On August 10, following a series of years in which the average home price in Palo Alto doubled to $2.5 million, attorney Kate Vershov Downing resigned from the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission in protest. Downing’s resignation, coupled with the announcement that she and her husband, a programmer, were moving away to Santa Cruz to find a home that they could afford, set off a national firestorm over the record-setting cost of living in the Bay Area.
The Stanford Political Journal interviewed Downing and contacted the entire Palo Alto City Council and all candidates who are running in November’s elections to represent Palo Alto in the California and federal legislatures for comment on the issue and Downing’s policy recommendations. All council members and candidates, if they did not respond initially, were contacted at least once more, and all have had two weeks or more to respond.
Downing’s six specific policy points in the letter were: “Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices).”
As mentioned in our interview with Palo Alto Mayor Patrick Burt, Palo Alto Municipal Code 18.16.060b does not mention a ban on multiple stories of residential in mixed-use development.
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