Belle Haven today
District 1 is majority Latino, and about as many households here speak Spanish at home as speak only English. This page sets out who lives in the district according to the census, and then what residents themselves told the City they need — taken from Menlo Park’s own record of the conversation, not from this campaign’s account of it.
Sources last checked August 25, 2026. Census figures carry wide margins of error at this scale; each one is given below.
Who lives here
62% ±13
of District 1 residents are Hispanic or Latino
4,113 of 6,627 people.
39% ±8
of households speak Spanish at home
808 households, within a rounding error of the 821 that speak only English.
2,403 ±580
residents were born outside the United States
About half are naturalized citizens.
16%
of households are overcrowded
327 households with more than one occupant per room; two thirds of them rent.
All 6,627 residents, by the census’s own categories. Race and Hispanic origin are asked as separate questions, so these are drawn from the table that keeps them from overlapping — they sum to the district and can be read as shares.
The district is majority Latino, and its second-largest group is Asian, at about a fifth of residents. The households counted here are 1,251 renting and 829 owning, and the median age is 32 — a young district, and a renting one.
60%
of homes here are rented, not owned
1,251 renting households against 829 owning.
47%
of renters pay more than 30% of their income in rent
That is the federal threshold for being cost burdened. Nearly one renting household in five pays more than half.
32 ±2
is the median age — a young district
1,052 residents are under 18.
2%
of workers get to work on public transit
83 people out of 3,942, and every one of them by bus. 59% drive alone.
Those last four belong together. A district that is three‑fifths renters, where nearly half of those renters are over the federal cost‑burden line and almost a fifth spend more than half their income on rent, is a district where housing cost is not an abstraction. The median age of 32 is part of the same picture: these are working households and young families, and just 83 workers in the whole district get to work on a bus.
Every figure on this page comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2020–2024 five-year estimates for Census Tract 6117, which corresponds to City Council District 1 — you can read the tract’s full profile and check any of them. The margins are wide because the survey samples a small area; treat these as the shape of the neighborhood rather than a headcount. At this scale the survey can also miss a small community altogether, so the list above is the groups it counted, not the whole of who is here.
How the neighborhood changed
In the 1970 census about 94 percent of Belle Haven residents identified as Black. Today the neighborhood is majority Latino. Both of those are simply what the census recorded, and neither is a problem to be solved.
Source: The Almanac, citing U.S. Census
The arrival is documented. Through the 1980s and 1990s families from Mexico and Central America settled across this side of the freeway, in East Palo Alto and in Belle Haven, drawn by housing that was cheaper than anywhere else on the Peninsula and by work in a valley that was booming. Guatemalan migration to the United States rose sharply through those same years, peaking at the height of that country’s civil war. The housing was cheaper here for reasons the history page sets out: this is the ground that was redlined, cut off by the highway and zoned next to the industry.
Source: Migration Policy Institute
What this page does not say is that one community replaced another. Black residents left Belle Haven over the same decades, for reasons of their own that deserve their own account, and this page does not have the sourcing to give one.
The schools show where that history landed. The Ravenswood City School District, which serves Belle Haven, is now 86 percent Hispanic or Latino, and one of its campuses, Los Robles, is a Spanish‑English dual immersion school.
Source: California Department of Education, DataQuest, 2025-26 enrollment by ethnicity
What residents told the City
In 2023, while drafting its Environmental Justice Element, Menlo Park asked residents what this side of the freeway needs. City staff summarized the answers for the City Council. What follows is that summary, reported as it stands. It includes things this campaign agrees with and things it does not, and nothing here is marked either way — quoting only the parts a candidate likes is not reporting what a community said.
City of Menlo Park, Environmental Justice Element community engagement summary, Staff Report 23-142-CC, presented to the City Council and Planning Commission June 20, 2023. City General Plan page
If this gets something wrong
This page was assembled from public records by a campaign, not by the community it describes. If a figure is wrong, or the City’s summary left out something you said, or something here reads badly to someone who lives it, please tell me and I will change it.
NextWhat got builtHousing projects by districtEvery housing project in Menlo Park on one map, coloured by stage, with how many homes are below market rate in each — and how District 1's share compares with the other four. →