How Menlo Park went from a philanthropist offering to build its library to taxpayers being asked to underwrite developers’ garages.
Menlo Park’s affordable-housing story has flipped on its axis. Eight years ago, a billionaire offered to give the City most of a new main library, and housing advocates asked to add homes on top. The city dithered, and the gift evaporated.
Now most of Menlo Park’s City Council is trying to fast-track the idea of placing housing on its downtown parking lots — a plan in which the money runs the other direction, from taxpayers to developers who say they cannot build without a subsidy.
The same city that couldn’t bring itself to accept a donation is now weighing whether to write a check. The same city that slow-walked a gift wants to move rapidly to making gifts of public land and taxpayer dollars.
In July 2017, developer and philanthropist John Arrillaga offered to cover the cost of a roughly $55 million new main library beyond the City’s first $20 million. The building was genuinely needed: consultants had said the library should nearly double in size, and the Library Foundation warned the aging structure couldn’t be brought up to ADA code by remodeling.[1]
On top of that public asset, advocates — Angela Evans of the Housing Leadership Council and Housing Commissioner Meg McGraw-Scherer — urged the City to add affordable apartments on land it already owned, steps from Caltrain, while Housing Commissioner Karen Grove argued that homes mattered more than a fancier library.[1] A consultant showed how libraries in Chicago and Portland had done exactly both.[2]
How many homes would have fit? No one ever said. The concept never advanced past illustration — the City gathered straw polls, not unit counts. That matters, because it means the library site was never shown as too small, or just right. Opponents of today’s parking-conversion plan note, without pressing the point, the reverse: that the Civic Center’s parking lots are in fact larger than the three downtown plazas, and could have held both a new library and affordable housing.[3]
The gift slipped away for want of speed. Costs climbed as the scope grew, a proposed bond polled short of the two-thirds it needed, the City stumbled into an open-meetings violation, and it never settled on where to put the building. Arrillaga, then in his 80s, wanted to move fast; the City wanted to “take our time and do this right,” as Mayor Peter Ohtaki put it.[4] In October 2018 the developer withdrew his offer, and that closed the book on the plan.[4] The old library, with its inadequacies, remains. The new housing remains unbuilt.
The collapse came amid institutional churn. City Manager Alex McIntyre, who had shepherded the offer, was himself heading out the door — he had resigned to run the City of Ventura, and his last day was Oct. 29, 2018.[5] The at-large council that let the gift lapse — Ohtaki, Mayor Pro Tem Ray Mueller, Rich Cline, Kirsten Keith, and Catherine Carlton — was also on its way out: weeks later, Menlo Park held its first district-based election. None of today’s council members were yet in office. Three who serve now, Mayor Betsy Nash, Cecilia Taylor, and Drew Combs, were elected that November and seated that December, just after the offer was withdrawn — so no one on the current council ever voted on the Arrillaga gift.[6]
What brought housing back was not a gift but a mandate. The state now requires Menlo Park to plan for 2,946 new homes by 2031 — including 1,166 for lower-income households, 740 of them very-low-income — on pain of fines and the loss of local zoning control. The council majority that Nash leads holds that the answer is to build at least 345 affordable units above new parking garages downtown.[7]
But the garages are the rub. Developers’ proposals seek a reported $15 to $26 million in city money — plus waivers of millions more in impact fees — to replace the 556 public parking spaces the plan removes.[3] And they expect to build on valuable downtown acreage the City owns for no more than $1 a year in nominal rent. One developer, offering no low-income units at all, still asks for $15 million.[3]
All of it lands amid a city budget deficit, and 135 downtown businesses warn that trading easy surface parking for garages could hollow out the district they anchor.[3]
The Civic Center itself was quietly taken off the table. The city’s 1,400-page Housing Element disposes of it in a single sentence: the Council chose not to pursue housing in the parks or on the Civic Center site, citing “the importance of green space and community space” for residents.[3] So the site that once arrived with a donor attached was set aside by choice — not for lack of room.
Strip away the detail and the reversal is stark. One option was a developer’s donation to the community: a library the City needed, homes as a bonus, mostly on someone else’s dime — and the Council let it go. The other is a subsidy from the community to developers, to rebuild parking the city already has so that housing can rise above it — and the Council is actively considering it.
There is a final irony, in the tempo. The gift was lost to delay — a city that couldn’t move fast enough while a willing donor waited. The parking-lot plan, if it is lost, will be lost to the reverse: a council pressing ahead even as a public vote on the very question looms next November. The lone brake has been Drew Combs — one of the three current members elected in that 2018 turnover — who has urged his colleagues to pause and let the voters decide rather than “kick the can down the road.”[8]
Menlo Park dithered when speed was warranted, and hurries now when patience might be. Haste made waste once; this time, waste is making haste.