Five Towns, One University: The Civic Ecosystem Around the Farm

Stanford sits on unincorporated land in Santa Clara County, which means the university has no mayor and no city council. Its neighbors have five. Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Mountain View and Woodside each keep their own budgets, their own police and their own fiercely held sense of what kind of place they are. Their residents shop, commute, send children to school and argue across those lines every day, and the boundaries on the map have long been more administrative than real.

This autumn, the shared story is unusually easy to see. A single rail line, a single body of state housing law and a single ballot on November 3 are pressing the five towns toward the same questions at the same moment. The university, which released its most ambitious land-use proposal in a generation this September, is at the center of all of it.

The Chronicle’s new Community News section begins with that premise: that the towns around the Farm form one civic ecosystem, and that the Stanford community, which lives, rents, works and votes across all five, has a stake in how each of them chooses.

The University’s Own Application

On September 9, Stanford released its application for a new General Use Permit, the catch-all approval the university needs from Santa Clara County to build on its campus. According to the Palo Alto Daily Post, the application seeks 2,500 student beds, at least 500 homes and 1.8 million square feet of academic space, with final county approval hoped for in 2028.

The history matters. Stanford withdrew its last application in November 2019, four days before county supervisors were due to vote, after a three-year fight over whether the university had done enough to house the people its growth would bring. The county’s previous permit, issued in 2000, allowed more than 2 million square feet of academic space and 3,018 housing units.

The new plan, which the university calls StanfordNext, is built around the objections that sank the last one. Stanford says it would immediately build up to 500 below-market workforce homes at the corner of Quarry Road and El Camino Real, across from the Palo Alto Transit Center, and enable more than 500 homes for the general public in Stanford Research Park. It proposes a $100 million Stanford Community Fund, predominantly for regional affordable housing, and a continued commitment to its “No Net New Commute Trips” standard. Critics will test every one of those promises in the hearings ahead. What is striking is how much of the plan is written in the language of the neighbors: housing near transit, traffic held flat, money that flows beyond the campus edge.

One Rail Line, Five Stakes

Caltrain is the spine that binds the Peninsula, and its future is on the ballot. Regional Measure RTM would levy a 14-year sales tax, half a cent in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties and a full cent in San Francisco, to stabilize BART, Muni, AC Transit and Caltrain. SPUR, a sponsor of the measure, reports that if it fails, Caltrain’s contingency plans to close a $75 million deficit include closing up to 10 stations, eliminating weekend service, reducing trains to hourly and ending service by 9 p.m.

Each town meets the railroad differently. Palo Alto is spending years and potentially more than $1 billion deciding how to separate its tracks from its streets. Atherton, whose station Caltrain closed in 2020, opened the restored depot as a museum on October 18. Mountain View’s downtown Caltrain station now anchors a debate over denser housing under state law. Menlo Park’s downtown, a short walk from its own station, is fighting over parking lots. Woodside has no station at all, which is part of why it looks the way it does.

Sacramento’s Long Reach

The second shared force is state housing law, which over the past decade has shifted authority from town halls to Sacramento. Every one of the five towns carries a state-mandated housing target for 2031. Atherton must plan for 348 homes, according to the town; Woodside for 328.

The tools the state has handed developers are now visible on the ground. Senate Bill 79, which took effect July 1, requires greater height and density near major transit stops; in Atherton it applies to seven properties, and in Mountain View it has become a central question in the City Council race. In Woodside, a Southern California developer has invoked the so-called builder’s remedy to propose a 16-story apartment building in a town where homes are typically limited to about 30 feet. In Menlo Park, the city’s own plan to build affordable housing on downtown parking plazas faces financing gaps of $19 million to $45 million and a ballot measure that would require a citywide vote before the lots could be developed.

Five Ballots, One Electorate

The November ballot reads like a single civic syllabus. Palo Alto voters will decide Measure J, a half-cent sales tax principally intended to buy and renovate land at the Cubberley Community Center. The Daily Post notes that if both Measure J and RTM pass, the city’s sales tax will exceed 10 percent. Menlo Park votes on Measure P and on council seats in three districts. Mountain View will seat three new council members from a field of eight candidates, none of them incumbents.

Two towns, by contrast, will barely vote at all. Atherton canceled its council election in August and appointed four members because the race was uncontested. In Woodside, both council candidates on the ballot are running unopposed.

The Long View

It would be easy to read these as five separate parochial quarrels. They are better understood as variations on one question that the region has been asking since the university opened in 1891: how much growth a place can welcome without ceasing to be itself. Woodside answers with horses and open space, Atherton with large lots, Palo Alto with process, Mountain View with a willingness to build, and Menlo Park with a downtown it cannot quite agree on.

Stanford’s students, faculty and staff are not bystanders to that argument. They are its renters, its commuters and, increasingly, its voters. The Chronicle will cover each town on its own terms in the weeks ahead, beginning today with a report from each. But we will keep returning to the larger pattern, because the most important civic story on the Peninsula this fall is not happening in any single council chamber. It is happening across all five at once.

Photo: King of Hearts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0