After throwing the residents of the President Apartments out of their homes, this is a place I will never patronize.

As has been remarked by many, no plans to darken their doors after they evicted 84 moderate income residents and now we're stuck paying to bring moderate income residents downtown.,

I'm looking forward to spending time at the rooftop bar. (as soon as it stops raining!)
My husband and I had drinks in the bar. Very nice! The lobby is beautiful!

As inviting as a roof-top bar is, it is hard to embrace this particular one b/c of the high price that was paid by the former tenants. And the double-speak coming from City Hall about affordable housing inventory. As for the names of the drinks - risky business to name anything after a president these days. I guess the owners weren't informed of Palo Alto's recent history with name changes.

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I look forward to seeing how this goes.

The new Graduate hotel restored an historic building in desperate need of renovation and improved infrastructure. The conversion to apartments indicated the decline of the building and the trajectory of an old building with deferred maintenance leads directly towards demolition. The eventual demise of the building would only provide unsafe housing and finally displaced residents.
Ill will towards The Graduate does not resolve housing issues and is contrary to the positive economic impact the hotel provides through employment, enhancing vitality of University Ave and tax revenues for the city.
The issue of low income housing is greater than one building and derision of this one location is a distraction from the very real issue of housing.

I agree with Peter Venkman. The historic building was completely renovated and is now beautiful. The old building could have been torn down and replaced with an office/retail building similar to 429 University Ave. The former property owner Of the President Hotel had no intention of turning the building into an updated apartment building. And believe me, updated apartment units would never have been affordable!

This building was built as a hotel and defaulted to low-income housing because of lack of investment of the owners. We can generate a lot of low-income housing in the city by encouraging deterioration of the housing stock.

This piece of history has probably been saved for some time. I think it likely that another developer would have torn it down for more office space without regard to history.

I think there are Graduate hotels in other cities with universities. It’s fine and legal.