When city leaders from all over the Peninsula pitched a plan more than a decade ago to transform El Camino Real into a “grand boulevard,” they ran into a gauntlet of skepticism in Palo Alto.
The Grand Boulevard Initiative, a collaboration of 19 cities in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, was largely panned by local land-use watchdogs and planning commissioners at the time as too idealistic to merit serious consideration. Bob Moss, a long-time political observer, suggested El Camino’s shallow parcels and proximity to single-family neighborhoods would make redevelopment difficult if not impossible. Carl King, a former Palo Alto planning commissioner represented the dominant view when he proclaimed at a 2014 hearing: “You’ll never make it attractive.”
The regional plan, which served as the foundation for corridor-specific studies in Palo Alto and Redwood City, sought to turn what always has been a state highway into a more attractive urban destination, safe for pedestrians and cyclists and lined with denser mixed-use projects.
“Once the peninsula’s only highway, El Camino retains the auto-oriented character that first emerged in the 1920’s,” stated the Palo Alto-focused study, which was released in 2019. “Today, El Camino Real functions more like a local arterial than a state highway but struggles to become a destination corridor due to the vehicular focus of its land use profile and streetscape design.”
Even though the Palo Alto segment of El Camino has long served as a home to many beloved businesses (The Fish Market, Happy Donuts and Driftwood Deli among them), shopping areas and a few lucrative ones (the Tesla and McLaren auto dealerships), the street has never had the cache of University Avenue and California Avenue. Stanford Shopping Center and Town & Country Village both boast El Camino locations but operate like standalone universes.
Outside of neighborhoods such as Ventura and Barron Park, which depend on El Camino’s markets, drug stores and liquor stores for local shopping needs, many local residents have largely viewed El Camino as a conduit from one place to another, not a destination in and of itself.
That has changed dramatically in the past year, as El Camino has emerged as a local and regional laboratory for land-use experiments.
It’s where Palo Alto’s elected leaders recently created (and then expanded) “housing focus zones” that relax height and density limits for housing projects, allowing 85-tall buildings in places where 50 feet had been the maximum height limit for the past half century. It’s where the state Department of Transportation has recently replaced all parking with a new bikeway stretching from Los Altos, and all through Mountain View and Palo Alto, a project that seemed unthinkable during the 2014 hearings.
It’s where state legislators are hoping to generate more housing with recent bills like Senate Bill 79, which allows housing developments with maximum heights of up to 95 feet near train and bus corridors, including places like El Camino.
It’s also where developers are looking to take advantage of new local and state laws and construct projects that would have been roundly rejected for being too tall and dense just a few years ago. The most prominent of these are a 295-unit development that Oxford Capital Group is planning to build at 3400 El Camino Real, site of Creekside Inn, and a 368-apartment complex that Acclaim Companies is preparing to build at 3150 El Camino Real.
“We’re hopeful we can start this project before year end,” Mark Johnson, president of Acclaim Companies, told the council at a May meeting.
Yet the Acclaim project also illustrates the city’s current dilemma when it comes to El Camino development. By creating one important amenity, it is diminishing another. The city may welcome the influx of housing to El Camino in south Palo Alto, but the project comes at a cost to the retail scene, with The Fish Market and McDonald’s recently shuttering to make way for Acclaim’s plans.
Similarly, when Oxford Capital Group first proposed constructing its project, one of the main critiques that it ran up against is the potential for displacing the two businesses at the site: Driftwood Deli and Show de Carnes, a Brazilian steakhouse. Council member Greer Stone suggested that his support for the project would depend in part on Oxford’s ability to keep Driftwood at its location.
“I’d like to see a somewhat concrete plan rather than a somewhat hollow promise that they’ll be able to have a place to return,” Stone said during a 2022 public hearing. “Because we all know that’s not going to happen.”
The application has since gone through numerous revisions (and is now in the midst of another), but Sar Peruri, chief operating officer at Oxford Capital Group, said in an interview this week that the developer is hoping to retain Driftwood and that it has given the deli the option of retaining its operations at the reconstructed development, which includes two residential buildings and a hotel addition.
“It’s their option if they want to take the space,” Peruri said. “We have an agreement with them where they can take it and I think they will. They have a very successful existing operation.”
Under the proposal that is now being refined, the Creekside Inn project would have a retail space fronting El Camino Real as well as a rooftop bar that would span an existing hotel building and a new one that would go up next to it. Peruri said that his company had constructed numerous projects in other cities, including in Detroit and Chicago, that successfully combined residential and retail uses. The company is trying to create the same mixed-use vibe on El Camino.
“We’re a big believer in urban setting to bring all these different uses together in one location,” Peruri said.
The task of balancing the occasionally competing interests – spurring housing and protecting retail – has fallen to the city’s Planning and Transportation Commission, which has been on a quest this spring to create a series of “retail nodes” along El Camino Real. These are areas in which the ground-floor retail requirement would continue to apply.
In March, when the council expanded the housing focus zone on El Camino Real, it took the cautious step of creating one giant retail node between Page Mill Road and the south end of the city to ensure that, for now at least, retail will retain its zoning protections. Several council members, including Keith Reckdahl and Pat Burt, brought up the possibility of new housing applications displacing retail. Burt noted that on El Camino in south Palo Alto numerous dealerships that could be threatened without retail protections.
“It’s basically a proposal to get rid of our auto dealerships,” Burt said, referring to a plan by planning staff that included two retail nodes that did not include the dealerships.
Since then, the planning commission has been diving deep into the topic of “retail nodes” and debating which segments of El Camino should be reserved for retail and which should be designated for purely residential use.
The city’s main tool for retaining shops along El Camino is its retail-preservation ordinance, which the council adopted in 2015 and which prevents conversion of retail spaces to other land uses on the ground floor in major commercial areas, including El Camino. At the same time, the city’s housing plan identifies the retail-preservation ordinance as a “constraint on housing production.”
State laws and the city’s housing plans have somewhat blunted the tool. The retail ordinance does not apply to sites that are being redeveloped for 100% affordable housing projects. It also does not apply to most of the properties in the city’s “housing inventory,” a section of the Housing Element that lists possible sites for future residential development. The document makes an exception for 21 properties along El Camino that are near pedestrian and retail areas.
“These sites are principally in the core pedestrian retail downtown areas, where commercial uses are already clustered, and contribute to the vitality of the retail operations and residents’ access to everyday shopping and services,” the Housing Element states.
Some residents have argued for additional nodes. Winter Dellenbach, a Barron Park resident and long-time council watchdog, urged the council on May to protect retail-rich areas along El Camino from redevelopment. She focused on the segment between Matadero Avenue and Loma Verde, which includes a smattering of businesses.
Neighbors support these businesses, and these businesses support our neighborhood, and they have for a very long time,” Dellenbach said. “Some businesses there may not look as manicured and chichi as those on University Avenue but they are successful.”
Others urged the city to prioritize residential development. Amie Ashton, president of Palo Alto Forward, cited the city’s retail requirement as one of many barriers to producing housing. She urged the council to provide more flexibility to developers and to refrain from imposing design requirements like setbacks on upper stories of buildings and rules pertaining to daylight planes.
“Our housing shortage is fueling our climate emergency and is really fueling human misery among our local workers,” Ashton told the council.
The planning commission agreed to retain several nodes, the biggest of which is known as “central node” and stretches between the Creekside Inn site on Matadero Avenue to Los Robles Avenue. It boasts an eclectic collection of businesses, including spas, auto shops and food establishments such as Papa Johns and a Baja Fresh.
Another retail node, known as “triangle node,” would be in the triangular area where El Camino Real meets El Camino Way, a place that includes a Goodwill store, Fuki Sushi and Animal Hospital of Palo Alto.
Just south of that would be the “bike to school” node, which goes roughly from Maybell Avenue to Arastradero Road, a popular school commute route. In addition to neighborhood-serving businesses (Walgreens, Jiffy Lube), this node includes Tesla and Volvo dealerships, which for the city are lucrative sources of revenue.
Commission Vice Chair Bryna Chang championed stronger protection for retail along El Camino and argued that the city should retain retail protections even at sites that are listed on the city’s housing inventory, provided they are not designated as appropriate low-income housing. She suggested that while the amount of housing generated at these sites would be relatively small, the benefit that the preserved retail would bring to all new residents could be great.
“It would also be great for the existing residents,” Chang said.
This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner is the editor of Palo Alto Weekly and Palo Alto Online. As a former staff writer, he has won awards for his coverage of elections, land use, business, technology and breaking news.
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