After 7 years, NIMBY battle finally over
$5 million homes rise on site once eyed for affordable senior units
When a nonprofit housing developer won approval several years ago to build 60 apartments for low-income seniors in Palo Alto, neighbors revolted.
They complained it was “too dense,” eroded “the quality of life,” and that developers didn’t “give a damn” at public hearings. A citywide referendum killed the Barron Park neighborhood project on Maybell Avenue seven years ago.
Now, the long-awaited aftermath of that referendum has emerged: The first batch of 16 new single-family homes are on sale, starting at around $5 million, each with about 4,000 square feet of space for home gyms, theaters, offices, pergola-covered patios and multicar garages with electric vehicle charging ports.
Even this upscale development, called Orchard Park, was cut in half after challenges
and criticism from staff and residents.
“The irony abounds,” said Michael Lane, an affordable-housing advocate and San Jose director of SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. “It’s the textbook case to why we have a housing crisis.”
Silicon Valley cities have widely and prodigiously failed to meet state goals for affordable housing.
Palo Alto is near the bottom of the pack, providing just 6% of its target for very-low-income housing, and 13% of its low-income housing in the most recent development period.
New state guidelines will impose stiffer penalties for ignoring the standards. But the community resistance to new housing common in Palo Alto and many other Bay Area cities has a stubborn and lasting effect.
This bitter fight over the 2½-acre site on Maybell Avenue has highlighted the power of neighborhood resistance, a lingering distrust of city development decisions, and the ballotbox triumph against moving affordable housing into wealthy ZIP codes.
But what the city has ended up with — a new collection of luxury homes — has appeared in the midst of a pandemic chilling the sale of high-end properties.
“The big question is, where are the buyers?” said project executive Ted O’Hanlon.
The construction and sales slowdown caused by the pandemic are just the latest twist in a history of bickering, politicking and a unique argument over
city development rules that thrums through new development proposals to this day.
The Palo Alto Housing Corporation, a nonprofit with a half-century of experience developing affordable housing, owned the site.
It won approval in 2013 to build a 60-unit apartment building for moderate-income seniors and a dozen single-family homes.
The project would have filled a niche for affordable housing neglected by other developers. Roughly 19% of the city is over 65, nearly double the percentage found throughout Santa Clara County, according to census data.
The dozen market-rate homes would have helped subsidize the cost of the senior apartments. “We thought we had done good community outreach work,” said Jean McCown, a longtime board member of the nonprofit and former Palo Alto mayor. “But it never really went that smoothly.”
City councilmember Eric Filseth said the Maybell development “has become a little like Hillary’s email server — it’s taken on
a political narrative largely disconnected from actual events.”
Residents at the time felt the city had misused its power to greenlight commercial projects in exchange for dubious public amenities, Filseth said. Opponents argued it represented another questionable use of the city’s “planned community” policy, a tool allowing the city to negotiate with a developer to receive a public benefit — a park or additional infrastructure — in exchange for approving a project that doesn’t strictly meet zoning standards.
Filseth, one of multiple council candidates who successfully ran for office opposing the Barron Park project, said the developer and community never got along. “It started very adversarial,” he said, “and got worse from there.”
After the project was defeated, Palo Alto Housing sold the property to developer Golden Gate Homes. It, too, ran into community resistance. It initially asked to build 32 homes on the site, a smaller development than allowed by city zoning. But pressure from
the city and neighbors during public hearings and community meetings whittled the development down to 24, then 16 single-family homes. Developers are also paying the city at least $6 million in various fees.
Construction on the Orchard Park homes has been delayed by a few months, and the project is expected to be complete in early 2021. “It’s been really frustrating, to be honest,” said Palo Alto real estate agent Michael Dreyfus, who started marketing the property late last year.
Shoppers are spending more time scanning online listings but are not showing up to actually tour homes. “And you’ve got to show up in a scuba suit to see a house,” he said.
As the new homes wait for buyers, Orchard Park’s impact has been felt on projects across the city, housing advocates say.
McCown said the nonprofit, now renamed Alta Housing, has mostly chosen to develop in other cities rather than reengage with Palo Alto. The nonprofit had not planned a project in the city until last year, when it won approval
for Wilton Court, a low-income, 59-unit apartment complex about a mile from the Barron Park site. It was the first 100% affordable housing project the city had approved since Maybell.
Mayor Adrian Fine, a housing advocate who was not on the council when the senior project was killed, said the community’s reaction surprised him. But opponents of new development became emboldened by the referendum success, and city staff and leaders became more conservative in approving projects, he said.
“It changed the tenor of the conversation,” Fine said. “It’s like, Palo Alto, you guys are NIMBYs gone wild.”
But Filseth said the approval of Wilton Court shows the city is willing to greenlight affordable housing projects that meet community standards. At Orchard Park, he said, “I think everybody was still just exhausted from the Maybell fight and settled quickly on something of minimal drama.”