Throughout the North Ventura Coordinated Area Plan (NVCAP) process I've advocated for a particular land use design pattern which I think would satisfy many of the criteria for a successful plan. I have modeled this design pattern in the hopes that it may provide the council and community with a successful resolution of the NVCAP challenge.

You can see images of this proposal and a more detailed description here:
Web Link

In a nutshell, I modeled a few multi-family residential and mixed use buildings in a form I call the Garden Apartment and arranged them within the North Ventura area. The design is pedestrian oriented, humanist and ecologically beneficial. It brings significant additional housing and park space to the area along with a mix of retail, commercial, and community space, all within a human-scale envelope which respects adjacent single family residences.

The essential form of the Garden Apartment is a building terraced such that every occupant has access to rooftop gardens. Its animating principle is that every person should have a home and access to nature.

This proposal is mid way between the medium and high density alternatives, and has a much reduced impact particularly on neighboring single-family residences. It offers over 1,400 bedrooms, 1M sq.ft. Residential, 1M sq.ft. Open Space, and 334K sq.ft. Commercial space (a net decrease of 50K sq.ft. from existing uses). It preserves the most historically significant and visually interesting portions of the Historic site: the section of the cannery building with the monitor roofs, and the ranch house on Ash and Portage. From a bird's eye view, most surfaces are naturalized open space.

Keep in mind that the dimensions, spacing and distribution of residential vs commercial could be adjusted to best meet the communities needs.

If you like this proposal, please inform the council at City.Council@cityofpaloalto.org or the staff at NVCAP@cityofpaloalto.org

The proposal described above is interesting and well worth the look. SO much nicer than the usual unimaginative boxes going up everywhere.

As for the rest of the session, I wonder how much it cost to waste everyone's time with this and to so blatantly ignore all the time and effort put in by the Working Group. Yet again, the "Planning" staff was unable to answer basic questions, laughably classified parking strips as "parklets" and couldn't answer how they'd enforce a one-car-per-housing unit limit, if that limit was even legal and what penalties (if any) they'd impose for violations and where the 2d car would park beyond saying, "Uh, I suppose on surrounding streets."

Yet again "Planning" and the usual suspects advocated for the developer, pushing offices instead of housing, including Ms "No Traffic Here" Kniss who began her 2 minutes with a gratuitous dig at the Mayor. At least this time, their reports and arguments were so bad even their council acolyte had to reject all the proposed alternatives. Unanimously.

I just wanted to clarify for anyone who watched my public comment presentation to Council (watchable here: Web Link and read my description above and noticed a discrepancy: last night I said my proposal had a net change of ~80K sq.ft. but above I wrote that it had a net change of -50K sq.ft. of Commercial space. The reason is that in my initial calculation I included in the commercial space an outdoor area under an overhang: a veranda which surrounds the ground-floor retail where dining tables and shop displays could be outside but protected from the elements. But, properly, only fully enclosed and conditioned spaces are included in square footage so I corrected my calculation to more accurately reflect the renderings. I was surprised actually what a big difference that little tweak made on the total net change in commercial space, +80K to -50K. Total the calculated commercial space in the buildings I modeled went from 464K sq.ft. to 334K sq.ft. by not including the veranda, compared to 385K sq.ft. in the existing buildings replaced by my model. It goes to show that even little tweaks spread over a large enough set of buildings can add up to a big difference.

The Cedric de La Beaujardiere design is far too compressed and appears to be promoting maximum usage of every available square inch in the neighborhood.

People do not want to live like caged rats and privacy considerations also enter into the picture.

Ventura is one of the few remaining mixed-use neighborhoods in Palo Alto with various specialty repair shops and older homes dating back to the 1940s.

Many Ventura residents would prefer to keep things this way and it is not for the PACC or other Palo Alto neighborhood residents to advocate unnecessary changes or chime-in on an established residential environment that is none of their business.

Maybe consider building those ludicrous spaceship designs somewhere else (e.g. Barron Park) and let the designer embrace his Frank Lloyd Wright leanings in some other way.

We like our old 2BR/1B house and so do most of our neighbors.

Where else can one pay $2M for a fixer-upper other than in Palo Alto?

Due to repeated violations of our Terms of Use, comments from this poster are automatically removed. Why?

Probably best decision since we have no idea what type of things we will need in a couple of years' time. Pandemic recovery will show a different type of normal to the status quo we had before. Nothing can be decided on by prepandemic norms.

Since I have been following this story, two thoughts continually occur to me:

1. The pandemic has reshaped how we think about work spaces and working from home. Why continue to plan for office space the way we used to when we don't even know how we will emerge from the situation that obtains today? (From an infectious diseases point of view, we are lucky indeed that we went 102 years between worldwide pandemics. Instead of returning to a state of denial today, June 15, we should be planning for the next one.)

2. Why is housing construction forever and always held hostage to commercial development?

I agree with vmshadle. There are 2 brand new office buildings built on Park blvd near by Fry's site not yet occupied. I wonder how quickly those building will be filled. We shall see.

Such a sad abdication of responsibility given the importance of timely action to address our broad-spectrum housing crisis.

The residents of Ventura should have the final say and the PACC and developers go against their wishes, a class action lawsuit can easily be initiated.

And besides, the City of Palo Alto is no stranger to an ongoing threat of lawsuits.

The Council gave a verbal 'spanking' to the staff and to the consultant. The staff got theirs by holding meetings with a selected residents group and then disrespecting them by pushing a plan that the residents group disliked. The consultant got theirs by an absence of creative thinking in the housing design and layout (their solution to all problems: increase the height and add more floors and reduce the parking) and for an economic analysis based on questionable assumptions. The questioning by the Council was appropriately withering and brutal. The disagreement is over priorities: the staff pushed a proposal that would support subsidies for affordable housing but would include more offices (and more jobs), and the Council, while welcoming more housing, wanting a proposal that would reduce the jobs/housing imbalance.

Thanks for having common sense, City Council! Why must we build more offices when the offices we have are lying vacant? Does not make any sense. Plus, if we build more offices, doesn't that also mean we will be required to have even more housing?? Let's fill the offices we have before building more. People are working remotely now; office space is not the necessity it once was.

As someone recently suggested, the property should be condemned. The owner should not be unhappy: its a good deal with significant appreciation and tax free money. Planning can go on forever but saving the 1918 cannery?
Get on with it!

"The Council gave a verbal 'spanking' to the staff and to the consultant."

Yup. And how did they respond to that and/or specific points of criticism? Planning Director Lait said, "Oh gee, it's late." At 8:30PM when meetings usually run later than 11PM. When told to defend some of their sillier assumptions, "Oh, gee. We don't have the budget for more analysis."

How much did their consultant cost? How much did staff time cost? How much time was wasted for the PTC, CC and Working Group meetings?

The same questions apply to Staff's failure to define "medical retail" re Town & Country both before starting the review process and after they were so directed by the City Council. Or to notice there were problems with the Solar Permitting process until PAO's excellent report broke.

For this we pay big bucks and have to sacrifice libraries, police protection, fire protection and other valued services??

Whatever develops, hopefully it will be of benefit to the current Ventura residents as well.

As Palo Alto city residents, they deserve the same consideration that the other more affluent neighborhoods receive.

Ventura is one of the last of the pre-snob neighborhoods in Palo Alto. College Terrace, Evergreen, Midtown, Charleston Meadows, Mayfield, and Barron Park can also hold that distinction.

The northerners could take a few cues.

Why is Jonathan Lait still employed by the city of Palo Alto? His performance is usually cringe worthy; not impressive. His "facts" are frequently anything but. He has been called out by the public on many issues; yet, he is still here.

When will the City Council get tired of his tilt towards developers at the cost of residents?

Palo Alto deserves much better. Thank you

@Rita, great question.

Anyone following the Solar Permitting debacle saw he was clueless about the problems/ complaints until the Palo Alto Weekly's report. How can a "manager" not notice no applications had been approved -- for months! As always, something else was to blame -- the pandemic, email outages that went unnoticed for months, vanishing applications ...

His solution to the problem employee: Double-teaming inspectors so "they can learn from each other" -- as if poor performers should be teaching others how to abuse contractors and applicants! Then after doubling the cost of inspections by double-teaming he complains he's got no money to do "analysis"!

Someone should analyze what his "performance" costs us.

Hmmm. Seems to me it's Sobrato, not the city council, that decides this one.

"Ventura is one of the last of the pre-snob neighborhoods in Palo Alto. College Terrace, Evergreen, Midtown, Charleston Meadows, Mayfield, and Barron Park can also hold that distinction.

The northerners could take a few cues."

Penelope Roberts, that's a pretty unkind thing to say. Every neighborhood is different and each resident in this town is unique.