The strip of San Antonio Road east of Alma Street hardly looks like Palo Alto’s most inviting housing destination.
It is located near U.S. Highway 101 and its current occupants include car dealerships, modest one-story office buildings, an oil change place, two new hotels, an apartment complex for seniors and a smattering of restaurants. But if things go as planned, Palo Alto officials hope to turn this eclectic area between the train tracks and the highway into a walkable, bike-friendly residential neighborhood, featuring 2,000 new dwellings.
A key step to achieving that goal will occur on March 10, when the City Council considers approving a three-year contract with the firm Rami and Associates to help create a new vision for the 275.3-acre area near the city’s southeastern edge. The plan would cover a stretch of San Antonio between Alma Street and the Baylands, as well as nearby streets such as Fabian Way, Transport Street and a segment of Alma between Charleston Road and Alma Street.
The transformation of the area near the Mountain View border is the most ambitious and complex component of the city’s recently approved Housing Element, its blueprint for adding 6,086 housing units by 2031. The new plan will create a blueprint for Palo Alto for accelerating housing production, improving bike and pedestrian safety, easing access to the San Antonio Caltrain station, enhancing open space and streetscape improvement and creating opportunities to enhance economic vitality, according to a report from the Department of Planning and Development Services.
Mayor Ed Lauing said the goal for San Antonio is to effectively create a new neighborhood. As such, it will take some time to get it right.
“We need some strategic planning around that to make sure we get it right because we think it’s going to be there forever,” Lauing said in an interview. “So conducting the study for that amount of time and that amount of money – the latter is what it costs to do that from anyone, and the former just suggests that we’re trying to be really strategic for what we want to have happened out there on all fronts – housing, bike/pedestrian transportation, open space.
“We want to make sure all of these components are out there.”
Yet the planning exercise comes with a sense of urgency. Partly, this is because of the deadlines imposed by the Housing Element and enforced by the state Department of Housing and Community Development. But more importantly, it’s because even with no area plan in place, the city is already encouraging and approving housing projects around San Antonio, even as planning commissioners and council members routinely acknowledge the area’s shortcomings when it comes to retail, bike safety and other amenities.
Just this week, the council agreed to expand the city’s “housing incentive program” to the San Antonio Road area, a zone change that will allow residential developers to get significant height and density bonuses for building housing sites that have historically been reserved for commercial and industrial uses.
City leaders have also been receptive to recent housing applications for the area, including the 102-condominium complex that they approved for 788 San Antonio Road in 2020. While construction of that housing project was put on hold, the developer’s project manager told the council this week that a new proposal for the site will soon be forthcoming and suggested that it will include more density.
In addition to that project, the council approved last May a 75-unit development at 800 San Antonio Road. And city planners are currently reviewing a 350-apartment complex proposed for 3397 Fabian Way and a 198-apartment complex eyed for 762 San Antonio Road.
Palo Alto doesn’t have to go too far to see examples of what a new vision for San Antonio could look like. In Mountain View, the City Council adopted a specific plan for San Antonio a decade ago and its stretch of San Antonio includes, among other new developments, The Village at San Antonio, which features a movie theater, restaurants and retail.
The goals of the two cities aren’t completely aligned. The Mountain View plan envisioned its segment of San Antonio as a place with walkable blocks, transit improvements and amenities that seek to make the area a regional destination.
In Palo Alto, the immediate priorities aren’t so much to turn the area into a regional magnet but to create a safe and functional neighborhood. Yet there’s hope among local officials that the retail on the Mountain View side of San Antonio will serve the residents on the Palo Alto side, once the housing arrives.
Lauing said he’s been encouraged by recent housing proposals and conversations with developers.
“With the new zoning in place, it’s more appealing to build multi-family housing, which is what we’re planning to build out there -– to build density and height in places where it works.
The strategic plan is going forward because that’s what we need.”
For the council, the recent projects offer signs of hope that the city’s ambitious vision for south Palo Alto may actually come to fruition. They also, however, create a quandary. As council members acknowledged last May, they are being asked to approve housing projects in an area that lacks the needed amenities to support a population boom.
The dilemma came up last May, as the council was considering approving a 75-condominium development at 800 San Antonio Road. Even though members voted to advance the project, city officials and area residents noted that the area remains hazardous for bicyclists and lacks the types of amenities that other neighborhoods enjoy, including safe streets for biking and an adequate tree canopy.
Planning Director Jonathan Lait assured the council that the forthcoming plan for San Antonio will address these issues.
“The questions of, ‘What would the roadway look like? How do we improve Safe Routes to School? How do we address canopy?’ — those are all things that we will consider in the San Antonio Road area plan,” Lait said shortly before the vote to approve the project.
Once the contract is approved, the city will begin the planning process by forming a community advisory group, which would be appointed by the city manager or his designee. The project team will coordinate the planning effort with local and regional stakeholders, including the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, the Santa Clara County Valley Water District and the city of Mountain View, according to Lait’s report. The planning period will also include community workshops, pop-ups, surveys and web-based interactive tools to get feedback from the community, according to the report.
The San Antonio plan is also a critical component of one of the council’s top priorities for the year: implementing housing strategies for social and economic balance. During the council’s annual retreat on Jan. 31, Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims was among the members who underscored the importance of this effort.
“We’re essentially making room for a whole new community there and we want it to happen in a coherent way, which takes a lot of effort and planning but will so pay off for us in the long run,” Lythcott-Haims said.
This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner covers local and regional politics, housing, transportation and other topics for the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Online and their sister publications.
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