16 Comments

Thank you for bringing awareness to this problem! I am part of a new coalition named CHANGE Santa Clara County and would love to post this article on our link tree with your permission. The link on our page would send them directly to this page.

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Absolutely, please do! Thanks for sharing it!

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Aug 12, 2020Liked by Mike Dunham

Thank you for this excellent article. I grew up very near Maybell Orchards and passed by it every day on my way to school. I was thrilled when I heard it was going to become a low income senior housing project. My mother, who still lived there, was too. But her neighbors were not. In fact, they started emailing about "parking issues" and traffic (for a senior housing project, no less). Mom went door to door to advocate for the project, talking to neighbors who she had known for 50 years. They were adamant against the project. She couldn't believe it. That neighborhood was never exclusive. I grew up next door to teachers and nurses and social workers (and doctors and lawyers and professors and techies). My parents bought their house in the early 1960's for about $40,000. When my mom sold to move in to a retirement home, she had multiple offers and it sold for $3.5 million, cash. There are still many good people in Palo Alto, but I think that it is all too easy to scare people into being afraid of any changes. Most of my friends who I went to high school with could never afford to live in Palo Alto today, which is a shame, because it really was a great place to grow up and everyone should have an opportunity to live in a nice place.

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Addressing, beyond below, previous, Ms. Smith Currie's narrative, with due respect, her story is from a birds-eye view. Very few people rejected the proposal because they were against senior housing; on the contrary, it looked like senior housing was being used to rationalize building luxury housing on the same lot; an elder named John Elman attacked the project and joked that there wouldn't be much for seniors to do, stuck in Barron Park, but tryst in the local motels. I actually supported a suggestion by Ms. Davis to preserve the last remaining stone fruit orchard in Palo Alto -- before Silicon Valley cartels, this area was fertile farmland -- and yes, I am part of the problem in that the conversion of one such lot from fruit to retail is what brought by parents and I here from Chicago in 1968. But the value of "senior housing = good" was being exploited cynically by the real estate industry and the easily duped non-profit.

Only about 10 percent of my Gunn class -- the area around Maybell -- still live in Palo Alto. I went into the arts, which was only possible because I lived with my parents after college and rented unitl I married a woman - -also in the arts -- who owned a townhouse. I rented until age 53.

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Mark, I suppose it was within the bounds of reason to ask at the time whether the originally proposed Maybell project was too tilted towards market-rate. A pretty surface-level analysis would suggest that using 12 market-rate single-family homes to subsidize five times as many affordable senior units is a pretty good deal, and that should have been obvious back in 2013. (That's an 83% affordable project, which is rare on the Peninsula, where most inclusionary zoning ordinances in normal market-rate projects only mandate 10-20% affordable units.)

However, given that what the project ended up being in the end -- 16 market-rate homes selling for $5 million each -- it's a ridiculous point to argue now. It's quite obvious with hindsight that the Palo Alto Housing was pursuing this project for the sake of helping the community, as is their mission as a nonprofit, and not just to line the pockets of the developers.

The "No on D" campaign and the current Palo Altans for Sensible Zoning are, in fact, the ones who ensured that the Maybell land would go towards making a for-profit developer very rich. If anyone was duped by the real estate industry, it was them, except I suspect for most of them, their concerns were not actually about the real estate industry but instead about preserving their neighborhood in amber. Given the depths of the housing crisis, that was a highly privileged, segregation-ignoring position to hold back in 2013, and it's even more obviously a morally indefensible position to take today.

From everything I read, there was never a proposal to maintain the site as an orchard. If someone wished to do that, they could've raised money to buy the land and put it in the hands of a trust to keep it that way. No one did.

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Why don’t you write about housing inequities in Atherton or Hillsborough? Don’t just pick on Palo Alto. Also why don’t you report on low cost housing in other cities like East Palo Alto?

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I said this on another website and it's a bit hard to distill here, in context of Mike's argument the relevance but the fact that Tom Dubois -- in some ways a product of the fight over Maybell -- does not mentor Rebecca Eisenberg but attacks her shows that the real estate industry is successful at a "divide and conquer" campaign. PASZ told voters to bullet-ballot their four candidates rather than ranking me 5th and including me, even though Tim Gray and I had the exact same platform in previous election cycles. Maybe my stance is sour grapes but it looks like PASZ always play just well enough to lose the land-use battles.

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Your point is that because it got worse and not better we were better off surrendering?

By the way, Margo Davis is Julian Davis' mother - -never met her to my knowledge, but I respect her view -- the other question, why didn't Palo Alto consider Buena Vista and Maybell as whole-cloth? I think we should discuss Ventura, Cubberley and Castilleja simultaneously.

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/square/2013/09/25/why-not-help-save-the-last-orchard-in-palo-alto

I have roots in Rochester and found that the home my grandmother lived in in the 1930s is available for $50,000. I prefer to live in a more modest home here, and fight for what I believe in.

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My point is that no one should oppose affordable housing just about anywhere and that it's similarly indefensible to oppose denser housing in wealthy neighborhoods. Virtually all the arguments made against Maybell turned out to be incorrect, and the result of opposing affordable housing there was the community becoming more segregated and less inclusive.

Do you honestly believe homes that are worth millions of dollars can be described as "modest"? The median home price in Palo Alto is $3.1 million. That is a sign of a deeply dysfunctional, economically and racially segregated community.

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You unsubscribed my email for asking a question I think is relevant to your point of views in your articles. I am confused Mr Dunham as to why you did this.

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As far as I can tell, you're still subscribed to this Substack, and I haven't manually removed you (or anyone, so far). There's a confirmation email you received that you need to click to validate your subscription. Perhaps that's the issue.

Anyone is welcome to ask questions or comment what they wish, so long as they are in good faith and not abusive. I don't have the time to answer or respond to everything, however.

Re: things about Yale being racist -- Yeah, the institution hasn't certainly been party to a lot of bad things over its history, including today. I'll probably write at some point about Ivy League schools and how they're not really advancing the cause of equity (they disproportionately draw students from the very highest income earners in the country, for instance). I have a few other topics in the queue before I get to that, though.

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I was sent an email that I was unsubscribed by Substack. I would be happy to forward you the email. I had to resubscribe to post my 2nd comment asking why my account was unsubscribed.

I wasnt expecting an immediate response Mr Dunham. I was just asking why the account I registered was unsubscribed.

re your response: Good to hear you will get to the topic of Ivy league discrimination eventually. From your reading your writings, you have now called your former neighbors in Palo Alto and your current neighbors in Burlingame racists for choosing to live in the suburbs, but have failed to call your alma mater, which you were maga cume lade in Political Science, a racist institution. Why is this a low priority on your writings priorities list?

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Ok, sorry to wear out my turn, but your argument is procrustean. Of the three links, the first is bogus because the "suicide cluster" is not true, the "N" is too small -- they are unrelated cases, and certainly not unique to Palo Alto - -and by the way, my valedictorian, John Neumann also killed himself, in 1984. These are all individual cases; your use for the greater gain of, I'm guessing Real Estate Industry, is crass; the thing about 280 Stanford, looks like buyer in your article has since sold, got his money out. Again, not unique to Palo Alto. I believe the property is spruced up a bit but still stands. Regarding the college admissions scandal, definitely not a Palo Alto story. The cite in your link is someone who worked here -- a VC -- but lived elsewhere. Actually Bill McGlashen went to Gunn freshman year before private school but has not been iin Palo Alto for quite a while. And your examples of HP and Tesla are interesting. In the 1960s Palo Alto came close to being a "company town" with a director of HP being mayor here, Porter. And he tore out 100 homes to build an expressway to get butts to the bench on time. But HP in the 1960s was a lot closer to being normal than today's corporate values, which destroy democracy. Tesla, gee that guy does a lot for workers and Democracy.

Palo Alto acquitted itself well with BLM; there have always been a core group here committed to progressive values, although the industry -- in my use, high tech -- does displace good and ethical people. Things are worse, but as my rabbi says, you don't have to finish your work but you can't quit, either.

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Please explain your position on your Alma mater being accused a racial discrimination and being named after a slave owner

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-finds-yale-discriminated-based-on-race-in-undergraduate-admissions-11597351675

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Yale

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I've lived in Palo Alto area on and off since 1974, which for me is 4th grade. And I ran for City Council here. I find your model is off. More simply: the real estate industry controls this town, corrupted PAHC and then finds compromised candidates like Filseth and Dubois -- who are just Silicon Valley white guys who like to boss people around -- and Kou, who is a realtor instead of any change that would empower residents. I would say: read George Packer, "the Unwinding" -- he's from here, Gunn High, 7 years before me, Robert Reich, "Saving Capitalism" and maybe Piketty -- i've just read the commentary.

Interestingly the candidate here I like the most, and the most refreshing in years, Rebecca Eisenberg, trained at Harvard Law with Elizabeth Warren, although she is more pro-housing that I think is prudent. I'm not a "Nimby" -- I don't have a voice.

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