Going big

The residential portions of the project will consist of 46 townhomes and two large apartment buildings. Each apartment building is slated to contain 300 apartments along with parking for 375 vehicles. In addition, a 1.6-acre portion of the property at the corner of Middlefield Road and Ravenswood Avenue will be reserved for a future affordable housing development, which will be built separately by a developer that specializes in such projects. That project could accommodate up to 154 affordable (that is, below market rate) housing units, bringing the total number of new housing units for the entire project site to 800.

Parkline’s new office/R&D space would consist of five office buildings, plus an “office amenity” building. This latter would contain, on its ground floor, a food and beverage space that would be open to the public, plus, on its second floor, additional amenities just for the office tenants. Parking for the office tenants would be accommodated by three stand-alone parking garages, plus two smaller garages beneath two of the five office buildings and some amount of surface parking. And three of the existing SRI buildings would remain for SRI’s use; these would be updated by SRI through a separate project that would be independent of Lane Partners’ efforts.

The plans for Parkline show some 29 acres of open space all throughout the site, roughly 12 of which would be open to the public. Ten acres alone would come from the transformation of what today is paved surface parking. Parkline’s open space would be laced with accessible pedestrian and bicycle trails, plus active/passive recreational areas (including a 3,000 square foot dog park) that will be open to the public as well as to tenants. And there will be many, many trees: in addition to those that will be newly planted, hundreds of heritage trees that live on the site today are to be preserved.

Even with preliminary plans in hand, and lengthy written descriptions of the project (both of which are available on Menlo Park’s website), it is hard to imagine just how a project of this magnitude will affect the surrounding area. Considering the housing component of the project, 800 new units of varying sizes (from studios to three bedrooms in the apartment buildings, and four bedrooms in the townhouses) will bring a lot of new residents to the area. As for the offices, the total square footage will actually be a bit less than what is there today, but the density in terms of employees per square foot will certainly be higher, meaning that there will be more people working in the new development than have been working there in the past. Fortunately, Menlo Park’s Caltrain station is a short walk from this new development, and the heart of Menlo Park is not much farther, meaning that the folks moving into these new homes will likely do a lot less driving than many existing Menlo Park residents. And although the office portion of the project will have room to park some 2,000 vehicles, the nearby Caltrain station will surely induce a lot of those new employees to take mass transit. And some may even choose to live in the on-site housing, making their daily commute just a short walk.

Parkline looks to me to be a great asset for Menlo Park. But it won’t be alone for long. Right next door, along Middlefield Road, is the former U.S. Geological Survey campus, which in August sold to Presidio Bay Ventures, the folks behind the Springline project. Their initial proposal for the site includes 670 residential units, 740,00 square feet of office space, 40,000 square feet of retail and amenities, and a 15,000-square-foot childcare center. Presidio Bay’s project is a long way from approval, but whatever they ultimately do there, Menlo Park is going to see big changes over the next several years.