This report comes from Emily Cao, a junior at Gunn High School. When Emily contacted Palo Alto Pulse about writing a story, we suggested she check out Palo Alto Forward’s walking tour of downtown housing. Despite the non-teen friendly Saturday morning tour schedule, Emily went and filed this story:
On January 24, 2015, I went along as Palo Alto Forward conducted its first walking tour of Downtown Housing in Palo Alto. While this is not something I would normally do on a Saturday morning, the tour ended up being both fun and informative.
The walking tour moves down Hamilton Ave
Palo Alto Forward is a nonprofit group that aims to engage residents in a vision of development that integrates housing and transportation to create sustainable, liveable neighborhoods for all Palo Altans. As Palo Alto Forward’s Elaine Uang explained, the goal of the tour was simple. “We wanted to give people a chance to see and experience the spectrum of different housing options that exist in our city today and to think about the elements that make projects successful (or not). As someone pointed out during the tour, we have some really good big projects and also some terrible little projects.”
The tour began with an overview talk by the leaders of Palo Alto Forward, who explained some of the history of development in the area. I learned that when the Palto Medical Foundation moved from its location on Homer
The walking tour looked at the architectural details that make Palo Alto buildings unique
Avenue, the community went through a planning process to figure out how to develop the open space in the South of Forest neighborhood. Eventually, due to community input, housing, parks, and day care centers were included in the development plan that was approved in 2000.
Heritage Park’s beautiful open space, the site of a hospital until the 1980s, is the result of a community planning process in the South of Forest neighborhood
Today, there is a mixture of multistory residential projects, condos, apartments, and single family homes throughout this area, along with parks, a library and commercial buildings.
As the tour wove through the lively environment of University Avenue, we received a brief overview of the different kinds of buildings and their architectural significance. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Palo Alto witnessed an increase in the construction of tall buildings on and near University Avenue, due in part to the proximity to the train station, which was the primary mode of transportation in those days. While these early buildings were notable for their design details, later high rise developments like 525 University caused the City to pass a 50-foot building height limit in the 1970s, which is still in place today.
Walkways and open space divide are features of good housing development, like the one next to Heritage Park
The final part of the tour took place in Downtown North, where higher density housing was integrated in the 1980s and 90s. Townhomes and small lot single family residential homes provided smaller scale structures that blended more subtly into the existing neighborhood fabric than big developments.
Palo Alto Forward’s Downtown Housing Walking Tour was an interesting experience for me. As a teenager who is not old enough to have experienced much history firsthand, this tour helped me understand how the economic, political, and social movements in the previous decades have shaped the housing and transportation policies of present day Palo Alto. And I learned how this historical context and understanding is important for making decisions that will shape the future of Palo Alto right now.
As Elaine Uang explained. “Good planning and good projects come from people who ask for them, so we hope tour
participants can keep housing models and community amenities in mind when Palo Alto embarks on an update of the Comprehensive Plan later this summer.”
With the information I learned on the tour, I want to be a champion for better options for both commercial and residential development in my community of Palo Alto.
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