How zoning decisions shape District 1

Zoning decides what can be built where — homes, offices, shops, parks. The map below shows how District 1 is zoned today; toggle a category to isolate it.

47.1%

of developed land is zoned office & life sciences

0.4%

is zoned commercial & retail — shops, restaurants, and services

Nearly half of District 1’s developed land is zoned for offices and life sciences. Commercial and retail zoning accounts for 0.4%.

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.

Zoning is set by local ordinance and amended by local vote, so the map above records a series of decisions rather than a fixed condition.

The 2016 ConnectMenlo rezoning

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.

Of that capacity: 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.

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. But only 17% of the plan is built, because Willow Village was 58% of that pipeline on its own.

Housing allowed (R-MU) — 48 acresOffices & life sciences (O, LS) — 277 acresStill industrial, never rezoned — 41 acres104 Constitution Dr — approved shops and offices, never builtRest of District 1

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 allocation was set in a single vote on November 29, 2016, adopted 4‑0‑1 with Councilmember Ray Mueller dissenting. Purple marks the land zoned for offices and life sciences; green marks the land where housing is permitted.

ConnectMenlo did not rezone all of it. 41 acres of District 1 remain zoned straight industrial.

District 1 covers both Belle Haven and the Bayfront. Belle Haven is the residential neighborhood; the Bayfront is the former industrial area east of Highway 101, where the ConnectMenlo rezoning and every development above are located.

The commercial space that came with it

Willow Village was not 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 Bayfront’s commercial program, concentrated in a single development. The surrounding sites were entitled as housing and offices. Willow Village was paused in May 2026; the surrounding developments proceeded.

Under section 5.1 of the Willow Village development agreement, the community benefits are tied to a construction trigger that only the developer can pull, so the city cannot compel them while the development is paused.

The Bayfront has a large daytime workforce in those offices and, since Lume and Vasara opened, 776 occupied homes alongside them. Lume’s 441 apartments included about 2,900 square feet of ground‑floor commercial space.

Of the 41 industrial acres shown in purple, 15.7 lie within about a 5‑minute walk of those homes and 7 minutes of the offices.

A pending application

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‑story 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. In August 2026, Greystar filed a new application for 142 homes there, asking the city to change the permits it approved for Vasara in 2021; on September 25 the city found that one incomplete too. The city’s July 2026 housing update still counts the builder’s remedy application as pending: 140 homes, 28 of them for low-income households.

On both sites, mixed‑use zoning permitted ground‑floor commercial space but did not require it. Lume built roughly 2,900 square feet of it; Vasara’s commercial building was never started and 140 homes are now proposed in its place.

What a commercial district physically requires

A full‑service grocery store generally requires 25,000 to 45,000 contiguous square feet with truck access. Smaller retail and restaurants depend on narrow frontages opening onto a sidewalk, and on the number of households within walking distance. The largest undeveloped parcels near the new housing are currently zoned industrial.

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 figure for the developments 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 about the rules: what Menlo Park’s zoning allows on this side of the freeway, what ConnectMenlo changed in 2016, and how much of that was set aside for jobs rather than homes. The maps are drawn from the city’s own zoning GIS, every figure is linked to its source, and the page is deliberately limited to what the record shows.

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.

Sources (10)

NextWhat the state requiresMenlo Park’s housing planWhy Menlo Park has to plan for 2,946 new homes, whether the state has approved its plan, how the city is doing, and every housing development on one map, with how District 1's share compares. →