The State has ordered Menlo Park to approve 80 Willow Road — a builder’s-remedy complex of high-rise towers, the tallest near 450 feet, wrapped around 665 homes, a hotel and offices — by October 27, a week before the election. It would be among the tallest buildings in California outside its big-city downtowns, dropped into a low-rise neighborhood that has fought it. Approving it is a bitter pill; fighting it, after the way the City has handled the application, could become a losing and expensive endeavor. This is a problem largely of the Council’s own making — and a test of whether it can get out of the corners it paints itself into.
MonitorMenlo.news · Opinion · August 4, 2026 · Reports/Opinion
On Wednesday night, the City Council meets in a special closed session with a single item on the agenda: “significant exposure to litigation — one case.” Not mere exposure, but “significant” exposure — which seems likely when a developer and the Attorney General both come after you.
The one case is 80 Willow Road, and it is no ordinary infill. Proposed by N17 Development as “Willow Park” on the former Sunset Magazine campus in the Linfield Oaks neighborhood — near the Palo Alto border and San Francisquito Creek, at the opposite end of town from the bayfront — it would rise as four towers of roughly 300 to 450 feet, holding about 665 homes (some 100 below-market), a hotel, and around 300,000 square feet of offices and retail: more than 1.5 million square feet in all, one of the largest projects ever filed in the city. In a suburb of two- and three-story blocks it is wildly out of scale, and neighbors have fought it hard. On the merits, it is a bad fit for the site. The catch is that it came in through the state’s builder’s remedy, which strips a city of most of its usual reasons to say no. City project page · site plan & massing diagrams (PDF).
Documents: read the Aug. 5 agenda packet — the developer’s AB 712 notice of intent to sue (Aug. 3) and the California Attorney General’s letter (July 29).
Yield, and a tower the neighborhood fought goes up. On paper the numbers improve — Menlo Park has permitted just 18.5% of the very-low-income homes the state assigned it this cycle, and about 39% of its overall target, and 80 Willow would add 665 units, roughly 100 of them affordable. But “yield” here means green-lighting an out-of-scale high-rise complex the City and its residents have spent two years resisting — a win for the housing tally and a loss for the height limits, neighborhood fit and local control the City otherwise defends.
Fight, and the meter runs — probably for nothing. The roughly $300,000 the City made the developer reimburse it for outside counsel was unlawful, the Attorney General says, and must be refunded. Litigate the rejection and lose — against the State’s own lawyers, on a record the AG has already called unlawful — and the court must award the developer its fees and impose fines on top. And the fight would run through the weeks before November 3, a distraction the Council can ill afford while it asks voters to trust its judgment on housing.
Here is the part that is on the Council. The Attorney General’s objection is not that Menlo Park lacks reasons to dislike this project; it is that the City litigated it badly — adding new grounds for rejection months after its first letter, which state law forbids, and billing the developer roughly $300,000 for the City’s own lawyers, which it may not do. Handled cleanly, the City might have preserved more leverage to shrink the towers or shape the project. Instead the fumbles handed the State a tidy case and narrowed the City’s own choices to bad and worse.
The same lesson points at the November ballot. The City’s downtown argument rests on the parking plazas being the indispensable place for affordable housing. But 80 Willow is a reminder that a city cannot litigate its way out of its housing obligations — and that the durable answer is to plan for housing early and competently across many ordinary sites, so the litigation and community outcry are avoided in the first instance.
None of this makes 80 Willow a good project; it is not. But the Council has a real talent for turning even a defensible instinct into a self-inflicted wound — three flawed rejection letters, a $300,000 tab it now has to refund, and the Attorney General on the other side. Compounding it, the AG’s timeline brings all of this to a head just one week before an election that will decide the fate of the downtown parking-plaza ballot measure and the outcome of three of the five City Council seats. Meantime, two of the council’s most ardent housing proponents — Mayor Betsy Nash and District 1 councilmember Cecilia Taylor — are lame ducks, unable to ride quietly away from the Sunset.
No matter who sits in on the closed session Wednesday night, or on the council dais come late December, the skill these converging problems really put to the test is agility: whether this Council can find the least-bad way out of a corner it painted itself into, rather than paying to lose.
Good governments make fewer problems like this — and like the downtown parking fiasco. The better ones know how to get out of the ones they make.
This is an advance on a closed-session item. The Council has not stated its position, and the violations described are the contentions of the Attorney General’s office and the developer, which the City disputes. A fuller report will follow the meeting. Meanwhile, the Housing Commission meets the same night on a separate housing item — see our advance, A $3.84 million fee, and the homes it defers.. Sources: City of Menlo Park Aug. 5, 2026 City Council special-meeting agenda and attachments — Allen Matkins AB 712 notice (Aug. 3, 2026) and California Department of Justice letter (July 29, 2026); housing-production figures from the City’s RHNA update (Staff Report #26-122-CC, July 14, 2026); project scale and site plan from the City of Menlo Park 80 Willow Road project page and its site-plan/massing diagrams, with additional detail from coverage in San Francisco YIMBY, The Almanac and InMenlo (N17 Development / “Willow Park”).