Wonman Lee for Menlo Park · District 1

Housing projects by council district

Every development project on the city’s list that includes housing, plotted on the five council districts and colored by its stage. Click any dot for the city’s own numbers — total homes, how many are below market rate, and the income levels they are restricted to — and a link to the project page so you can check it at source.

Sources last checked August 24, 2026. Each dataset’s own as‑of date is noted beside it.

The share each district carries

Homes in projects that are completed, under construction, approved, or under review. Projected counts homes under construction, approved, or under review; built counts those in completed projects. Parkline Phase 2 is left out of the totals because it is a re-application on the Parkline site and would double-count those units.

DistrictProjectsProjectedBuiltTotal homesShare of cityBelow marketHomes deed-restricted to income-qualified households under the city's Below Market Rate program. Not the same as housing that is simply cheap.% of homesBelow-market homes as a share of that district's own total homes — not of the citywide total.
District 1112,8928183,71058.2%478 +4?12.9%
District 21880881.4%8798.9%
District 382,0652162,28135.8%158 +6?6.9%
District 45802152954.6%9 +1?3.1%
District 500000.0%0—
Citywide255,1251,2496,374100%73211.5%

“Below market” and “affordable” are not quite the same thing. Below Market Rate, or BMR, is the name of Menlo Park’s own program: any project of 20 or more homes must deed‑restrict at least 15% of them to income‑qualified households. Affordable housing is the wider category — it includes those BMR homes, and also projects that are 100% affordable through subsidy rather than through that requirement, like Laurel Landing and the Ravenswood teacher housing. Neither term means “cheap”: both describe homes with a legal restriction on who may rent or buy them and at what price.

The counts here are what each project page labels below market. The state uses a third set of terms again — very low, low, moderate — which is what the RHNA table further down reports, so the two tables cannot be added together.

District 1 accounts for 58% of the homes in this set and 65% of the below‑market homes. District 5 contains none of the projects listed. These are counts of projects on the city’s own list, not a measure of what each district could hold.

What the income levels mean

Income levelShare of AMI1 person2 people3 people4 people
Extremely low30%$44,150$50,450$56,750$63,050
Very low50%$73,550$84,050$94,550$105,050
Low80%$117,700$134,500$151,300$168,100
Moderate120%$168,650$192,750$216,850$240,950

Maximum household income, California State Income Schedule, effective June 1, 2026. Area median income for San Mateo County is $200,800 for a household of four. Limits are set annually and published by the County of San Mateo. Menlo Park’s below-market program is a local program, so the state schedule applies rather than the federal one.

What the state requires of Menlo Park

Every California city has to adopt a Housing Element — a part of its general plan, rewritten every eight years, that must be certified by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development. It sets out where housing can go and what the city will do to get it built. Within it, each city is assigned a Regional Housing Needs Allocation, split across four income levels. Menlo Park’s allocation for the 2023-2031 cycle is 2,946 homes, of which 1,662 must be affordable.

RHNA counts building permits issued, not homes finished. A city is judged on whether it permits its allocation, not on whether developers then build — so these figures are not the same as the built and projected counts above.

Income levelRequiredPermittedComplete
Very low income74013718.5%
Low income42611927.9%
Moderate income49613427.0%
Above moderate income1,28476359.4%
Total2,9461,15339.1%

Cumulative through December 2025. Source: the City’s General Plan and Housing Element Annual Progress Report, presented to the City Council March 24, 2026.

What happens if a city falls short

Two different failures carry two different consequences. If a city’s Housing Element is not certified by the state, it loses the ability to reject qualifying housing projects on zoning grounds — the “builder’s remedy.” Menlo Park’s element was certified in March 2024, though a builder’s remedy application filed before that date is still pending at 104 Constitution Drive.

Separately, a city that falls behind on permits can be placed on the state’s Streamlined Ministerial Approval Process list, under which qualifying projects are approved by staff with limited local discretion. The APR notes Menlo Park has not been subject to it since it began in 2018; the next evaluation is June 2027, and again at the close of the cycle in 2031.

Builder's remedy applications in Menlo Park

The city has received 2. To qualify, a project must be at least 20% affordable to low-income households, or 100% affordable to moderate-income ones. Both are still under review.

80 Willow Road — 665 homes, District 3

N17 Development / Willow Park LLC

Being pursued through several routes at once — SB 330, the builder's remedy, and AB 2011. The city has ruled it ineligible for AB 2011 streamlining and is still evaluating the builder's remedy claim.

104 Constitution Drive — 140 homes, District 1

Greystar

Proposed on the unbuilt commercial half of the Vasara site. The city has deemed the application incomplete three times.

Source: the City’s Builder’s Remedy page, which lists the applications it has received.

Sources — all 26 projects, with links

Every project, with its source

Each name links to that project's page on the city's website, where its unit and below-market counts are published.

District 1

District 2

District 3

District 4

Where the data comes from

Limits of this data

  • The city rarely publishes AMI percentages. It publishes statutory categories (very low, low, moderate). Only Laurel Landing states a percentage outright — 80% of area median income. The bands above are the standard definitions those categories map to, not figures the city stated.
  • 10 projects confirm a below-market agreement but never state a count. They are shown with a “?” and counted as zero affordable homes, so the affordable percentages here are a floor, not a final figure.
  • Non-residential projects are excluded— hotels, the Meta campus, CSBio, the fire station, the golf club. They build no housing.
  • A project is not a home. Willow Village is 1,730 approved units that Meta halted; those are counted here as pipeline, so they raise District 1’s totals despite not being built.
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