By Patrick Ye
Welcome to our spotlight series on Menlo Park residents highlighting how housing affects their lives! We hope that each spotlight reveals a little piece of Menlo Park, and compiled together, can give us a broader idea of how housing affects our entire community.
Scientists in their 30s
Living in Linfield Oaks with their two kids (2 years and 4 months)
Renting a 2 bedroom apartment for ~$3500/month
How long have you lived in Menlo Park?
We’ve called Menlo Park our home just more than 3 years now, and it’s where we had both of our kids!
Favorite local establishment / institution / thing to do?
Going to the Willows Market. We love taking our kids there on our neighborhood walks and exploring all the aisles.
What do you love about living in Menlo Park?
We love how walkable everything is, which is super convenient with kids: the library, playgrounds, pool, downtown Palo Alto and Menlo Park, Stanford Shopping Center, the Little Free Libraries, and the Linfield Oaks neighborhood in general. We are also both biking distance to each of our workplaces; a short commute was very important to us so we can spend more time with each other and our kids.
Why do you support more housing in Menlo Park?
Menlo Park is such an amazing place to live and we wish more lovely people could choose to live here. Young families such as ourselves have much to benefit from living here, but also all parts of society like seniors, veterans, and ambitious young professionals figuring out their careers in the Bay Area.
Do you know anybody that would live in Menlo Park but couldn’t?
We would love for each of our parents to retire here and be a regular part of their grandkids’ lives, but it doesn’t make sense financially to retire in Menlo Park or anywhere else nearby.
If you could save $1000 / month on housing, how would that change your life?
As we think about growing our family, having an extra $1000 per month could help pay for quality child care, especially as we both progress in our careers. It could also help us save for our kids to go to college; supporting our kids to get a good education is very important for us. College is expensive, but that amount of savings would really add up!
Menlo Park has goals to build more housing. Where would be a good place for more housing?
Honestly, there is such a dire need for more housing that anywhere in Menlo Park would be helpful. But building more housing in desirable, walkable and bike-able places, such as near Caltrain, near Stanford campus, near parks, and near downtown, would make the most sense. For example, the planned addition of housing on the SRI campus and potential housing projects in downtown Menlo Park are both in highly convenient locations for new residents.
The city has proposed building more housing in downtown Menlo Park on city-owned surface parking lots – what benefits and/or drawbacks do you see?
Downtown Menlo Park is a great place for more housing, being especially close to restaurants, shops, and Caltrain. Having more people living in the downtown district could also help boost local businesses and bring new energy.
Specifically building housing on surface parking lots sounds like a no-brainer. The parking lots sit on extra prime real estate; redeveloping those lots while maintaining the parking would be a much better use of that space! While the construction could be inconvenient in the short-term, ultimately it would be a very worthwhile long-term investment in the downtown area.
What are the biggest challenges to adding more housing in Menlo Park, and what solutions are you most excited about exploring?
Maybe some residents are worried about how things would change if there were more people in their neighborhood, like more traffic and more noise. While thinking of the downsides can be a knee-jerk reaction, one solution could be prompting people to reflect on the benefits of more housing, such as appreciating all the wonderful people who could be our neighbors and contribute to our community. Such reflection could help people better evaluate how more housing would affect the greater society as a whole.