On Menlo Park’s plan to call its heavily used downtown parking “surplus” — and the single bid that can qualify it for the bargain.
About the time Eichler was building his mid-century houses around the Peninsula, a kid couldn’t finish a comic book without hitting the ads for government surplus: an Army Jeep for $50, ammo cans and parachutes “at a fraction of original cost.”
The deals were mostly phantom, but the concept was grounded in fact. Wars had ended, warehouses of olive-drab goods were full, and nobody was driving those Jeeps. “Surplus” meant what it said — an asset the government genuinely no longer needed.
Menlo Park now wants to borrow that word for the opposite situation. Its plan is to declare three heavily used downtown parking plazas “exempt surplus land” and lease them to an affordable-housing developer on a 55-year ground lease at one dollar a year. On the text of California’s Surplus Land Act, the City may well be entitled to do it — for the right bidder. But entitlement and honesty are different things, and this doesn’t pass the smell test.
Start with the word. Ordinary “surplus land” requires the City to find that a parcel is “not necessary for the agency’s use.” A downtown plaza jammed with cars on a weekday afternoon fails that test on sight.
To keep the fiction alive, the City hangs its helmet on a term of art: “exempt surplus land.” Dedicate the parcel to the right kind of affordable housing, the statute says, and the “not-necessary” requirement drops away in exchange for a promise to build affordable homes.[1] Under that game, public land no longer has to be surplus in any ordinary sense; it only has to be headed toward the right use.
The rent is its own artifice. The kid who scored the $50 Jeep at least sent money toward the public. A one-dollar annual rent runs the other way: the City hands over coveted, income-producing land worth eight figures and collects a coin.
Defenders will say — correctly — that the forgone land value is the subsidy, and the public’s return is a 55-year affordability covenant, not the rent check. Fine. But that is a deliberate, multimillion-dollar public gift, and it deserves to be defended as a choice about priorities — not dressed in the thrift-store vocabulary of clearing out the motor pool. That may be the right call. It is not “getting rid of surplus,” and it belies the need downtown patrons and merchants have for the parking as it is.
Here is the part that matters for whoever wins the RFP. The exemption doesn’t reward just any housing. Every exempt-surplus pathway keys on “lower income households” — at or below 80% of area median income — and the City’s own solicitation asked for at least 345 units affordable to very-low-income families.[1] Measured against that bar, the three proposals do not fare equally.[2]
Presidio Bay is the clearest miss. Its 345 units are workforce housing pitched at 80% to 120% AMI, and it candidly admits it “does not deliver the very low-income housing requested.” Its whole band sits at or above the lower-income ceiling. Whatever its merits for nurses and firefighters, it does not supply the affordability that trips the exemption.
Related/Alta is closer, but points the wrong way in parts. Its 500-unit plan is mixed-income: an affordable core financed with tax credits, plus a market-rate parcel whose land value pays for the replacement garage. The affordable core can clear the 25%-lower-income floor the competitive pathway requires — but the market-rate piece is exactly the revenue generation the Surplus Land Act eyes warily, and the proposal never fixes the precise affordable-versus-market split. As designed it can qualify; as written it leaves the trigger to be nailed down later.
Alliant is the one bid that lets the Jeep drive. Its 345 units are 100% affordable, averaging 55% AMI, with a majority restricted at or below 50% — squarely in the very-low-income range the City requested. It satisfies both exempt-surplus pathways and needs no market-rate carve-out. Only Alliant clearly gives the City the means to declare the three plazas exempt surplus property.[2]
This dog may hunt. But if it is going to ride shotgun in a surplus Jeep, Alliant will be in the driver’s seat — and the Council will be in the back, reading comic books and longing to send away for X-ray specs and sea monkeys.