People will park.

Field of Dreams is a story about falling short and selling out. Menlo Park, afraid of falling short on housing quotas, now risks selling out its downtown.

That leaves a hard question: will the open spaces still be there through 2031, when the current Housing Element cycle ends and city leaders hope to have housing standing where people park today?

And can the stores that draw those drivers survive years of torn-up streets and construction, while costly garages replace surface lots — assuming the city can find the money to build them?

From the City Council dais, however, the danger appears easy to discount.

Council members themselves designated the downtown parking plazas as priority sites for affordable housing towers. The city’s Housing Element identified 68 opportunity sites across 82 parcels, including all eight downtown plazas. A 2024 feasibility study then narrowed the field to three plazas — 556 spaces in all. Losing them would put both downtown parking and downtown businesses at risk.

Three developers have answered the call. Each promises to replace every space; none has settled who will pay. A staff recommendation is imminent. Meanwhile, a housing mandate council members did not create — and cannot ignore — hangs over every choice.

The council increasingly treats the outcome as settled — a decision waiting only for a formal vote. The people who park, shop, work, and own businesses downtown are left to watch and plead against doing this.

There is another way.

On November 3, the people who park, shop, work, and run businesses downtown can put the final decision about changes in use of the downtown parking plazas where it belongs: with the voters, not the City Council.

Thirty steps

Begin with what the city owns and controls: five acres of extraordinarily useful ground. The acreage is not what makes it valuable.

Thirty steps from car door to shop door: close enough to spark an unplanned errand, an unintended purchase, or lunch on a whim — because the customer is already there, downtown, in Menlo Park.

Merchants on Santa Cruz Avenue and the surrounding streets live on those unplanned errands and the dollars no one meant to spend.

That is not nostalgia.

It is how a downtown works. A spreadsheet cannot capture it: it never appears as a line item, only as the absence of a vacancy.

Bought with people’s homes

Now consider what no staff report will say plainly.

The Santa Cruz Avenue parking plazas were not bought with general tax dollars. They were bought with people’s homes and merchants’ money.

More than fifty landowners gave up property for the north-side plazas alone. Couples, widows, brothers and sisters.

Some deeded their homesteads and moved away.

The Presbyterian Church gave up its corner at Chestnut in 1947 and borrowed against itself to pay the assessment.

The families who would not sell were taken to court, and the Court of Appeal’s opinion in that case still records the arrangement Charles Burgess made: no part of the cost was to fall on the public generally.

The downtown taxed itself to buy its own parking.

Then it handed the parking to everyone else, for free, forever.

He was right. And here is what matters: they were paid with a promise. Not cash — the expectation that the ground would remain parking. For 71 years, that promise has meant Saturday mornings and easy errands. Every council before this one honored it almost by instinct.

This council does not have to be the one that breaks that promise. But if it wants the power to do so, it must first ask the people whose downtown will bear the consequences.

That is what Measure P secures. It does not forbid housing. It does not freeze downtown in time. It requires voter approval before the city trades away the access, convenience, and public trust on which downtown depends.

On November 3, a Yes Vote on Measure P will keep the final decision with the people who inherited the promise — and who would suffer the consequences of its breach by the City Council.

Sources and method

• The 1955 assessment and the promise. City of Menlo Park v. Artino, 151 Cal. App. 2d 261, 263 (1st Dist., Div. 2, May 27, 1957). At page 263 the Court of Appeal records that under the resolution adopted April 12, 1955, no part of the costs of acquiring the land and building the parking plazas was to be borne by the public generally. The sentence in this editorial is a paraphrase of that passage, not a quotation. The opinion also confirms the assessment district, the six-block Santa Cruz Avenue frontage, and the city’s condemnation of the parcels whose owners would not sell.
• “71 years.” Measured from the April 12, 1955 resolution recorded in Artino.
• Burgess. Quoted from Michael Giudicessi, Mayor Burgess & MP’s Big Yellow Taxi: “Park” is in the name (rev. June 2025), which reports the 1948 remark. Charles P. Burgess served as mayor 1945–53 and again 1955–57, per the Menlo Park Historical Association. The Artino opinion records the council’s resolution; it does not name him.
• 556 spaces across Parking Plazas 1, 2 and 3 — 249, 95 and 212. Downtown Parking Plazas request for proposals, Sept. 15, 2025, § 2.2 and Table 1. The RFP sets replacement parking at a minimum of 556 spaces, “built and financed by the developer without City financial contribution.” How each of the three responses treats that requirement is set out in our RFP fast facts.
• 68 opportunity sites across 82 parcels, including all eight downtown plazas — City of Menlo Park 2023–2031 Housing Element, ch. 7. The 2024 Affordable Housing on City-Owned Downtown Parking Lots Feasibility Study narrowed the eight plazas to three. The Housing Element cycle ends January 2031.
• Program H4.G. The City Attorney’s impartial analysis states that the Housing Element “includes Program H4.G, which plans for the development of at least 345 affordable housing units” on some combination of the plazas, and that voter approval would be required before the City could implement that program “if it would diminish access to or convenience of public parking.” Nira F. Doherty, City Attorney, impartial analysis under Elections Code § 9280, Aug. 17, 2026. Posted in full at Resources.
• “Requirements” to “priorities.” City of Menlo Park project page, recording the Aug. 26, 2025 council direction to staff on the draft RFP.
• The landowners, the church, and the title record. Mayor Burgess & MP’s Big Yellow Taxi, drawn from City title reports obtained by public records request; the booklet is posted at Booklets. Surnames are rendered as they appear in that transcription of the Plaza 1, 2 and 3 title reports.
• Measure P on the ballot. City Council Resolution No. 7008, Dec. 2, 2025.
• Field of Dreams. Referred to for comment. No language from the film is reproduced.