Prioritizing balanced, thoughtful growth. A vibrant and diverse community is made up of a tapestry of housing types that transition from higher density in core areas to medium and lower density neighborhoods. We need to continue transitioning from excessive overgrowth in offices to providing a balance of new low, moderate, and higher-income housing for teachers, nurses, retail and essential service providers, public safety workers, and others. Diversity in the types of housing in our community helps ensure a place for the diversity of people we need and want here.  We should:

 Continue to moderate the rate of office growth.

 Increase zoning incentives for low income, moderate-income, and market-rate housing including rezoning portions of our downtowns, El Camino, and Stanford Research Park from office/commercial development to housing only or housing/retail.

 Provide greater funding for low and moderate-income housing by reinstating impact fees (cut in 2017) on new office development to fund these initiatives. An increase in Palo Alto’s impact fees doubles affordable housing funding, since the county’s fees on Stanford are tied to Palo Alto’s fees.

  Help decrease expensive land costs for low and moderate-income housing by converting city-owned surface parking lots in areas that are zoned for higher density to parking garages with housing on top.

 Strengthen renter protections against rent gouging and wrongful terminations. Almost half of all Palo Alto residents are renters and their home stability needs must be supported.

 Adopt as city policy the Obama Administration “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) rule to assure that the city is free of any discriminatory barriers to housing.

 Support designated off-street RV dweller sites that are safe and provide sanitary services.  

As a Palo Alto City Council member, we run a pretty tight ship; I do have interns, but no office staff members.   As such, much of the input I receive to assist with my decision making comes from the office hours I hold with constituents, my interactions with residents, and my service on City commissions.  I am the current City Council liaison to the City’s Human Relations Commission, for example, discusses criminal justice issues and the impact on those incarcerated.  In addition, for the last 4 years, I have held regular weekly office hours to hear the concerns of any resident willing to share. While I am not always privy to the constituent’s background, I do diligently listen to whatever concerns are raised.

The current pandemic has strained the finances of the City of Palo Alto, as it has strained the finances of many businesses and families. Many individuals in our state are finding themselves navigating through extremely uncertain times.  Through keeping a close eye on and shoring up our City’s finances, my hope is to help the City be more able to assist all Palo Altans struggling through these difficult times.

Our City Council, working through and with our Planning and Transportation Commission, will work to accomplish this challenging planning task.  It will not be easy, but with all of us working together, I’m sure we can accomplish this goal.

One of the most pressing issues for California residents is housing affordability. It is, unfortunately, the case that many of our residents are struggling to afford to live here. Our community and its needs are diverse.  It is my belief that the best way to address a community-centered issue, is to ask the community.  I believe that it would be best to first hear the thoughts and concerns of my constituents regarding modest density in order to create sensible local legislation.

To me, local control means listening to and respecting the wishes of my residents and constituents.  I do believe the best course of action is to gather their input. Many in our city are struggling to be heard and to live here. I want to ensure that I am doing everything I can in order to bring forth their concerns.

I have long been an active environmentalist. I have voted in favor of establishing an e-scooter program in Palo Alto, regularly bike and scooter to City Hall for meetings, and have advocated for exploring programs that would give financial incentives to those who bike to work. I have also been endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters, twice.  Recently, I voted in favor of future home construction in Palo Alto being all-electric. In addition, I practice what I preach: I am the only Councilmember to regularly bike/scoot/skateboard to Council meetings even though I live further away than most.

The City Council must do all we can to make sure that the stories of underrepresented communities are heard. We need to know if our residents are living in fear, rather than living their life as they choose. As a City Council Member, I want to make sure that all voices can be heard, particularly if they feel they have experienced a form of injustice.  However, our efforts must not stop there but must seek to include every perspective.  Our hope is that all Palo Altans feel heard and represented regardless of racial identity.

I will seek to include the voices of folks impacted by the prison-industrial complex in our city government. My campaign is in large part about bringing voices into our local decision-making processes that have been unheard for a long time, and this includes folks who have been incarcerated. I would welcome the input of community members that have been impacted by incarceration - particularly when reimagining community safety in Palo Alto. 

As a community, we must face our history and uncomfortable realities. Mass incarceration is an issue that has impacted our neighboring communities that are largely made up of low-income people of color, such as East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park. De facto segregation between Palo Alto and these communities continues today because of historical policies that have kept us apart. As a council member, I will actively work to bring our communities together across physical and social barriers, and this includes bringing formerly incarcerated individuals into our conversations. 

As COVID-19 allows for decarceration, Palo Alto needs to be a part of reintegrating formerly incarcerated people into our communities. Reimagining community safety means investing in services that prevent interaction with the criminal justice system in the first place, and making sure that all of our neighbors have the stability that they need, so that they never feel they have to break the law to meet their basic needs. Building housing that is accessible to low and middle-income residents is essential to making Palo Alto more welcoming to folks who may be facing a myriad of hardships, including those with incarcerated family members. We should invest in resources that members of the community, including formerly incarcerated folks, find helpful, such as educational resources at spaces like Cubberley, incentives for businesses to hire formerly incarcerated people, and restoring our funding for the County of Santa Clara Reentry Resource Center.

Palo Alto must collaborate with our neighbors to be part of the solution to the housing crisis, and this means making it easier to develop more housing in Palo Alto and ensuring that enough of these units are affordable. There are several approaches we can take concurrently to meet our housing needs. In residential neighborhoods, we can preserve neighborhood character with multi-family homes such as duplexes, triplexes, and cottages or cottage clusters. We can approve apartments, condos, and townhomes in areas near public transit such as downtown, near California Ave, and along El Camino. We need to make sure we have enough affordable housing for our essential workers, such as teachers, first responders, and service workers, many of whom are forced to live sometimes hours away from Palo Alto. We can use city land to build this housing.

Yes. We need to end exclusionary zoning so that we can build accessible housing across our city - planning carefully and creatively to meet our housing needs in a way that preserves the characteristics we all love about Palo Alto. In residential neighborhoods, we can maintain neighborhood character with multi-family homes (duplexes, triplexes), and accessory dwelling units. We can accommodate apartment buildings along transit corridors.

Cities should have local control over our housing policies to make sure we are building the types of housing that make sense for an area. It’s important that Palo Alto and other municipalities play our part in producing enough housing to meet the needs of our region and state region. Our state government needs to set standards and look at the big picture to make sure that we are building enough housing and that this housing is accessible to the folks that need it the most. It’s important that we work together with our regional governing bodies and all of the different groups helping us meet our housing goals to make sure everyone has access to affordable housing around Palo Alto, the Bay Area, and California. 

There are several ways we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in Palo Alto. First of all, transportation accounts for 70% of our emissions. Too many Bay Area residents, including folks who work in Palo Alto, have to make long commutes each day due to the lack of affordable housing near jobs, and lack of robust alternatives to driving. We can curb the emissions caused by transportation by building more housing and ensuring that enough of this housing is affordable for all of our workers, which would prevent long commutes. We should be building more housing near transit hubs and ending exclusionary zoning to curb urban sprawl, which has had devastating effects on our environment and increases CO2 emissions. This must happen in tandem with building infrastructure that makes biking safer in our city, as well as improvements to our public transit.

The City should incentivize moving away from CO2 emissions and investing in clean energy. For example, Palo Alto has our own utilities, and we can combine our land use and utilities policies to encourage solar, renewable electricity sourcing, and ending the use of natural gas. Palo Alto has made strides by moving to carbon-neutral electricity, and we should continue to incentivize developments that are energy-efficient and move away from natural gas.

Being a Black woman in a predominantly white city, a big part of why I’m running for City Council has been to bring people who feel underrepresented into our political processes and make sure our voice is heard by our larger community. Our political system has for too long sidelined the needs of Black and indigenous people, people of color, young people and seniors, women, and the working class. We must bring all voices to the table during our decision making processes. 

Palo Alto must contend with our history of segregation, and take concrete steps to heal. This means desegregating our housing by ending exclusionary zoning and making our city accessible to low-income people of color and our essential workers that are forced to live far away due to high rent. It means changing the way we approach community safety to make sure all of our citizens can feel safe in our streets without fear of being harassed or profiled. It means providing low-income communities and communities of color universal internet access, educational equity, and strong infrastructure.

Yes.  Individuals and families charged with crimes rarely are asked for input on the issues with which only they have direct experience: knowledge of what it is like to go through the criminal justice system.  I will do outreach and offer services, including transit and childcare,  in order to enable individuals accused of crimes to have a seat at the table. 

As a mental health and criminal defense legal advocate on behalf of involuntarily committed individuals at Mass Mental Hospital, I saw how easy it is to disappear within racially biased systems. Additionally, as a domestic violence victim advocate, I saw how sexism and racism can combine to silence and blame victims seeking to escape abuse. I have been an attorney for 30 years; I recognize and fight injustice.

It is critical that we involve silenced voices in all levels in our government. And I understand that in order to include the most marginalized voices, we must go beyond the resources shown to us, to locate the resources we are not shown. For example, in a recent event hosted by Emerge California (of which I am an alumna), Senator Cory Booker discussed his efforts to view prisons in order to create policies to treat prisoners more humanely. The Senator said that he had been shown a dozen prisons before he recognized that none of those prisons incarcerated women.  Once Senator Booker had that knowledge, he proceeded to visit the prisons he recognized were most overlooked and ignored: women’s prisons. With the knowledge he gained, Senator Booker worked swiftly to introduce legislation with Senator Elizabeth Warren to improve conditions at women’s prisons. I greatly admire and respect the actions of these two senators -- one a Stanford classmate, and the other, my favorite professor at Harvard Law School -- and I promise to act with similar integrity and hard work to bring justice to those whom society has discarded. 

We must work harder to create a more fair, humane, non-violent, and restorative approach to criminal justice, starting with empowering the people who have fallen victim to our current system’s failures and prejudices.

Including formerly incarcerated people, and others who spent time in the criminal justice system, would involve making room for them at the table.  It would involve giving them more than two minutes of time to describe their treatment by COs, POs and others in the system -- rather, allotting as much time as they need. It also would involve providing anonymity, confidentiality, and security when requested. It would involve not editing or “toning down” their stories, but rather, allowing them to speak the truth of their narratives. Importantly, it would involve giving them direct access to decision makers, rather than speaking for them.

I am committed to helping create a more just system by empowering and amplifying the voices of formerly incarcerated and arrested individuals, in order to create a better and less racially-biased approach to criminal justice and peacekeeping. 

When formerly incarcerated individuals and families arrive in Palo Alto, I will do my best to help them feel welcome and valued. The best way to make all people feel welcome and valued, in my opinion, is to ensure that we provide a social safety net for all residents. Through a business tax on only the largest businesses that have profited from the pandemic, Palo Alto will have a much more robust general fund, big enough for our wealthy city to make long-overdue investments in affordable housing, universal childcare and healthcare, transit, and high quality equitable public education.  

For the people who have reentered, I will work with Santa Clara County’s Office of Reentry Services to bring an Office of Reentry closer to Palo Alto.  Given Palo Alto’s great wealth and robust resources, I also would work with the County to enhance the Reentry Office with additional services and assistance that Palo Alto can afford to provide. 

To navigate re-entry, former prisoners need food, shelter, employment, and mental health services. Data shows that the provision of these elements are what reduce recidivism, which is often caused not by a second crimem but rather, by the consequences of poverty. Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in the world, and we have capacity to help former prisoners get back on their feet. Providing that help helps not only the former prisoners, but also the community as a whole.

To provide necessary services, Palo Alto can partner with exceptional nonprofits located right in our vicinity. Those organizations include LifeMoves, the leading provider of services to help the transitional homeless re-enter the economy, SecondHarvest, which provides meals, and JobTrain, which provides employment training.

Palo Alto is in a rare position that we have city land that is not being used. As we work towards a permanent re-envisioning for Cubberley Community Center, we can use some of the ample empty Cubberley space to house nonprofits that serve the homeless and the reeintering. Those nonprofits can include job assistance. Given that the City of Palo Alto has a number of open roles for which it needs to hire, and we will have many new job opportunities when we (finally) launch a system of contact tracing (which we must do), we can require that all city departments set aside some hires for former prisoners.

We also must partner with mental health services. In fact, I believe that the coming mental health crisis that will accompany this pandemic as we try to recover, merits Palo Alto investing in an Office of Mental Health Services. That office will serve all residents and city workers, including people re-entering from prison. Given that sensitivity training is badly needed amongst city management and city council, we can extend this sensitivity training to the greater community, working towards a Palo Alto where no one is stigmatized, and all people feel valued and heard.

Before I answer, I want to clarify that Palo Alto can afford to acquire land, Here is a summary of some sources of funding: 

(1) State sources of funding like the $600 million HomeKey program.

2) Public Land Trusts.

3) Funding from business tax and raising developer impact fees, like our neighbor cities have done successfully.

4) Commercial bonds - so not to place financial burden on residents.

5) Mortgage lines available to municipalities like Palo Alto with stellar credit ratings. 

More on that per request. :) 

Locations: 

Palo Alto actually is in a very enviable position, in that we have huge parcels of residentially-zoned land that currently is not being used for residential purposes. Here are a few examples:

1. Cubberley.  Cubberley has 35 acres of buildable land that can and should be used for housing. The City would need to acquire this land from the PAUSD, but an amicable deal can be worked out that protects and preserves the District’s need for a school in the future. While in PAUSD hands, the District can’t build teacher housing. But the city can, while also providing the school district badly needed financing to reduce class sizes and acquire PPE!

2. North Ventura. The North Ventura Neighborhood Association created a beautiful vision for their neighborhood called Alternative M. That vision includes preservation of all existing housing, protection of renters, and production of 760 new units of housing, including low income and very low income housing. The neighbors have spoken -- let’s make their vision a reality.

3. Castilleja School. Castilleja sits on 55 lots zoned for single-family homes. The school has been in material legal violation of its Conditional Use Permit and has outgrown its current location. Although it has filed for a new conditional use permit that will increase its size by 30%, neighbors rationally point out that this will make their lives a living hell, and environmentalists rationally point out that Castilleja’s plans to eliminate 200 trees does not serve a local area suffering from the harms of climate change.It seems likely that the school will move, and when it does, our city can reclaim these 55 residential lots for the purpose for which they were zoned: housing,

4.) The 50 acres where the train runs. All existing research and expert analysis points to the fact that if Caltrain is lifted to a viaduct or run through a tunnel underground, Palo Alto will regain control of the 50 acres of land on which the train tracks currently runs. Let’s confirm that and use it!

In sum, it has not been cost, nor has it been lack of available land, that has prevented our City Council from building the affordable housing it is legally required to build. Rather, it has been lack of will. I will change that. I know that we are legally obligated to build housing -- and that doing so is in the best interest of the community,

Yes. I oppose exclusionary zoning. Modest density will make our neighborhoods more diverse. We must customize the density solutions according to neighborhood. We also can and should give property owner the legal right to subdivide or duplex their homes. Many of our home-owning residents are struggling financially due to the pandemic. Allowing these homeowners to subdivide or to build another home -- absent the unduly restrictive and time-consuming requirements of ADU permitting -- on their property will give our community members the financial ability to make ends meet and stay in the community. Allowing subdividing and duplexing (or more) also enables multi-generational housing, which is badly needed for families like mine - the sandwich generation, both raising growing kids and seeking to stay close to, and help with, aging parents. Putting this right in the hands of the property owners is such a no-brainer. Our community deserves to have the stabiilty and inclusivity this reasonable measure would take.

I also strongly believe that our city government needs to be more flexible about height requirements, especially along busy corrodors and near jobs and transit. City Council recently spent a significant amount of money on a consultant to advise what kind of zoning changes would be necessary to make affordable housing economically feasible for developers. The resounding answer to this question by this year's consulting firm was identical to the answers given in years' past: Palo Alto's overly strict height restrictions and its parking requirements are the two biggest reasons that developers cannot afford to build housing.

Of those two inhibitors, the height requirement is the easiest to fix. There is no reason for the requirement that multi-family housing on Middlefield and other arteries that contain active retail and office space be limited to 2 floors. Inability to build up has created damage to our natural environment by forcing the building to create sprawl. Building out rather than up also deprives our community of green space for parks. Palo Alto stands to gain momentously from raising height limititations moderately.

As to parking requirements, unfortunately that is harder to change until Palo Alto keeps its long-standing promise to provide safe, convenient, free local transit through electric shuttles. One we have a large business tax, it will be easy to fund shuttles. Until then, why aren't we asking Tesla to help out with the provision of electric shuttles to get our community back on its feet? I bet they would be pleased to offer branded electric shuttles, in exchange for the next thing they are planning to ask of the city, that until now, our city council has just given this highly profitable company for free. Now's the time to take a stronger stand on behalf of our community.

I am for local control of housing -- anything else would be a disservice to the residents who have invested so much money into their properties in Palo Alto. That said, because local governments -- including and especially Palo Alto -- have refused to fulfill their legal and moral obligation to produce low income housing, the State of California enacted laws that give the state the right to come in and make housing in cities that fail to fulfill their allotted housing production numbers. 

Our City Council is on the brink of officially violating our legal responsibility to build housing. When it comes to the category of very low income housing, we are barely 7% towards our requirement, with one year to go. We have built merely 43 units of very low income housing in the past 8 years, when we were required to build 700. Our city council knew this day was coming, but chose to write urgent letters rather than build urgent housing. That was a huge error in judgment.

Due to city council’s intransigence we don't have time to debate about whether we need to increase density, lift unnecessary height limits, take advantage of the numerous state and federal grants and incentives to aquire property for affordable housing, and fix our permitting process to fast track the permitting and approval of urgenty-needed housing developments. Of course we have to do those things. If we do not do these things, the state will come in and do them for us.

So here is my question: would you rather enable Palo Alto to make the decisions of where these housing developments should be placed, or do you want the State to decide for us?  Because if we do not create our legally mandated housing allocations -- and right now, if voters elect any of the "slow growth candidates," odds are 100% that we will not make those numbers, then the State will come in and take away our local control.

Our community deserves better.  As a licensed attorney with 30 years of experience negotiating multi-billion-dollar corporate transactions and handling liquidity events like IPOs, I am uniquely qualified to identify and execute on funding sources and strategic partnerships to produce beautiful, efficient, and affordable housing for our local workers.

Absolutely. Here are some plans I have to make Palo Alto more green: 

1. Reduction of single occupancy vehicles.  We can do this with: (a) a robust, convenient, free system of electric shuttles; (b) safe, separate, well-lit bike lanes to incentivize cycling by all ages capable of biking; (c) low-cost shared bicycles to make biking convenient and affordable; and (d) safer pedestrian passageways, including bike/walk bridges and/or tunnels.

2. Park and ride points: We must require our largest employers to have their employees park in lots near the highway. These same large companies should provide shuttles to bring the employees to the office, and to enable employees to take advantage of Palo Alto’s restaurants and retail during lunch and after work. 

3. Switch to renewable energy sources. Palo Alto should be a model city when it comes to green initiatives, and owning our own utility makes that possible. 

4. HOUSING near jobs: Palo Alto faces a jobs-to-homes ratio of nearly 4-to-1, and that rate grows to 7-to-1 when it comes to lowest income workers and homes they can afford. This imbalance creates climate damage by requiring workers to commute long distances. Building housing near jobs needs to be top priority for City Council. Also, importantly, existing housing stock must be preserved and not allowed to convert to commercial use (like the City Council did with Hotel President earlier this year). Finally, tenants also must be protected so that they are not converted from non-commuters to commuters. 

5. Regional transport. Palo Alto has to start playing nice with our neighbors. Time after time, Palo Alto chooses to pick fights with regional organizations and even with the state, rather than working collaboratively with them. Our town is deservedly gaining a bad reputation. I plan to turn that around, reaching out to the regional transit organizations, and getting involved in the improvement and coordination of our regional transit system.

6. Green New Deal - I plan to work with fellow council members, residents, and community groups to kick off a local Green New Deal, to put people to work creating green solutions.

7. Protecting trees!! We cannot reduce CO2 if we continue to allow wealthy property owners to destroy our tree canopy.

8. Electric homes: absolutely, but the City needs to fund these measures so not to put the financial burden on residents, who already pay for so much! The city can provide solar panels -- perhaps acquired from Tesla for free or at a discount -- to residential homes, and subsidize the cost of those panels by reclaiming the surplus solar electricity. Palo Alto is an ideal location for solar power!

We have so many things we can do! And all of them are beneficial for the community as a whole. Here is an incomplete list:

1. We must diversity our workforce. When our city workers and those who make decisions about the city are representative of our community, the consequent decisions will include perspectives that continue to be silenced. 

2. We should switch to district elections, to make elections more affordable and representative. Most of our neighbor cities do this, including Menlo Park.

3. We should have publicly funded elections, which Palo Alto can afford. This would free candidates time to speak to voters rather than chat up wealthy donors. Even more importantly, publicly funded elections would open up candidacy to a more representative number of potential candidates, given the financial barriers to running for office.

4. We should transform city council to a full time job to enable residents who are forced to work long hours or multiple jobs an opportunity for a seat at the table.

5. We should reallocate a material portion of the 33% of our budget spent on our armed police force towards more important and urgent needs such as mental health services.

6. Instead of spending $200 million on a new "safety" building, we should invest in resources our community more desperately needs for safety: medical health services, and affordable housing.

7. We must build affordable housing for all income levels, starting with our most urgent and pressing need: very low income housing.

8. We must wake up to the reality of our situtation: Palo Alto is a city that suffers from the legacy of institutionalized racism. The racist policies of Palo Alto's past are not the fault of anyone today, but our community now recognizes that we live in neighborhoods that were defined -- and harmed -- by that exclusion.

9. Such low-hanging fruit! Palo Alto must open up Foothills Park permanently and immediately. And Palo Alto should apologize for its decades of irrational and arbitrary exclusion. I'll start with my own apology: I am very sorry that the city where I am living and raising my children is not sharing our park with you. These are not the values I teach my children, and I am ashamed of my city's choice to exclude you,. I will do everything in my power to make this right. Until then, I continue to be sorry. You deserve better. We all do.