Palo Alto Weekly Reports on Two Architects With an Answer to the City’s RHNA Problem

Palo Alto’s NIMBY streak may be forgivable—there are some very nice backyards out that way. But a state-mandated formula called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation declares that the city must build more than 6,000 new units of housing in the next ten years. Palo Alto Weekly’s Gennady Sheyner writes that Architectural Review Board members Peter Baltay and David Hirsch, working as private citizens, have a proposal. The city could build new housing over existing parking lots near the University and California Avenue corridors.

Perhaps 1,000 apartments could be stacked up over the existing city-owned lots, which would be excavated underground so that no existing parking spaces are lost. And Baltay and Hirsch suggest that bringing people downtown would help ailing retailers buffeted by the twin blows of COVID and the switch to online shopping. A note of urgency comes from Baltay: “You own the land, you call the shots. You wait until the state tells you what the rule is, you lost. It’s so important that the city has the opportunity not only to do these things, but to do them under Palo Alto’s standards.” But will these units privatize city property, and will these apartments be affordable to the class of people priced out by PA rents?

Read more: “Housing over parking? Architects propose building apartments on public lots”