Noon P examined the shape of the mark the campaign against Measure P serves on its homepage — the hazard palette, the curb-restriction silhouette, the instruction. It set aside the one part of the mark that argues rather than commands: the tagline in the black bar, two lines, a fraction the height of the letters above it.
Six words. Set at the size the designer chose, they are gone before the reader finishes braking. Set at the size the argument deserves, they read like this.
The mark’s only affirmative statement
downtown needs people,
people need homes
Tagline as set in the black bar of the mark served at homesformenlopark.com. Reproduced for criticism and comment; property of its owner.
The first three words are a claim about downtown. The last three are a claim about people. Between them sits a comma doing the work of an argument — the suggestion that the second follows from the first, and that Measure P stands in the way of both.
Set that aside and look at the last word.
What the filings describe
Three developers responded to the City’s Downtown Parking Plazas request for proposals on December 15, 2025. This site has already put their numbers side by side. What none of the three delivers is a home, in the sense the word ordinarily carries.
The word in the mark, against the record in the filings
Alliant Communities
Filed345 units, all income-restricted, averaging 55 percent of area median income. Ground lease at the RFP default of 55 years, $1 per year, City keeps the land.
Called“345 affordable homes.” Also “a diverse mix of affordable homes across studios, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and family-oriented three-bedroom units.”
Related California / Alta Housing
Filed500 units — 346 income-restricted, 154 at market rent. The filing describes the firms’ general practice as 55-year regulatory agreements or 99-year ground leases, without committing to either here.
Called“346 affordable homes and 154 market rate homes for a total of 500 homes.” A chart headed Unit Summary Table ends in a row labelled Affordable Homes.
Presidio Bay Ventures
Filed347 workforce units at 80–120 percent of area median income, above the band the RFP asked for. Ground lease of 99 years, buildings reverting to the City at expiry.
Called“347 new homes” in its summary; “345 workforce housing units” in its cover letter. It does not call them affordable, and says so: its proposal “does not deliver the very low income housing requested in the RFP.”
So the record is not missing the noun; instead it appears everywhere. Two of the three RFP response filings use the Vote No campaign’s exact phrase; the third uses the warmer half of it. What none of them can promise is to construct the very thing the word embodies.
Every proposal is a lease
Under all three RFP responses, the city-owned parking plaza land stays in public ownership and the buildings sit on that property for a term of years — 55 under the RFP’s default, 99 under the longest bid proposal. Nobody takes title to anything. Whatever gets built on Plazas 1, 2 and 3, no one who moves in will own it, and the structures themselves revert.
Presidio Bay puts that last point in writing, and offers it to the City as a benefit: a 99-year ground lease structure allowing the City to retain ownership of the land, and “full ownership of the three completed apartment buildings at lease expiration, providing major long-term value to the City and taxpayers at no additional cost.”
Vote No’s catchphrase invokes a noun the filings use freely and the instruments cannot deliver.
Developers don’t make homes — people do
There is a distinction here that predates the campaign. A structure is built: materials, footprint, code compliance, a line in an inventory. A home is what an occupant makes inside a structure over time — safety, routine, belonging, a center of life. The second is not a construction product. It is produced by the people who live there, and it travels with them when they go.
Which is why a developer can commit to 345 units and cannot commit to 345 homes. The first is a number in a pro forma. The second depends entirely on what the residents do with the years after handover, and no filing can promise it.
That is not a knock on the units, and it is not a knock on the people who would live in them. It is the reason the word belongs to residents rather than to campaigns.
The distinction is not new, and it has been made better. Burt Bacharach and Hal David built a ballad on it in 1964 for a movie of the same name: A House Is Not a Home. The title alone carries the argument. Sixty-two years later a campaign has put the second noun on a placard for the first.
Read the two nouns against each other
The habit is visible inside single documents. Alliant’s filing says “units” 269 times; “homes” appears roughly two dozen, and clusters in the cover letter and the firm overview rather than the program tables. Related and Alta manage both words in one sentence: a mix of affordable homes across studios, one-bedrooms and family-oriented three-bedroom units.
The plainer noun does the counting. The warmer one does the selling. That is not deception, and it is not peculiar to one side. It is what the vocabulary of development sounds like.
The reach runs both directions
The Save Downtown Menlo proponents do it too, in a filed ballot document. Their rebuttal to the argument against Measure P carries the heading “Measure P enables a more reliable path to affordable homes,” then reports additional homes being planned on major sites near downtown — and two sentences later proposes working with those developers “to make more units affordable.”
Homes in the heading, units in the ask. Same document, same paragraph, ten lines apart.
So the warmer noun is not exclusive to one campaign or one developer. Builders and balloters all claim it to advance their ask.
So, what does the ballot ask?
The measure before voters on November 3 asks whether the City may sell, trade, lease, donate, dispose of or convey the downtown parking plazas without a vote of the people. Its subject is the disposition of public parcels and who signs off on it. Nothing in that question turns on what anyone calls the buildings.
Which is what makes the six words in the black bar of the Vote No logo worth reading at full size. They argue for something the ballot measure will not cover, in a word everyone uses freely and which does not appear in the proposed parking plaza ordinance. Plus, neither a No vote nor a Yes vote can secure new housing, let alone homes.
What this piece does not say
Nothing here suggests that renters lack homes, or that apartments cannot become homes. They can, and the distinction above says so directly — a home is made by the people who live in a place, whatever the tenure and whatever the building. The argument is about a campaign’s choice of noun, not about the people who would live in the units. We concede homes need people.