Group urges Caltrain to consider high-density housing on its land

As many have posted to before. Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and other cities up and down the peninsula are suffering from over crowding. The solution is not to add more people. It would be a much better use of these right of ways and Caltrain owned property to establish more open spaces, bike corridors, and other uses.

What a great idea! If Caltrain has the land, why not use it for housing!

If they are just talking about redeveloping the train station parking lots, I am all for it. Replace the level parking lot with a 2 story parking garage and several stories of apartments or condos on top of that. Include transit passes with the rents or condo association fees. Housing right next to the train stations will take a lot of commuter private cars off the roads.

Great idea!

Put the tracks in a tunnel and there will be a lot more land available for such housing.

One thought is the put the trains underground, use the surface rights above it for housing in the stretches between stations and use the surface above the stations for transit connections and parking. The surface area of the current right of way is very valuable land - particularly in Atherton - and could generate a lot of the needed capital.

Why not take this as an opportunity to design a multi-dimensional, multi-purpose system that uses the existing right-of-way that includes CalTrain, HSR, utility conduits for telephone and internet cables, surface housing with high density housing around each station. And add pedestrian path and a separate bicycle path on the surface along the entire right of way. And include 3 or 4 12" conduits for the technology of the future.

We should think of this right of way as an integrated multi-modal communications spine for the peninsula.

A piecemeal approach will be very expensive.

Do it once and do it right.

The trains need to be underground. People moan that the cost is too high but never seem to look at the many benefits of doing that.
Imagine the opprtunity for a new straight bike route from San Francisco to San Jose. Imagine the value - including property taxes and CalTrain revenue - of housing for those who already commute to our towns in cars. Imagine the impact on traffic when fewer commuters have to drive long distances to get to existing jobs. Our cities have been irresponsible by approving the situation we are in. CalTrain can do something great that would benefit generations to come.

Relocating Caltrain rails underground will NEVER happen, so isn't time to move on to pragmatic solutions?

1. The biggest, richest and most aggressive proponent of underground rail systems - Palo Alto - just gave up on this preferred alternative after spending huge sums of money, city council time, and community resources studying it only to decide RECENTLY its too expensive and there are simply too many practical obstacles. You can read its findings online.

2. Caltrain would never approve funding for a solution it views as "extravagant", especially given the uncertainties surrounding the funding of EVERY future grade separation any where on the Peninsula. For example, there is no funding available for any grade separation project in San Mateo not already approved. Also, why spend $billions when $Millions will do.

3. Caltrain has NO experience building long open trenches and tunnels. Why would it want to start now?

RE: putting housing on Caltrain land is also a "pipe dream" and the reasons many and obvious.

Note: It's always easy to ask someone else to pay the high costs of "things" you cannot afford.

This is a familiar theme on the Town Square.

Learn from history.

The Golden Gate bridge:

"They Said It Couldn’t Be Built

Prospectors on their way to look for gold in the hills of California named the strait, which connects the Pacific Ocean with San Francisco Bay “The Golden Gate.” Capt. John Fremont, explorer and surveyor for the U.S. Army also is said to have given it this name in 1946 because it reminded him of a harbor in Istanbul named Golden Horn.

The mind-boggling idea of spanning this entrance to San Francisco’s harbor enticed people’s imaginations for years. San Francisco was growing fast, and Marin County, 1 mi. across the water, had tremendous potential.

Connecting the two would be a huge boon for the entire area. San Francisco was the largest American city still served primarily by ferry boats. Lacking a permanent link with communities around the bay, the city’s growth rate was below the national average.

Bridging the strait, however, was a daunting challenge.

Many engineering and construction experts said the bridge couldn’t be built. The strait is 6,700 ft. (2,042 m) wide. It’s really a gap in a mountain range, a gorge fronting directly on the Pacific Ocean, producing strong, swirling tides and currents, with water 335 ft. deep at the center of the channel, and almost constant winds of 60 mph.

The bridge would be broadside to ferocious winds and would often be surrounded by blinding fogs during construction and operation. It also would be within 12 mi. (19 km) of the geological fault whose shifting had rumbled through San Francisco in 1906, shaking down bridges and thousands of other structures.

No bridge had ever been built before at a harbor entrance; the structure would have to be tall enough to allow the largest ships to pass underneath its deck at high tide."

Advocating to put trains in a tunnel is a diversion strategy to prevent any action for more years, decades, to come. Don't fall for it.

It would be fantastic for Caltrain to put dense housing near the current and future train stations to encourage life with few cars. Wonderful. Do it now.

Minimum 3-4 stories.

This area is far too crowded already. Cramming in even more people will make it much worse.

No one who is in favor of these Transit-Oriented Developments ("TODs") has yet given anyone any practical plans with details that show exactly bow everyone who will live in these TODs and all of their visitors will be able to go everywhere they nee to go without using automobiles, and this includes Uber and Lyft, as they also contribute to road congestion.

One other big problem these TODs never address is the increased need they cause for more capacity for all utilities: water, sewage, electricity, and natural gas, and telecommunications. No one can live anywhere without these things.

I look forward to reading good, practical solutions to these problems I have written about.

Peter: since you and I often agree on so many issues I can only view your hyperbolical reference to the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as great satire. So please accept my modest contribution. Once Atherton "donates" its heavenly half-acre of Caltrain property (and embraces Caltrain grade separations) I am confident the majority of Peninsula Cities will eagerly embrace Atherton's leadership on the county-wide housing crisis. And building hi-density affordable housing on non-Caltrain land would further burnish its reputation. Go for it!

A little more levity in the Town Square is sorely needed.

It's critical to build more housing for workers here. Thousands more workers will be be commuting here anyway, with over a thousand more jobs opening up in Menlo Park alone (Web Link As long as more jobs are created than housing, housing costs and congestion on highways will go up. Building this housing here, near transit, will shorten commutes, minimize congestion, and reduce emissions.

Many people live without cars on the peninsula, and TOD will only make this easier and more commonplace.

The frantic hand-wringing on this forum is painful to see. Rather than suggest that these homes will be built without sewers, or that we'll run out of electricity, I'd love to see us embrace change and welcome new residents.

"Build it!" has a point---but I don't think the point I'm seeing is the point they are making. Yes, as long as more jobs are created than housing, congestion will continue to increase. That's why many of us would like a cap on further job creation at the major tech companies based on this small amount of land between the bay and the mountains. If you want to line the railway with housing and call it good, you can...but living next to the railroad cannot be anyone's idea of premium housing for tech jobs---and those are the majority of the jobs being created. Perhaps, rather than increasing the need for housing, we could line the railway with affordable housing for those who already work in this area, and make sure those apartments are soundproofed? If you've never lived next to the El or a train line, you need to experience it before developing it, so that you can anticipate the real life noise.

Once you develop our open space, it's gone. There's no going back. How anyone can consider putting more buildings in this environment is beyond me. We don't need to be Manhattan, Seattle (which has horrific traffic, jet fumes and noise, and has ruined much of the surrounding suburban areas) or even Chicago. Let's try to preserve our land. Perhaps FB, Google, etc could locate their next campuses across the Bay.

Peter Carpenter should know better than anyone that the Menlo Park Fire District design standards would render new housing infeasible along the narrow Caltrain corridor. I mean, the right of way is 80 feet wide in a lot of places, and it goes hundreds of feet between access streets. The District is going to demand accessways on one or maybe even both sides, at which point you're getting close to a flat house with no yard.

Not to mention that this is happening between litigious incumbents who've gotten used to their precious, PRECIOUS sky views. What do you think Michael Brady or Morris Brown are going to say about new medium-density townhomes looming over Michael/Morris' old high-density townhomes?

I mean, c'mon.

Even 80 ft buildings would not present a problem for the Fire District's current apparatus.

@ 2D Living who writes above and obviously doesn't know where I or Mr. Brady live, since neither of us will have our properties affected by any new town homes.

What I am concerned with is what the present leadership of Caltrain has failed doing, and what may well happen in the near future: See:

Web Link

[Post removed; argue your point, but don't attack other posters.]

"the idea of high-value housing being built on the nearby Caltrain ROW (which was Peter's disingenuous suggestion)."

There is nothing disingenuous about my proposal - I have made it for years and believe that it makes a lot of sense.

The mid peninsula is NOT over crowded. It has a fraction of the density of NYC or even LA. The issues here have been caused and are continued to be caused by greedy homeowners who courted offices while NOT building housing for the children and grandchildren. This has been exasperated by lack of transportation planning and the success of the very industry that was courted by the communities of the mid peninsula. Now you want to put a cap on the number of employees these companies can have?
READ: THESE COMPANIES AND STANFORD ARE THE REASON FOR THE OUTRAGEOUS COST OF HOUSING AND THE APPRECIATION LONGTIME HOMEOWNERS ENOYS HERE.
coupled with low property taxes thanks to prop 13, these homeowners crap all over anything new in order to keep there property values high.
The mid peninsula is NOT full, it is just full of greedy baby boomers who could careless about the community.