Requirements, priorities, and the feasibility question at Menlo Park’s downtown plazas.

Companion report: Amending a certified Housing Element — Menlo Park even knows how to do it, with the verified statewide roster and the amendment process.

Menlo Park’s certified Housing Element gives the City important protection: it is not now facing a Builder’s Remedy risk for HCD non-compliance. If the City sees trouble ahead in delivering its current plan, it can seek to amend that plan before non-compliance becomes the problem.

That is what the amendment process — the subject of a companion report — is for. It exists to address changed circumstances, and Menlo Park has already used it once during this housing-element cycle.

So the claim that any attempt to change priority sites would automatically trigger the Builder’s Remedy overstates the risk.

In this publication’s view, the City already has reason to revisit the downtown parking-plaza sites and to weigh whether substitute locations would better satisfy the Housing Element’s promise.

The central issue is feasibility: whether the downtown plazas can realistically produce the housing capacity the City is counting on.

That question turns on three related facts: the cost and complexity of replacing public parking, the City’s shift from “requirements” to “priorities” in the RFP, and the possibility that the November ballot measure could make development harder still.

What makes a site infeasible?

A preliminary, AI-assisted review found no close California match for Menlo Park’s situation — a certified housing element later amended because replacing public parking, utility relocation, environmental limits, traffic and fire constraints, land costs, or site-preparation costs made listed sites infeasible. That finding should be read cautiously; it is not proof that no such amendment exists.

The confirmed removals catalogued in the companion report point in other directions: Costa Mesa removed 17 sites after an appellate ruling narrowed owners’ overlay-zoning flexibility; Redwood City pulled two narrow Bair Island parcels as a zoning “clean-up”; and Carmel swapped out two city parking lots to redistribute its housing. They help frame the issue, but they are not a statewide inventory of every infeasibility amendment.

San Mateo offers the closest parallel. In 2024, the Housing Action Coalition sued the City, alleging it had counted more than half of its lower-income capacity on sites that could not realistically deliver housing — chief among them active public parking lots, including the Bridgepointe Shopping Center lot, whose long-term agreement bars residential construction, and five downtown parking lots serving medical offices and a school. The parties announced a settlement in June 2025, and in February 2026 the City adopted an amendment removing eight of the disputed sites and adding two.

The lesson is straightforward: counting a busy public parking lot as future housing can inflate a city’s paper capacity without producing a feasible unit — and there it took litigation to force the correction.

Menlo Park had early notice about its own downtown-parking-lot program. In its October 21, 2022 review of the draft element, HCD wrote that the program “does not commit to develop all sites” and must commit either to developing every parking-lot site or to “the total number of units assumed in the inventory,” and asked the City to substantiate the feasibility of the parking-lot developments it was counting. The City revised the element, and HCD found it in substantial compliance in its March 20, 2024 letter.

The feasibility question did not disappear. The City’s RFP seemingly required that all 556 replacement parking spaces be built without public money — a condition Eden Housing called infeasible before declining to bid, the Almanac reported. Among the proposals that remained, the developers looked to the public to close the gap: Presidio Bay sought a City contribution of roughly $15 million toward the parking; Related/Alta asked the City to bond-finance a garage it pegged near $63 million; and Alliant said it could build the parking on its own only by forgoing prevailing wages.

San Mateo’s dispute shows how a housing-element site can become vulnerable when paper capacity depends on land that may not be practically available. Menlo Park has not amended its plan, but the parking-replacement record gives critics a factual basis to argue the downtown plaza sites should be reconsidered.

The RFP language sharpened those concerns. The phrase “seemingly required” turns on a last-minute change made in the open at the August 26, 2025 meeting where the Council voted to issue the RFP. The draft in the Council’s advance packet listed the City’s core terms — among them the replacement of all 556 public spaces through developer financing, not City money — under the heading “Minimum Project Requirements”; the final RFP recast them as “Project Priorities.”

At that meeting, Principal Planner Tom Smith recommended swapping “project requirements” and “minimum project requirements” for “project priorities” throughout the document. Recast as priorities rather than requirements, he explained, the 345 affordable units, the 556 parking spaces, and design compliance would be “city priorities for the project” but “would not automatically disqualify a developer” unable to provide them.

Then Vice Mayor Betsy Nash welcomed the change — “replacing the minimum project requirements with project priorities, that’s terrific” — and the Council authorized release of the revised RFP on a 4–1 vote, with then-Mayor Drew Combs dissenting on feasibility grounds.

The distinction is not cosmetic: a “requirement” is a floor a bid must clear, a “priority” only a preference the City may weigh. The record does not establish who first proposed the change before it surfaced at the dais. But the effect was real — two of the three remaining proposals conceded they could not finance the parking without public help, yet were not disqualified for it. As of the City’s posted project materials, Presidio Bay and Related California/Alta remained under consideration.

If the measure passes: could the delay itself make the sites infeasible?

The ballot measure adds a second layer of uncertainty. The November 3, 2026 measure would bar the City from selling, leasing, or conveying the downtown lots, or authorizing housing on them, or making any change that diminishes parking, unless voters first approve. If it passes, converting the Housing Element’s downtown parking-plaza sites to housing could require another citywide vote.

That raises a question the City has not yet had to answer: would a second-vote requirement make those sites too uncertain to deliver within the 2023–2031 planning period? If so, the City could have an argument for asking HCD to approve substitute sites — provided it preserved equal or greater capacity elsewhere.

The delay concern follows from the Council’s own reasoning. On December 2, 2025, the Council voted unanimously to place the initiative on the November 3, 2026 general election rather than call an earlier special election, on two stated rationales — turnout and cost.

On turnout, Councilmember Jeff Schmidt urged the general election so the City could “fulfill the democratic process and hear what voters have to say,” cautioning against the low turnout of a special election; Vice Mayor Betsy Nash agreed, as did residents who spoke for the general-election timing, among them Menlo Together co-founder Karen Grove.

On cost, City staff put a Menlo Park–only special election at roughly $315,000–$378,000, against about $79,000–$94,500 to add the measure to the general-election ballot — a difference the Council was unwilling to spend to vote sooner.

The same logic could apply later. If the measure passes and the City subsequently moves to convey a downtown plaza for housing or authorize apartments on it — the disposition a Surplus Land Act declaration sets up — that decision would return to the voters; and a future Council preferring higher-turnout, lower-cost general elections could again wait for the next general-election cycle.

The calendar is tight. The next general elections after 2026 fall on November 7, 2028 and November 5, 2030, while the current Housing Element planning period ends January 31, 2031. A late-2028 vote would leave a compressed window to dispose of the land, entitle it, finance it, and build; a 2030 vote would leave essentially no practical runway.

There are two fair ways to read the problem. On one, a site the City cannot convert without first winning a separate election — with the planning period closing in 2031 — is harder to defend as the “available” and “realistic” capacity the adequate-sites standard requires (Gov. Code §65583.2); on that view, the measure could strengthen the City’s case for substituting other sites through a Housing Element amendment (Gov. Code §65585).

On the other, the No-Net-Loss Law (Gov. Code §65863) would keep the City from simply dropping the plaza units: to remove them it would need replacement sites of equal or greater residential capacity — the plazas are credited with roughly 345 affordable units. State housing officials have generally been skeptical of local constraints that reduce housing capacity, so a voter-created constraint might invite scrutiny rather than guarantee approval of a swap.

Either way, one point cuts against alarm: seeking an amendment would not, by itself, expose Menlo Park to the Builder’s Remedy. That remedy — which lets a qualifying affordable project bypass local zoning — applies only while a jurisdiction’s Housing Element is out of substantial compliance (Gov. Code §65589.5(d)). Menlo Park’s element is certified — HCD found it in substantial compliance in its March 20, 2024 letter — and the certified element stays in force while any amendment is drafted, submitted, and reviewed.

The real risk would arise only if the element fell out of compliance — for instance, if the City removed the plaza sites without identifying adequate replacement capacity, or missed a required implementation step and HCD then found the element no longer substantially compliant. The danger is not proposing an amendment; it is dropping capacity or missing obligations without a lawful cure.

That revocation path — not the filing of an amendment — is the practical Builder’s Remedy risk to watch. Sixth-cycle certifications often rest on follow-through, including rezoning “Programs” with internal deadlines; if a city misses them and HCD revokes substantial compliance, the Builder’s Remedy window can reopen until the problem is cured. The companion report identifies Rocklin, San Bernardino and Portola Valley as jurisdictions where missed or incomplete rezoning obligations became the compliance issue.

Builder’s Remedy applications filed before Menlo Park’s certification, such as the one for 80 Willow Road, stand apart from any future amendment question.

The bottom line: Menlo Park need not choose between pretending the downtown plazas are unquestionably feasible and courting a Builder’s Remedy crisis. It can acknowledge the feasibility problem, preserve capacity elsewhere, and use the amendment process state law already provides.