How District 1 got this way
Zoning decides what can be built where — homes, offices, shops, parks. It is the quiet rulebook behind why District 1 has world-class employers but nowhere to sit down for dinner. Explore the map below; toggle a category to isolate it.
Shares are of the district’s developed land. Parks, baylands, and open space — 90.9% of District 1 by area, most of it Bayfront preserve — are excluded so the developed categories are comparable. Zoning data: City of Menlo Park GIS.
Zoning is younger than you think
For most of history, cities mixed everything together — you lived above the shop, and the corner store sat between the houses. Zoning, the practice of legally separating where people live from where they work and shop, is barely a century old. New York City wrote the first comprehensive ordinance in 1916, and in 1926 the Supreme Court blessed the idea in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty. Within a decade it had spread to cities across the country.
None of this is natural, and none of it is permanent. The map above is a record of choices — made by people, and revisable by people. A district zoned to separate homes from shops can decide to bring them back.
And in 2016, Menlo Park did change them
That year the City Council adopted ConnectMenlo, a general plan update that rezoned the Bayfront M‑2 lands east of Highway 101 — the old industrial area — for offices, life sciences, and housing. On a 2040 horizon it planned for roughly 4,500 new homes, about 2.3 million square feet of non‑residential space, and some 400 hotel rooms.
Some of it happened, and it is worth being precise about how much. 776 homes are built and occupied — Lume’s two residential buildings and Vasara’s. Another 474 are approved but unbuilt: Lume’s 42 townhomes and 123 Independence Drive. But the single largest piece by far was Willow Village — 1,730 homes, including 312 below‑market and 119 for seniors, alongside the grocery store, pharmacy, and bank the neighborhood has gone without. It was approved in December 2022. Meta halted it in May 2026.
That is the whole problem in one number. Everything ConnectMenlo has produced — built, approved, or halted — adds up to about 2,980 homes, roughly 66% of the 4,500 the plan allowed for. Only 17% of the plan is actually built. And Willow Village alone was 58% of the pipeline — when one company changed its mind, more than half of this district’s planned housing disappeared in a single announcement.
Look at the balance. ConnectMenlo rezoned about 326 acres of District 1 — 44.7% of its developed land. But only 48 acres of that allows housing. The other 277 acres went to offices and life sciences: 5.7 acres of workplace for every acre where someone can live.
That balance was not inherited. It was chosen, in one vote, on November 29, 2016 — adopted 4‑0‑1, with Councilmember Ray Mueller dissenting — and it is why the people who work in District 1 mostly cannot live in it, and why there are still nowhere near enough households here to support a grocery store. The purple shows where we made room for jobs. The green shows where we made room for the people who fill them.
And ConnectMenlo did not finish the job. 41 acres of District 1 are still zoned straight industrial — warehouses and yards, not houses. That is the land to talk about when someone says this district is full.
So when people say District 1 is full, listen to which word they use. They say Belle Haven — and Belle Haven, the neighborhood of houses, is full. But this district is Belle Haven and the Bayfront, and the Bayfront is warehouses and parking lots that the city already rezoned for homes a decade ago. Nobody is proposing to bulldoze a single‑family street. The plan for those homes already exists. It just was never finished.
We built the homes, but not the shops
Here is the piece that explains the rest of this page. Willow Village was never only housing. It carried about 200,000 square feet of retail, an 18,000‑square‑foot dining district, 25,000 square feet of cinema and entertainment, and a 4‑acre town square — the entire commercial heart of the Bayfront, in one project. Everything else was designed as the housing and offices around it. That is why Lume and Vasara contributed a storefront each and nothing more: they were never meant to carry the shops. Then the centre was cancelled and the ring got built anyway.
Nobody knows what Meta does next with Willow Village, because the community benefits in that agreement depend on a construction trigger only the developer can pull. That was a drafting error, and I would write the next one differently. But I am not going to run on waiting for a company to change its mind. So here is what the City Council actually controls: zoning on the Bayfront.
Two things are already true out there. Tens of thousands of people drive in every weekday to work in those offices, and drive back out at six because there is nowhere to eat. And now 776 people’s homes sit among them at Lume and Vasara. That is two customer bases — lunch and after‑work from the offices, evenings and weekends from the residents — and almost nothing built to serve either. Lume’s 441 apartments came with about 2,900 square feet of ground‑floor commercial. That is one coffee shop.
Look at the purple on the map again. Of the 41 industrial acres ConnectMenlo left behind, about 15.7 of them sit a 5‑minute walk from those new homes and roughly 7 minutes from the offices. Warehouses and yards, in the middle of the one place in District 1 that finally has customers.
Happening right now
The red dot is 104 Constitution Drive — part of the Vasara site, and already zoned Residential Mixed Use by ConnectMenlo. The approved plan put a three‑storey commercial building there: about 34,500 square feet of offices over ground‑floor neighborhood shops. It was never built, and Greystar has applied to put 140 homes on it instead, under the state’s “builder’s remedy.” Menlo Park has deemed that application incomplete three times.
Notice the pattern. Mixed‑use zoning permitted the storefronts on these sites; it never required them. Lume built one. Vasara’s never started, and is now proposed as housing. So we got the homes and not the shops — which is what makes me keep asking whether ground‑floor retail should be required here rather than merely allowed.
So how do we actually fit a commercial district in here?
That is the question I keep coming back to, and I have not finished answering it. A full‑service grocery store generally wants something like 25,000 to 45,000 square feet under one roof, with truck access. Restaurants want small bays and a sidewalk, not a parking lot between them and the street. Retail follows rooftops, and the rooftops here are arriving one building at a time. Meanwhile the flattest, emptiest land in the district is zoned for warehouses.
If you have run a business, leased retail space, or built one of these buildings, I would like to hear what you think it would take.
Every project figure above links to its source. Totals and percentages — the 2,980‑home pipeline, the shares of the 4,500‑unit plan — are sums of those linked figures. Acreages and walking distances are calculated from the City of Menlo Park’s zoning polygons, clipped to the District 1 boundary: the same data behind the map at the top of this page.
About this page
This page is me learning the district in public. I am publishing what I find as I go — the zoning, the plan behind it, and what actually got built — and some of it has changed how I think. Treat it as my notes rather than a finished platform; where I land on any of it is still a work in progress.
If you know this ground better than I do — you worked on ConnectMenlo, you run a business out here, you live in one of these buildings — I would genuinely like to hear where I have it wrong. And if there is data you would like to see mapped, tell me.