How Belle Haven was segregated

Detail of the 1961 edition of the U.S. Geological Survey's Palo Alto quadrangle. The Bayshore Highway is a wide divided freeway with interchanges, and Belle Haven is densely built on the far side of it.

Detail of the 1953 edition of the same quadrangle, the same ground. The Bayshore Highway is still a surface road, and Belle Haven's street grid is drawn but only thinly built.

Drag the handle to compare 1953 with 1961, or focus it and use the arrow keys.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Palo Alto quadrangle, 1953 and 1961 editions, showing the same ground. Between them the Bayshore Highway becomes a divided freeway. USGS, public domain; nothing has been added to either sheet.

The separation of Belle Haven and the Bayfront from the rest of Menlo Park was not the residue of private preference. It was written into deeds, underwritten by federal loan rules, hardened by a state highway alignment, and reinforced by municipal zoning and school district lines. Most of it is a matter of public record, and most of that record is local.

What follows is that record, in order, with a source beside every entry. It makes no claim about the intentions of anyone serving in Menlo Park today. It describes decisions, most of them decades old, that still shape where the freeway runs, where the industrial land sits, and why there is no grocery store east of it.

Sources last checked August 25, 2026. Every claim links to the source that records it.

Deeds

Containment

Ground

Schools

Today

The covenant language quoted from Menlo Park subdivision deeds, barring residents of Black, Japanese, Chinese and Mongolian descent except as live-in domestic staff.

Written into the deeds1920s–1940s

Racial covenants written into Menlo Park deeds

Subdivisions in Menlo Park, among them the Willows, carried covenants barring people of Black, Japanese, Chinese and Mongolian descent from living there except as live-in domestic staff. These were private contracts, but they were enforceable in court, which is what made them policy rather than preference. The U.S. Supreme Court ended that enforceability in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948; the covenants themselves stayed in the deed records long after.

The Almanac, “Reflections on racial inequities that persist in Menlo Park” (2021)

Select a point to read it, or use the arrow keys. Showing 1 of 10.

Where this comes from

The local timeline was assembled by neighbors, not by this campaign. Menlo Together’s Color of Law, Menlo Park Edition brought more than a hundred people together in 2019 to build it from city documents, court records, news clippings, photographs and maps, with the Menlo Park Historical Association, NAACP San Mateo County, Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, Nuestra Casa, the League of Women Voters of South San Mateo and others. Belle Haven residents were on the panel.

The national framework is Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017), which uses this area as its case study of blockbusting. The local reporting is chiefly Kate Bradshaw’s Uneven Ground series in The Almanac. Both are worth reading in full; this page is a summary and no substitute for either.

Go deeper

This page is a summary. These are the works it summarizes, and they are all better than it.

BookThe Color of Law — Richard Rothstein (2017)The national account of how federal, state and local government segregated American cities by law. It is the source most of this page rests on, and it uses this stretch of the Peninsula as its case study of blockbusting.FilmSegregated By DesignA short animated film built directly on the book, covering the same history in about seventeen minutes. Free to watch, and the fastest way to hand someone the argument.BookJust Action — Leah Rothstein, Richard Rothstein (2023)The sequel, on what communities can actually do about the segregation the first book documented. The authors came to San Mateo in 2023 at the invitation of Menlo Together, the Housing Leadership Council and Palo Alto Forward.ReportingUneven Ground — The Almanac (2019)Kate Bradshaw's series on the two Menlo Parks, and the local reporting most of this page rests on. Part II is the one on the food desert — no grocery store on this side of the freeway, four Safeways on the other.LocalThe Color of Law, Menlo Park Edition — resourcesMenlo Together's own page for the local workshop, with the recording, the slides and their reading list. This is the material the timeline above draws on, gathered by neighbors rather than by this campaign.

If you find an error here, or you lived through something this page gets wrong, please tell me and I will correct it.

NextWhat the rules allowHow District 1 got this wayZoning is younger than most people think, and it can be changed. What ConnectMenlo rezoned in 2016, how much of it was for jobs rather than homes, and the commercial core that was permitted but never required. →