighborhoods while developers and their paid stooges keep peddling their fairy tales that no one wants or has cars so the developers can make more money with higher density.
The latest proposal in Sunnyvale has only HALF of one parking space for each unit, which assumes the residents are all single and aren’t part of a couple and/or aren’t commuting to jobs, schools etc.