Menlo Park City Hall in Menlo Park, Calif. The Menlo Park City Council on Tuesday voted to delay taking action on a proposal that would build hundreds of low-income housing units on three parking lots.
An all-too-familiar political skirmish about affordable housing is playing out in Menlo Park.
The city, which is home to Meta, joins other wealthy San Mateo County cities — such as Atherton and Hillsborough — that are figuring out how to satisfy new housing quotas set by the state without infuriating residents.
During an hourslong meeting Tuesday night, the Menlo Park City Council voted to temporarily table a proposal to build several hundred units of low-income housing across three parking lots in the city’s downtown after dozens of residents, many of them business owners, spoke out against it.
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“If I don’t have parking, my business is dead,” the co-owner of an electronics repair shop told the council.
The proposal is the result of the city’s housing element, a state-mandated plan that requires individual cities to build a certain number of new homes by 2031. To be in compliance, Menlo Park needs to build 2,946 new housing units by 2031, with at least 740 of those units being made available to people who make just 50% of the area median income.
The city hoped to build at least 345 of those units across three city-owned parking lots along Santa Cruz Avenue in the heart of Menlo Park. But that would erase 556 public parking spaces from downtown, and project opponents at Tuesday’s meeting argued that such erasure would hamstring downtown businesses and........