‘Sour Grapes’ City Council

There were post-election sour grapes at Monday night’s ( 11/18/2013) Palo Alto City Council meeting. Council Member Liz Kniss lamented the “lowest voter turnout” she can remember and still doesn’t understand what those no on Measure D people were thinking. In fact, 39.7 percent of registered voters (15,014) went to the polls on D- That’s […]

Residents Petition Against 4-Story Building

Stop Palo Alto Urban Sprawl — Vote “No” to Rezoning 2755 El Camino for Yet Another Giant Building  (From Palo Alto Online, February 11, 2013) One of Palo Alto’s most prominent and congested intersections may soon have a signature building serving as its anchor as part of a proposal that the City Council weighed for […]

Voters Stop Maybell Development

A grassroots campaign in Palo Alto to overturn an approved housing development on Maybell Avenue scored a sweeping Election Day victory Tuesday night, winning by more than 1,000 votes. With all 32 precincts reporting, the campaign against “Measure D” had a lead of 6,437 to 5,036. The vote means that residents have succeeded in overturning […]

Deja Vu, All Over Again 1

It’s deja vu all over again The Maybell neighborhood’s struggle against a well-funded developer brings back memories of exactly ten years ago when many neighborhood residents worked to referend  the 800 High Street ‘planned community’ (PC). A number of those working for the current PC  are the same people who in 2003 supported  the developer […]

Is It Good Housing?

PAHC has proposed senior housing on the Maybell site.  Is it good housing? I don’t think so! The PAHC proposed building has virtually no senior-serving amenities, certainly no dining room where residents could congregate and enjoy a meal together, after all, they could be living there for a very long time.  Thus, residents will have […]

Daily News: Vote No on Measure D

Maybell senior housing project just too dense: Vote no on Measure D Hardly anyone disagrees that housing for low-income seniors is in great demand. And when the Palo Alto Housing Corporation comes up with an innovative proposal to provide 60 such units, as it did for a 2½-acre orchard at the corner of Maybell and Clemo avenues, it’s hard to […]

Are We NIMBYs?

Some proponents of Measure D have accused us of  NIMBYism. The oldest trick in the book is to give your opponent a negative label. Purely an ad hominem attack, which has nothing to do with the facts. There’s already a low-income housing complex called Arastradero Park right next to the proposed site of the senior […]

“Facts” vs. Real Facts

The proponents of rezoning in their desperate effort to ensure passage of measure D have been resorting to the use of misleading or disingenuous statements and refer to them as “facts”.  In a recent full page advertisement they stated that “The project will have 47 parking spaces” allocated for the 60 senior apartments.  The real […]

Blowing Smoke

Proponents of the development at Maybell have been blowing smoke about how it is all about housing poor Palo Alto seniors.  Actually it is about cramming high density housing into low density residential areas with big impacts on traffic, parking, and a huge push from ABAG to build dense projects here. Senior occupants can’t be […]

Safety Must Come First

I live on Georgia Ave. on the Cul de sac that nestles up to the back of Juana Briones school. Some days I have to back out of my driveway during the peak of pedestrian traffic, past the blind spot caused by my neighbor’s illegally high privacy fence. Kids on bikes, kids walking, little kids […]