Another solid opinion! I don't know Scott, but this is a great reminder that downtown needs customers, not competition. Balanced office/residential developments like Stanford and Greenheart seem like a great way to get people in those stores. Hey, maybe that's what is needed to reopen Su Hong and Menlo Hub on El Camino! The point about Traffic Management programs is also good. I don't know how a retail business on El Camino could make it's customers take transit, but Facebook definitely does. Good stuff to keep in mind.

Downtown needs customers. Where do savemenlo think the folks in the office buildings are going to eat lunch? Where will they take their breakfast meetings? Where will they take meals or cocktails right after work? It will be downtown. That will add vibrancy to our downtown. Maybe savemenlo likes a "dead" downtown. Who knows. Nothing coming from them is honest.

Here's a clue: we don't live in a "village." We live in a CITY of 35,000 people. Wake up! We're living in the 21st century, not the 19th.

Downtown vibrancy comes from a balanced mix of uses. The community agreed upon a nice balance in the downtown plan. Huge office are suitable for urban or office park environments, not the center of a community that wants its downtown to retain a "village character" (not my words, but those documented in the plan's Vision).

The two large proposed projects are anything but balanced mixed use. Each is about 50/50 office and housing. The plan's mix assumed 17% office overall. Of the non-housing development, the plan's mix assumed that office would be about 50%. For these 2 projects, the amount of office is nearly 100% of non-housing space.
Why that matters: offices bring no sales tax revenue to the city, they bring commuter traffic at peak hours (worst time of day), they are dead in evenings and weekends. More residents, from the housing, will help vibrancy, but look seriously
at the claims about startups occupying brand new, expensive space rather than a more typical garage and think about how many lunches can startup workers afford!

Fact Checker:

1. While I agree the Downtown Santa Cruz Avenue area has a small town character El Camino clearly does not. The notion that EL Camino could look like a village is a bit bizarre.
2. El Camino is suburban highway with a jumbled mix of retail similar to other Peninsula cities.
3. In general the most attractive buildings on El Camino are the office buildings not the older retail structures which look tired.
4. Small MP shops and restaurants continue to struggle in Downtown because of intense and growing competition from restauarnts in Palo Alto and stores in Stanford Shopping Center.
5. There is absolutely no basis to believe new ones located on El Camino would fare any better. If anything they would increase competition for our existing ones. So attracting new small retail to ECR is a pipedream.
6. There is no factual basis to believe that new office workers would not benefit Downtown businesses especially restauarnts; run a free lunchtime shuttle and make it easier to get Downtown.
7. Workers who use our shops and restaurants DO pay sales revenue.
8. Each year that nothing is built on the Greenheart and Stanford sites costs MP + School District millions of dollars.

Dana Hendrickson

Dana, everything you say is true. Those empty lots should be developed, property tax will go to the schools, office workers will eat and shop downtown, new residents will too (the two big projects alone will bring ~386 new housing units). A key question for me is how much office is too much in the downtown area? The Plan we all worked so hard on envisioned ~240,000 sq ft. That's a lot, but it was accepted by the majority and used as the basis for the Environmental Impact Report. The two big proposals account for over 400,000 sq ft of office. That's really a lot.

IF Save Menlo wanted to restrict the amount of development in the ECR SE and ECR NE R
zones they could have done so with two sentences reducing the FARs for those zones.

Instead, Save Menlo's Davis California environmental lawyer created a 12 pages document which is poorly written and which has lots of unintended consequences. Even the measure 100,000 sq ft of offices per PROJECT is meaningless because there is not a single existing parcel for which that limit makes a difference.