Community Voices
FORLosAltos | Our Position
Why Preserve
Downtown Parking Plazas?
FORLosAltos is focused on keeping Los Altos livable, accessible, beautiful and economically healthy.
That means making clear, thoughtful City decisions about public land and public dollars—prioritizing demonstrated community needs over unclear projects, and protecting the public assets that strengthen daily life in our town and neighborhoods.
Downtown parking plazas are City-owned public lands where essential public benefits, economic vitality, everyday use, and community priorities converge.
Parking Plazas: Essential to Downtown Vitality
Downtown parking plazas play a central role in Los Altos—historically, functionally, and economically. They shape the downtown's character and provide safe, convenient, and accessible parking for shoppers, diners, employees, and visitors..
Parking underpins downtown viability. While some residents can walk or bike to downtown, many cannot. Downtown depends on other local residents and visitors from surrounding areas. Without convenient, readily available parking, downtown activity and economic health will decline.
Los Altos' parking plazas succeed becasue they serve the people who use downtown–local shoppers, seniors, families, restaurant-goers, employees and people running errands or enjoying easy in-and-out access to services like banks, salons, coffee shops, physical therapy, drug stores and post offices. Multiple, tree-lined plazas near businesses make parking convenient, comfortable and safe for short errands and longer visits.
Parks: Fix What We Have First
Los Altos has one of the lowest park acreages per resident in the region—about 1.57 acres per 1,000 residents—and no actively used or managed Parks Plan. The City’s last Parks Master Plan dates to 2012, and a comprehensive, up-to-date plan is long overdue—one that covers all public lands, including parks, open space, and historic and cultural landscapes, and clearly defines priorities, resources, budgets, and responsibilities for long-term upkeep, operations, monitoring, and stewardship.
Downtown already sits immediately adjacent to multiple parks—Community Park, Lincoln Park, Shoup Park, Redwood Grove, Hillview Park, and Veterans Community Plaza—yet many citywide parks and facilities remain under-maintained or unfinished or appear/disappear from City-approved annual budgets. Grant Park facilities have lingered on improvement lists for more than 20 years, the Garden House at Shoup Park still needs renovation, and other historic park buildings face deferred repairs and inconsistent maintenance.
The City should restore, fix, and maintain what it already has—first.
Instead, the City is prioritizing costly new projects, including a downtown park on an existing parking plaza, while several neighborhoods, especially North Los Altos, still lack convenient access to nearby parks.
A downtown park may or may not make sense in the future. Today, limited park funds should address unmet needs in existing parks and underserved neighborhoods—not replace functional public infrastructure that benefits residents and local businesses.
Los Altos needs a comprehensive parks and public lands plan—and disciplined investment in what already serves the community citywide.
Trees: A Mature, Irreplaceable Public Asset
Los Altos is fortunate to have more than isolated street trees in its downtown core. Our parking plazas contain organized rows and clusters of mature Chinese Pistache trees that form a continuous canopy and deliver substantial public benefits every day.
This living canopy:
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Provides shade and comfort for shoppers, diners, employees, and visitors
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Reduces ambient temperatures by 3–5 degrees, improving heat resilience
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Improves air quality and helps manage stormwater runoff
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Supports accessibility for quick errands, longer visits, seniors, families, and business deliveries
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Defines the open, leafy, small-town character that makes downtown Los Altos distinctive
This is irreplaceable green infrastructure, not landscaping.
It is a public land asset that, once cut down or carved out, is permanently lost.
Current planning for Plazas 1 and 2 (downtown park and parking structure) and Plazas 7 and 8 (high-density housing) would remove or damage up to 125 Chinese Pistache trees—nearly one-third of downtown’s tree canopy.
This loss cannot be mitigated by replanting elsewhere. Cutting down mature canopy trees and replacing them with 24-inch boxed trees in heavily built areas ignores biological reality. These trees will struggle to survive amid concrete, utilities, and buildings. A mature heritage canopy cannot be recreated.
Addressing City Responses
A number of community members have asked the City and City Council about the Downtown Park with Parking, and questioned the need and lack of study. Below is some information and fact-based responses to City statements.
City says: We need a park in downtown
The facts: The City has not demonstrated or studied a need for a downtown park.
Tree-lined parking plazas already function as flexible public spaces. They support seasonal pop-up uses, community events, festivals, and temporary activations—uses that could be strengthened and better managed without removing trees or eliminating parking.
It is unclear whether the City ever monitored or measured how expanded public spaces impact short-term or long-term business activity. There is no written consideration or justification in the downtown park project descriptions or RFP.
Before committing public land to irreversible change or spending millions on plan design concepts, the City should evaluate and improve what already works, protect mature trees, and conduct a real, community-driven needs and economic study.
City says: The trees are old, the plazas are in poor condition
The facts: Most of the trees are healthy and structurally sound. They need routine, proven care—proper pruning, improved irrigation, and better separation from surrounding asphalt—not removal. The plazas themselves need resurfacing and restriping, work that can be done at modest cost and with limited disruption to downtown businesses.
The Chinese Pistache trees are protected-size, heritage-eligible trees and a defining feature of Los Altos. At 50–75 years old, they are mature, irreplaceable public assets. While Chinese Pistache can live 150 years or more when properly maintained, replacement trees cannot replicate their canopy, shade, cooling benefits, accessibility, or character for generations.
Trees cannot simply be “replaced” or even re-grown. Once removed, these benefits are lost for decades—if not forever. Removing them is not just impractical; it is not smart planning, and it erodes a key hallmark of our town.
City says: The parking plazas are underutilized space-we don’t need the parking and better to build on it.
The facts: This claim does not match reality. The parking plazas are used throughout the day, every day, and frequently operate at or above 80% capacity on both weekdays and weekends. The City has produced no studies showing excess parking or reduced demand. The evidence instead indicates that Los Altos has the right amount of parking for how downtown vibrantly functions today, including the permanent loss of on-street spaces due to restaurant parklets and street extensions on State Street and Main Street.
The parking plazas allow drivers to easily find an open space and, if needed, move to a nearby plaza.
For short visits, the plazas enable fast, convenient entry and exit—ideal for quick errands, post office stops, and pickups.
For longer stays, they provide something structured garages and hardscaped parks cannot: mature tree canopy and shade for much of the day—an essential comfort, accessibility, and climate benefit in the downtown.
City says: Autonomous vehicles will someday eliminate the need for parking.
The facts: The City has provided no evidence or studies to support this claim. It also has not accounted for the cumulative loss of parking already underway or proposed—more than 263 spaces from Parking Plazas 1 and 2, plus 250 or more spaces tied to housing planned for Plazas 7 and 8.
If autonomous vehicles eventually reduce parking demand, the prudent and cost-effective strategy is not to build on parking plazas now or invest millions in underground or structured replacement parking. The smarter approach is to wait, monitor actual demand, and only consider redevelopment after parking needs demonstrably decline—at which point replacement parking may not be necessary at all.
Until then, preserving existing parking avoids unnecessary expense, risk, and irreversible decisions based on speculation rather than data.
City says: We need a downtown park to drive business to the downtown, and attract families.
The facts: Everyone wants a downtown that is welcoming and appealing to people of all ages, but a new downtown park is not the solution. Improving the visitor experience does not require replacing functional public infrastructure with a permanent recreational park. It requires targeted, everyday amenities that support shopping, dining, and lingering—many of which were already identified in the Downtown Vision Plan and remain unimplemented. And parking plazas can be reconfigured to better serve in a flexible way for pop-up events, seasonal activities and outings if needed.
Downtown Los Altos already sits within a short walk of multiple parks—Village Park, Lincoln Park, Hillview Park, Redwood Grove, and Shoup Park—providing ample access to recreational open space without removing parking or trees.
What downtown needs is more of what already works: additional trees and canopy, seating and benches, drinking fountains, small-scale parklets, and safer, easier pedestrian connections across San Antonio Road and Foothill Expressway. These improvements strengthen downtown’s warmth, comfort, and accessibility—supporting families, seniors, and businesses—without sacrificing the shaded, village-scale character that makes Los Altos inviting.
City says: We need to have sufficient facilities for people who bike as well as drive to downtown.
The facts: The City has not produced a study showing unmet demand for additional bike facilities or demonstrating that reduced parking would better serve downtown users.
As downtown continues to shift toward restaurants and evening activity, convenient parking becomes even more important—especially for visitors who travel from outside the immediate area. At night, many residents and visitors face safety and accessibility challenges that make walking or biking less practical.
Downtown planning must reflect how people actually use the area today, not assumptions unsupported by data.