A plan to build Silicon Valley's tallest tower could break California housing politics

A proposed mega-development in bucolic Menlo Park demonstrates the failure of the old NIMBY paradigm — and the risks of giving developers carte blanche

A developer wants to build a 420 foot skyscraper at the former headquarters of Sunset magazine (Credit: Rob Corder via Flickr)

Affluent cities and towns in California have gone from being among the least-friendly places for housing development in the country to some of the most-friendly. For now, this transformation is only visible in blueprints and planning documents. But soon enough, cranes will loom above neighborhoods in Santa Monica, Palo Alto, and San Francisco that haven’t changed much in decades, if not a century. Other high-cost states are gradually, begrudgingly, moving in the same direction.

During the era when NIMBYism was the dominant urban development paradigm, local politics, city planning, and architectural criticism coalesced around a set of ideals and preferred outcomes. Respect for context, neighborhood scale, community engagement, and historic preservation were the words of the day. Now, that paradigm is quickly eroding. The overarching goal of the new YIMBY paradigm is clear, and clearly reflected in public policy: Build more housing in urban areas. But beyond that big-picture objective, there’s little consensus as to what new development should look like in terms of architecture, urban design, and political process.

A proposed development in Menlo Park, in the center of Silicon Valley, perfectly encapsulates this transitional moment and its discontents. It at once demonstrates the brokenness of the old NIMBY paradigm, and the risks of giving developers carte blanche.  

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Dubious origins

The more you discover about 80 Willow Road, the more unbelievable it seems.

The developer, N17, plans to invoke the “builder’s remedy” — a zoning holiday designed as a legal cudgel against unrepentantly NIMBYish cities like Menlo Park — in order to build three towers ranging in height from 300 to 420 feet. According to initial plans, the towers would hold 800 homes, including 160 deed-restricted affordable homes, per builder’s remedy requirements. There would also be a 150-key hotel, a quarter of a million square feet of office space, and at least 500 parking spaces.

The towers would rise on a seven-acre site set amidst two-story houses and commercial buildings. The tallest tower in the development would easily be the highest structure in Silicon Valley; taller, even, than any building in diminutive downtown San Jose where heights are capped due to FAA flight paths. The 285-foot bell-tower of the Hoover Institution, about two miles away on Stanford’s campus, would develop a serious inferiority complex.

Adding another point of controversy, the development would necessitate the demolition of the former headquarters of Sunset magazine, an iconic organ of the American west, whose 1950s campus was designed by Cliff May in a unique Mission-modernist style.

Oh, and one more thing. The property is owned by a group that includes Vitaly Yusufov, son of Igor Yusufov, a billionaire former energy minister of Russia under Vladimir Putin. In 2019, as the $72 million sale of the property was closing, Deutsche Bank, one of the parties in the transaction, took the highly unusual step of flagging its own deal as suspicious to U.S. regulators, the New York Times reported at the time.

‘Crude juxtaposition’

When the sale went through, Russian media reportedly mischaracterized the property as a “sprawling $72 million mansion in California.” That’s actually not too far off. The office campus custom built for Sunset magazine “embodied a distinct vision of the California Dream,” writes San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King in a recent column, “low-slung and inviting, with an immense adobe ranch house opening onto an expansive, bucolic garden inspired by the American west.”

By contrast, the proposed redevelopment represents “a starkly different take on California — one where builders call the shots, and residential towers pop up from any planning loopholes that attorneys can find,” King continues. “The juxtaposition is so crude as to be startling, the most flagrant case yet of trying to exploit the undeniable need to create more housing in established communities. The need is real, absolutely. But this doesn’t mean that churning out product should take precedence over everything else.”

It should be noted that all of these plans remain preliminary, and that no architectural designs have been released. More details are expected this summer. But all indications are that N17, founded by a former Trammell Crow vice president, means business. Already, the developer has upsized its proposal from its initial application. The group is also working on a pair of super-sized state density bonus towers in downtown San Francisco.

Based on what we know so far, there’s plenty to justify King’s criticism. At the same time, there are aspects of this development that are daring and exciting; that point toward a more just and more sustainable mode of American urbanism. The challenge, for both cheerleaders and good-faith critics of this new urban development paradigm, will be disentangling the scarily new from the legitimately harmful.

In introducing this project to the world, King neglected to describe its location. It’s an 11-minute drive or 30-minute bike ride to the Googleplex and a 9-minute drive, or 15-minute bike ride, to Meta HQ. Stanford U, the venture-capital capital of Sand Hill Road, and the offices of dozens of major tech firms are within easy biking distance. The shops, restaurants, and grocery stores of downtown Palo Alto are a 15-minute walk away, and the Caltrain station, with frequent train service to San Francisco and San Jose, lies just beyond. The median home value of Menlo Park is $2.5 million. The median household income is $200,000. The schools are stellar. The weather is perfect.

For decades, this area has walled itself off from new arrivals. It has invited job growth while blocking housing. It has forced its workers, especially poorer ones, to endure harrowing, gas-guzzling commutes.

A reasonable person — who is not steeped in a Sunset magazine vision of pastoral California — would probably agree that the backyard of a top university and some of the world’s largest companies would be an appropriate place for very high-density housing. (Better, surely, than the rolling hills of California Forever.)

How dense is too dense? We don’t know because communities like Menlo Park have asserted from time immemorial that anything more than the status quo is a horror show. This mentality is how Menlo Park ran afoul of state housing laws and became eligible for the builder’s remedy in the first place. The same attitude is what led to the proposed (and presumed dead) 580-foot tower in San Francisco’s Sunset District, which only came about after neighbors fought tooth and nail against more reasonably-sized developments.

In a perfect world, cities and neighborhoods ought to have some authority to shape development within their boundaries, even the most socially beneficial variety. Unfortunately, they have abused that authority so egregiously, for so long, that tools like the builder’s remedy have become necessary. No amount of gentle cajoling would have convinced affluent suburban city governments — which exist in large part to block new housing construction and protect homeowners’ property values — into adopting a more welcoming stance.

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Disastrous politics

But that doesn’t mean a project like this is above criticism. A trio of skyscrapers rising amidst single-family homes is not great urban design. Perhaps in a decade or two, after a few high-rises go up in downtown Palo Alto, and five-over-ones line nearby boulevards, a 40-story building in this location could fit in more seamlessly. But we’re not there yet. Not even close.

If this project were to go forward, it would be disastrous politics, giving NIMBYs across the country a terrifying symbol for their reactionary campaigns. It would be just as galvanizing as the Sunset District tower, a suburban Tour Montparnasse built by a Russian oligarch. (N17 is developing the property on behalf of the ownership group.)

It’s often said in pro-housing circles that for-profit developers are unfairly maligned. It is they, after all, who actually build the vast majority of housing that cities and their people so desperately need. But housing activists have to acknowledge that this industry has its fair share of bad actors. There’s a long and shameful history of developers engaging in corruption and treating the communities where they operate as disposable. Real estate remains an all-too-convenient vehicle for money-laundering, even as it serves a vital purpose in society. There are enough unambiguously good projects out there to avoid cheerleading for suspicious characters.

It’s also unfortunate that the builder’s remedy allows developments like this one to dedicate as much as one-third of their square footage to non-residential uses. The purpose of the builder’s remedy and similar policies like the state density bonus is to spur housing production; specifically, to capture a portion of developer profits from high-density projects and channel them into affordable housing. When hotels and commercial projects can enjoy these zoning holidays, too, it lends credence to the criticism that pro-housing policy amounts to a developer giveaway.

Balancing historic preservation with the need to build housing is another very real challenge, as King highlights in his column. But instead of being an excuse to say, “no,” this challenge should be an invitation to get creative. Just as it would be heartless to demolish the entire seven-acre Sunset magazine campus, it would be equally extreme to preserve the whole thing in its circa-1950s state.

After all, a 30,000 square foot office complex and its luscious grounds don’t provide much social good in the belly of housing-starved Silicon Valley. A mega-development with 800 homes, including 160 deed-restricted affordable homes, provides a much-needed benefit to the community, despite all of its other flaws.

How to incorporate these nuances into public policy is a generational challenge. Shattering the old NIMBY paradigm was just a first step. Now comes the hard part of creating a new urban development consensus that allows for lots of new housing in the right places, while respecting historic architecture and creating reasonable guardrails against the most chaotic proposals.