In May 2026 the City invited residents to meet the three teams bidding to build housing on downtown’s parking plazas. Unable to attend, I sent the Council and the developers five plain questions. What came back was silence.
In May 2026, the City of Menlo Park invited the community to an open house where three development teams — Alliant Communities, Presidio Bay Ventures, and Related California with Alta Housing — would explain competing plans to convert three city-owned Santa Cruz Avenue parking plazas into affordable housing.
Unable to attend, I submitted five written questions to the City Council and the developers. What followed was silence.
This report documents those questions, what the public record does and does not answer, and the conspicuous unresponsiveness of the people positioned to answer them.
The questions were not rhetorical.
The first asked when each developer would build a true-scale model showing the proposed buildings against existing downtown structures, and where the public could view it.
The second asked whether a developer would relocate the same project to an alternate site — and if so, whether it would do so only at one-dollar-a-year rent, or would instead pay land-acquisition or replacement costs, as these firms have done elsewhere.
The third asked for each developer’s record of compliance with construction codes, safety codes, project labor agreements, and landlord health-and-safety regulations.
The fourth asked whether the developer or an affiliate had ever defaulted on or breached a construction or financing agreement, and what became of the project involved.
The fifth asked whether any developer had communicated with individual council members, the city manager, or the City attorney about this project outside the Council’s public email log — and if so, when, with whom, and about what.
Measured against the public record, only one question has even a partial answer.
On labor, the record shows Alliant’s forecasted $200 million project cost assumes non-union labor and no prevailing wages, while a union requirement pushes the cost past $300 million and forces the firm to seek city money for parking it otherwise promised to build for free.
That is real information — but it addresses only a sliver of the third question and none of the others. No developer has published any record of code, safety, or landlord compliance.
The remaining questions fare worse. No true-scale model exists, and none has been promised; the public has renderings and building heights — five stories for Presidio, seven to nine for Related-Alta, and, remarkably, unspecified heights for Alliant, which kept its massing “flexible.”
The alternate-site question was never engaged, because the process never offered the option: the deal is locked to these three plazas through a 55-year ground lease at one dollar a year.
On defaults and breaches, the proposals tout past projects but disclose nothing; no default surfaced in a quick scan of the public record, but the question remains unanswered. And as to any off-log communications, there is neither confirmation nor denial.
The deeper problem is not that the answers are flattering or unflattering; it is that no one with the ability to answer chose to reply. The developers staffed stations at the open house and later “responded to questions from the City Council” at a June 2 study session — yet questions three, four, and five, the ones about track record, financial reliability, and back-channel access, remain untouched in every proposal, staff report, and meeting summary.
City staff, for their part, delivered a proposal “data sheet” one observer needed a magnifying glass to read and, nearly two months after receiving the proposals, offered no preliminary assessment of whether any of them complied with the City’s own requirements.
A project that would hand public land to a private developer for a dollar a year, reshape the downtown’s character, and commit tens of millions in potential public subsidy has advanced through selection and scheduling while the basic due-diligence questions — has this firm ever defaulted, does it comply with safety and labor law, has it lobbied public officials privately — sit unanswered.
Silence in response to such questions is itself an answer, though not a reassuring one. The record shows a city moving toward a decision faster than it is willing to be transparent, and residents left to wonder about what they cannot get anyone to confirm.
This report draws on the public record of the downtown parking-plazas process: the three development teams’ RFP responses (Alliant Communities, Presidio Bay Ventures, and Related California with Alta Housing), the City’s May 2026 community open house, the City Council’s June 2, 2026 study session, and the project’s 55-year, one-dollar-a-year ground-lease terms as set out in the City’s Request for Proposals. The developer proposals and related documents are collected on the site’s Resources page. The five written questions summarized here were submitted by the site operator to the City Council and the three developers; as of publication, they remain unanswered.