Menlo Park’s residents own a vast portfolio of public lands, perhaps none more valuable than the highly-used eight parking plazas downtown. Those off-street lots serve as the lifeblood for the shops and restaurants along Santa Cruz Avenue.
The City began assembling those downtown parking plazas into a city-owned property portfolio by strong-arming families to sell their homes and gardens shortly after World War II. By 1955, simple persuasion turned to legal compulsion as Menlo Park resorted to condemnation proceedings to seize title to private lands.
Fifty years after the City Council approved conversion of these private lands to community use and ownership, that same elected body proposes to invert the process. Current council members want to give these public properties to private developers as one more subsidy to entice them to build apartment projects that would tower over the neighborhood.
For this reversal of fortunes, City Hall again wants to use might over right.
With the arrogance of “we know best,” Menlo Park’s parttime governing body of five does not intend to ask the ultimate landowners for consent to hand over the parking plazas. For them, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission but many of them won’t be on the job when the consequences of their give-away become fully known.
Even worse, they know the land is yours, but assert the decision is theirs.
Ballot Measure P would change that by putting you first in the decision making as to the downtown parking plazas that are anything but surplus property.
This land is my land
In 1951, while Folkways was releasing Woody Guthrie’s argument that the land belonged to the people who walked it, Charles Burgess was six years into making the same case in Menlo Park with survey lines and asphalt, remaking Santa Cruz Avenue into a mid-century modern downtown shopping district anchored by parking the public would own.
By 1955, two years before Burgess died, the City finished his work the hard way.
It went to court and condemned the remaining lands it said it needed to complete the transformation of downtown to a shopping district that could compete with suburban malls. To finish the job, Menlo Park did not rely on general tax revenues — commercial property owners inside a special assessment district paid for land acquisition and the construction themselves, with no money from outside the district, according to contemporaneous news reporting of the period.
Menlo Park reached for the most severe power a government holds over private property, and it did so for the singular purpose to provide public parking downtown on city owned and controlled land. It didn’t take the land from one homeowner to give to developers to build more homes. It didn’t tax adjoining merchants to create a property vault for the municipality. It acquired the parking plazas to dedicate them for community use and to build and keep a competitive business district that would generate commerce, jobs, and tax revenues.
Therefore, as to the eight downtown parking plazas, this land is your land. The City took it for you and put its basis to do so on the record.
From open spaces to high rise towers
Seven decades later, a three-person majority of the five-member City Council is all it takes at the moment to undo 70 years of public ownership of and dependence on the same eight parking plazas. Led by lame duck Mayor Betsy Nash, the council has shown it stands ready to do so in the name of affordable housing unless the latest of ballot measures prevents them.
Unlike the last two ballot measures that Menlo Park voters failed to approve, this one will not limit what owners may do with private property. Those measures in effect said your land is my land.
For example, in 2014, Measure M would have sent each downtown non-residential project above a certain size on private property to the ballot. In 2022, Measure V would have required a citywide election before the Council could rezone any single-family lot, whether owned by a family or a builder.
As noted, both efforts to limit what private property owners could do with their land failed. On the certified county canvass, Measure M drew 38.7 percent yes against 61.3 percent no; Measure V drew 38.17 percent yes against 61.83 percent no.
Neither Measure M nor Measure V was a vote for or against housing or even one against giving voters a voice. Both were verdicts about sequence and ownership.
By lop-sided margins, voters rejected the concept that government should hold a priority position over private property owners as to preliminary and final decisions. They ratified that what happens to a piece of property should start with its owner. They preserved the concepts, first, that government’s role comes through compliance rather than control and, second, government plays its role as part of a process that neither starts nor ends with the City Council members.
A yes on Measure P extends the verdict of the last two ballot measure elections and keeps the priority held by property owners intact. A yes vote reverses nothing decided in 2014 or 2022. Instead, it extends the same rule to the parcels and lots those measures never reached: where the owner of record is the public itself.
Reduced to its core, Measure P lets voters, the ultimate owners of the downtown parking plazas, make the first and last decision on reducing or changing that land’s use and ownership.
What is already in motion
Without Measure P, the plazas easily could change hands through a process that already is underway.
At the direction of a majority of the City Council members, city staff issued a solicitation for bids, which three development teams answered for Plazas 1, 2 and 3.
Staff and a consultant are reviewing and scoring the proposals.
After that, the City Council wants to pick a winner, negotiate the land transfer and development terms, and declare three parking plazas are “exempt surplus property” so the city can dispose of the public lands in a streamlined, no bid fashion.
To do all of that, five council members vote, and three of them decide.
Read that sequence from end to end and you will not find the people as the owners anywhere in it. You also will not find that the people as beneficiaries, have any control.
The particulars. The solicitation, its priorities and its deadlines are set out in
the RFP fast facts; the staff schedule that places these steps around the election is examined in
Racing the ballot.
What Measure P does, and does not, do
Measure P sets the process right and vests approval authority in the true property owners and users. It does nothing else except to provide that before the City may sell, lease, donate, or otherwise convey the eight plazas in a way that affects the availability of or access to parking — the basis for which the City acquired the parcels to begin with — the landowners vote.
What Measure P does not do is also notable. It does not:
- Rewrite zoning laws.
- Alter height limits, density standards, or setback requirements anywhere in the city.
- Inject voters or government into planning or decision making over privately-owned property.
- Take away private rights or subject them to public approvals.
In those regards, Measure P differs from the earlier ballot measures on all fronts.
Beyond that, Measure P doesn’t even stop plans from getting made.
Staff can still negotiate with developers, and the Council still can choose among them. They simply lose the ability to close the deal without affording the true landowners the right to approve changes in the downtown parking uses or transfers of the parking plaza land rights.
Measure P therefore simply gives the voters first position over public lands they own, exactly as Menlo Park has twice insisted the property owners should retain.
What a no vote settles
In the end, a no vote will not get housing built downtown or the many other places the City Council could approve and subsidize for affordable housing. It does not even guarantee conversion of the downtown plazas to the urban towers Mayor Nash and her cohorts find so desirable.
But a no vote will let Mayor Nash and two other members of the City Council on their own to convey public property, permanently, for fair value or for free without the prior consent or subsequent approval of a single resident or taxpayer who rightfully owns that property.
To repeat, Measure P does not forbid housing, and it should not be sold as though it does. The City’s Housing Element — the plan every California city must adopt showing the state where it will accommodate new homes — counts these lots as capacity for at least 345 affordable units. Measure P would put their conveyance to a vote rather than take it off the table, and voters may well approve it.
Housing elements can also be amended, and the City’s own July 2026 update reported capacity above its allocation in every income tier, which suggests those units could be sited elsewhere if the public preferred. That update, and what it shows about where the CityThat update, and what it shows about where the City’s numbers stand, is examined in Jobs now, housing later. and the Housing Element watch.
Menlo Park will build affordable housing either way.
What Measure P decides is which ground the City surrenders to do it, and whether the people who own that ground are asked rather than told what will become of the eight city-owned parking plazas.
Charles Burgess spent a decade assembling these lands for the public. It should take more than three votes to give it away.
A vote yes gives the public landowners the right to say no or yes, to say not now, or even to say not on the terms you propose. They will have the right to decide how publicly owned parking plazas get used.
In that, Measure P codifies that as to the downtown parking plazas, this land is your land.