Palo Alto drops idea of adding housing at Cubberley

Palo Alto’s elected leaders have no shortage of ideas for future housing sites, from parking lots and transit hubs to industrial zones and residential backyards.

But there is one site that city officials are explicitly excluding from their housing discussion: Cubberley Community Center. Chastened by the past and antsy about the future, city staff and the City Council agreed that the new vision for the sprawling campus at 4000 Middlefield Road should not include a residential component.

The decision marks a break from the last time the city debated its vision for Cubberley. In 2018, the consulting firm Concordia led a “co-design” process that brought hundreds of residents to the Cubberley gym for three meetings devoted to the future of the 35-acre campus, much of which is owned by the Palo Alto Unified School District and is leased to the city. The exercise flowed smoothly for two meetings, where participants agreed that the campus should include a gym, a performing art center, classrooms, nonprofit spaces and other valued community amenities. Everyone was pleased.

But the tone harshened in the third meeting, when consultants unveiled a series of design alternatives that now included housing. The most ambitious of these proposed 164 apartments at Cubberley, 100 of which would be built on top of the new community center, bringing the facility from two stories to four. Many residents and neighborhood leaders blasted this plan, accused the city of throwing a last-minute curveball and argued that Cubberley should be reserved for recreation and serve the entire community.

That Cubberley plan was ultimately shelved in 2019, when the school district clarified that it won’t be taking part in any joint redevelopment. But the lesson from that exercise continues to guide and haunt the City Council, which on Monday approved another contract with Concordia to create a Cubberley Master Plan.

This time, the city is facing a new hurdle to the center’s redevelopment: the requirement that two-thirds of voters pass a bond in November 2026 to fund the needed improvements. Given the high threshold, staff and council members have little appetite this time around for including features that don’t enjoy widespread support.

Housing clearly fits that bill. Sonia Bradski, who lives near Cubberley, was among those who argued Monday against having housing at Cubberley. The campus, she argued, should be a true community center, with recreational offerings for south Palo Alto residents.

“I’d like to see Cubberley provide just as many services to south Palo Alto as north Palo Alto has, like a maker space and this wellness center,” Bradski said.

Penny Ellson, a long-time advocate for repairing and redeveloping Cubberley, recalled how contentious the topic of housing became the last time Concordia came to town. Controversy will not help the council win over two-thirds of the voters, she said.

“Achieving that two-thirds majority will be no small feat,” Ellson said. “The design has to be right to win local voters’ support. It must serve local needs well.”

The council and city staff indicated that they received the message. Kristen O’Kane, who as director of the Community Services Department helped lead the Concordia process last time around, said that the consultant was told not to include housing in the master plan that it will be working on between now and the end of 2025.

“We will need to identify what level of a bond measure the community is willing to fund,” O’Kane said. “So we’re going to need to look at what is there, what amenities the community wants, but also be realistic in not shooting too high in the sky for something that may not lead to a successful ballot measure.”

The council concurred. Most members have publicly opposed having housing in Cubberley and the idea fell further out of political vogue after the November election. None of the three candidates who had supported housing at Cubberley – Katie Causey, Cari Templeton and Henry Etzkowitz — won council seats.

Notably, not a single person advocated for housing at Cubberley during the Dec. 2 discussion. Rather, council members agreed that the city needs to be realistic and pragmatic. Council member Pat Burt said that getting two-thirds support is a “high bar” and suggested that the city will need to be careful about both the costs and the components of the new Cubberley project.

“I want to make sure as we’re going into this process that we’re not just opening the door to what we would all love aspirationally,” Burt said. “It has to be rooted somehow in what’s achievable.”

With its unanimous vote, the council approved the $631,966 contract with Concordia and endorsed the work plan proposed by staff for getting the issue to the voters. The new plan will be limited to a 15-acre portion of Cubberley, the 8 acres that the city had previously owned and the 7 acres that it had agreed in September to purchase from the school district for $65.5 million. As a condition of the purchase, the city must have the plan approved by March 2026.

Many of the components of the new plan will likely be holdovers from the prior one. Maintaining nonprofit spaces and art studios is a top priority. So is creating new athletic facilities – including a wellness center – and performing arts spaces. The forthcoming plan will be, in a sense, a revision of a vision.

Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims said the key objective will be removing the components of the plan that required and partnership with the school district.

“We’ve got to figure out all that’s still relevant, all that’s still wanted, lop off the things that are no longer relevant because we’re not trying to create flex space with the school district,” Lythcott-Haims said.

While housing is the first item to get lopped off, a new wellness center could be the first to get constructed. Moreso than other components, the proposed gym has won over local civic leaders, recreation commissioners and philanthropists, some of whom have formed a group called Friends of the Palo Alto Recreation Wellness Center to fundraise for the new facility. After initially considering Greer Park, the Friends group and city staff have pivoted to Cubberley after the city and the school district reached the deal that will make the redevelopment of Cubberley possible.

“Given the current situation in Cubberley and the opportunity and momentum we have right now, Cubberley seems like the logical location for this to happen,” O’Kane said of the new gym.

The Friends group is led by Anne Cribbs, a Parks and Recreation Commission member and long-time champion of building a public gym. To cement the partnership, the council voted 6-1 to sign a letter of agreement with the Friends group to authorize the forthcoming fundraising campaign.

“We are very anxious to move forward with the fundraising,” Cribbs told the council Monday.

As the sole dissenter, Kou said she was concerned that the agreement with the Friends group will give the donors undue influence of the community gym, which could be the first component to get constructed as part of a phased approach toward Cubberley’s redevelopment.

“I do not want this hard-fought community asset to be tied and have strings attached because Friends donors are going to be saying that they have a right to certain programming,” Kou said.

There is no disagreement, however, when it comes to the city’s broader strategy for Cubberley planning. The council unanimously agreed on a plan that includes a frenzy of activity between now and November 2026, including environmental studies, stakeholder groups, development of a financial model for Cubberley, creation of a plan to fix up the center’s crumbling infrastructure, polling, outreach and the drafting of the ballot measure.

There will also be consultants galore. In addition to the contract that the council approved with Concordia, the plan calls for approving contracts for a bond advisor, an environmental consultant, a pollster and a consultant to steer stakeholder engagement. Because of the compressed timeline, components of the plan that would normally be performed sequentially will now have to be done concurrently, according to City Manager Ed Shikada.

“In order to meet what we expect will be both council and community interests in moving quickly to construction, we have outlined a workplan that will allow much of this work to proceed in parallel,” Shikada said.