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Creating what is essentially a brand new neighborhood from scratch is no easy feat, a fact that the Palo Alto City Council wrestled with on Monday evening during a discussion of the San Antonio Road Area Plan, a roadmap for building more than 1,500 housing units.
The plan hopes to bring thousands of new units of housing, as well as retail, office and park space to the southern edge of the city where it borders Mountain View. The area around San Antonio Road has historically been dominated by low-density commercial and industrial businesses, but the city hopes to make great strides in housing development there to meet lofty state-mandated goals.
Previous discussions have toyed with the idea of adding around 1,500 units to the area per the city’s Housing Element, which serves as a master plan to guide new housing development to meet state quotas. But staff on Monday night presented the council with an even higher number: as many as 7,400 units if Palo Alto chooses to maximize height and density capacity across the board.
That new number caused much of the council, and the public, to balk. But Council member George Lu emphasized that the upper threshold should be treated as more of a reference point and could not realistically be met in the near future.
Planning Director Jonathan Lait also clarified that staff wanted to present city leaders with a full range of options for development, but conceded that the department could have done a better job at communicating the numbers.
“We are trying to create a sense of place in the San Antonio area,” Lait said. “Getting those higher quality elements of what connects and makes a neighborhood a neighborhood requires a certain amount of density, it requires a certain amount of office so that we can translate these ideas into something that brings it together cohesively.”
Staff sought council feedback on general themes of the development proposal for San Antonio, with the expectation that a more robust discussion will take place in June, when the council will be tasked with narrowing the list of options related to height limits, density, retail and transportation modes.
The early feedback on Monday night focused largely on the first two in that list.
The San Antonio Road Area Plan splits the 275 acres into several sub-areas based on the likelihood of redevelopment, taking into account any recent development as well as ownership and institutional uses.
The sub-areas designated as priority for their high development potential include the area along San Antonio Road between East Charleston Road and Byron Street (excluding the Greenhouse and condominium developments), north and south portions of Fabian Way and the area containing Commercial Street, Transport Street and Industrial Avenue, referred to as the CTI sub-area in planning documents.
In some areas, the transformation has already begun. The central San Antonio area, which is between Middlefield and Charleston roads, is currently dominated by low-density, commercial projects in its current state. But there are several pipeline applications for midrise apartment buildings between six and eight stories, including a 168-unit project at 788 San Antonio Road, which the city’s Planning and Transportation Commission plans to discuss at its meeting on April 8, and a 174-condominium project at 800 San Antonio Road.
In addition to ongoing development applications, staff identified 8.7 acres of Housing Element sites in the sub-area. They also found that the Magnussen Toyota at 690 San Antonio Road could be a future site of a plaza or park, given that the site is likely to be redeveloped in the near future anyway.
The City Council has already relaxed the building standards in the San Antonio Road in hopes of encouraging more housing. The new plan will build on that effort and further loosen height and density limits in areas that the council sees as ripe for housing.
The current height limit for residential projects in this area is 60 feet, or a little under six stories. Pipeline projects that exceed that limit, such as at 788 San Antonio, do so through the planned home zoning process, which allows developers to petition the city to allow denser housing on a site as long as at least 20% of the units are set aside for low-income households.
But the city could opt to increase the height limit to 90 feet for this sub-area with the goal of maximizing denser housing, which city staff indicated in their presentation could improve the feasibility of future projects. Many of the development applications for this area already attempt to exceed the 60-foot cap anyway, staff noted, and increasing the limit would bring city standards more in line with existing applications.
The exploration of the sub-area for South Fabian Way, near Charleston Road, is similar to the Central San Antonio one, but staff are more focused on “incremental redevelopment on a parcel-by-parcel basis” rather than increasing density across the board. The city will again have the opportunity to increase the height limit from 60 to 90 feet.
The City Council seemed amenable to increasing the height limit to 90 feet in these areas, with Vice Mayor Greer Stone stating that eight-story, mid-rise buildings could be the “magic number” for residential development.
However, a new analysis from Strategic Economics, a consultant that the city hired to help work on the new San Antonio Road Area Plan, found that the current real estate market favors for-sale townhomes at lower densities as opposed to mid-rise apartments. They added that “modest improvements in development conditions would likely readily enable development of these prototypes in the near future.”
As for North Fabian Way, the biggest change involves the Maxar site, where the owner is currently seeking a buyer for redevelopment with residential options likely, city staff noted. The Maxar site could yield between 900 and 1,400 units of housing, according to staff, and could allow for a mix of apartments and townhomes for purchase.
The 24.5-acre Maxar site could be reconfigured in a variety of ways based on the amount of residential, office, park and retail space. One concept from staff includes a large incubator space on the northernmost part of the parcel near the U.S. Highway 101, with one big park and one smaller one. Another concept reimagines the entire southern portion of the site as a large park with low-density residential units along the highway and higher-density facing Fabian Way.
The city’s decision on whether to increase the height limit and density of the sub-area could greatly influence the amount of potential housing, according to staff.
The final priority sub-area of Commercial Street, Transport Street and Industrial Avenue is characterized by smaller parcels and low-density commercial uses, with a single property owner aggregating numerous non-contiguous parcels. City staff envision transforming the area with high-density, mixed-use development. A key consideration for this sub-area is a proposed development just across the city’s border with Mountain View, which plans for an 11-story office building and an eight-story apartment building with 476 units of housing. Connectivity between the CTI sub-area and the Mountain View development is critical, staff explained.
Council member Pat Burt and Stone both emphasized the need for Palo Alto to address its jobs-housing imbalance by regulating office development. The most recent numbers from 2023 indicate that there are about 4 jobs per unit of housing in the city, far higher than the national average.
Burt said he was interested in the city exploring a transfer of development rights to limit office development and increasing housing density where it is more suitable for the area plan.
“Ultimately, I don’t want to see a growth in square footage of office, but replacing existing low-density (research and development) can make sense,” Stone said.
Outdoor space is also flexible for the CTI sub-area. Staff are seeking feedback on the size and amount of open space, as well as whether it should face Charleston Road or be placed internally to better cater to the neighborhood that could be created in the sub-area.
As for housing, the city has the opportunity to increase the height limit to 60 feet, or go as far as increasing heights for the residential to 250 feet and office height to 135 feet, allowing high-rises that could accommodate more than 1,500 units of housing.
Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims and Mayor Vicki Veenker seemed open to the high-rise idea near the highway.
“I’m more interested in going up to get the units we need and create more spaces for parkland and trees,” Lythcott-Haims said. “Going that extra height where we can stand it might help us get more of that green and that canopy that makes it Palo Alto.”
Council members spent much of the evening wringing their hands about the traffic impacts that would arise from adding so much housing to one area. San Antonio Road is already notorious for vehicle traffic as is, and the addition of thousands of new residents would only exacerbate that issue, council members said.
Staff and consultants don’t yet have an idea of the traffic impact because it depends largely on the housing capacity in the area, which is dictated by height and density limits that the council will vote on in June. Veenker described this problem as “trying to sail a ship while you’re building it.”
But council members expressed a strong interest in improving the flow of traffic in the area and increasing bicycle and pedestrian connectivity. Burt cautioned that the most extensive transportation demand management plan in the world would not be able to keep up with what is essentially a brand-new neighborhood.
Retail is another inflection point that the council will decide in June; that is, whether to require ground-floor retail in the priority sub-areas, or allow fully residential projects without any retail.
Council member Ed Lauing expressed concern that fully optional retail could mean that residents of new housing would lack a characteristic neighborhood feel without anywhere to shop, eat or drink.
The council will have plenty of work to do when it comes to making decisions on each of these policy aspects in June, but for now, the overall message was one of gratitude toward city staff for compiling a cohesive first look at what San Antonio could become in the future.
“This is a really bad place to live right now, but I think down the road it could be a really great place to live,” Council member Keith Reckdahl said.
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