"The specific plan has been almost a complete failure as it relates to actually revitalizing Santa Cruz Avenue. The projects there have been few and far between."
Menlo Park City Councilmember Drew Combs said that at the June 23, 2026 council meeting, and if you have walked Santa Cruz Avenue in the last year or two, you already knew it before he said it. You have seen the dark storefronts sitting next to a packed dinner table at Camper. You have wondered why a street with this much foot traffic and this much household income still has windows with paper taped over the glass. The easy explanation is rent. The real explanation is a rulebook, and the city just rewrote a piece of it.
A plan built to keep the street one thing
In 2012, Menlo Park adopted the El Camino Real/Downtown Specific Plan, and it drew a tight box around what could legally operate on Santa Cruz Avenue. The goal was a retail-focused street, the kind of place where every storefront sells something you can carry out the door. For years that meant landlords looking to fill a vacancy had a narrow list of tenant types to choose from, and if the retailers and restaurants who fit that box couldn't make the rent, the space just sat there. Not because nobody wanted to open a business in Menlo Park. Because the zoning had already ruled out most of the businesses that might have said yes.
That distinction matters if you have ever assumed the empty storefronts were a demand problem. They were at least as much a supply problem, and the supply in question was the supply of legally eligible tenants.
The application that forced the question
The push to change this came from inside downtown itself. Tod Spieker, a Menlo Park native whose company Windy Hill Ventures owns and recently renovated 870 Santa Cruz Ave, filed the application that got this whole process moving. His building had been fixed up and still couldn't find tenants under the existing rules. He put it plainly to the city: building owners don't want to invest in their properties if they can't get the rents or tenants to support that investment.
The Planning Commission took up the proposal on May 18, 2026 and voted unanimously to recommend an expanded set of uses, though it wanted to keep banks out entirely and made some adjustments to the recreation category. The City Council took a scaled-back version of that recommendation to a vote on June 23, 2026 and approved it unanimously.
What actually changed, and what didn't
Here is the practical result for anyone walking the avenue this fall:
- Spas, salons, and similar personal service businesses can now open on the ground floor without needing a conditional use permit. Before this vote, those uses were largely pushed to upper floors, which meant a nail salon or aesthetics studio couldn't simply take a ground-level vacancy the way a boutique could.
- Small-scale recreation, meaning gyms and arcades, was previously prohibited outright on Santa Cruz Avenue. Those businesses can now apply for a use permit, though the Planning Commission still reviews each one individually and can deny it.
- Massage parlors remain barred from the downtown core regardless of the other changes.
- Banks are capped at 30,000 square feet of the corridor total. They already occupy roughly 28,000 square feet of it. That leaves about 2,000 square feet of room for new banking uses across the entire street, which tells you banks were never going to be the fix for downtown's empty storefronts even in a version of the rules that allowed more of them.
If you have been picturing a wave of new banks and chain drugstores moving into those dark windows, the math doesn't support it. What the vote actually opens the door to is closer to what you'd want walking distance from your own front door: a facial studio, a boutique fitness class, maybe a bookable recovery and wellness space in one of the bigger vacant units near Chestnut Street.
What the old rules looked like in practice
The best illustration of what this zoning actually cost the street isn't hypothetical. AXIS Personal Trainers had operated near the Menlo Park train station at 550 Ravenswood Ave since 1996. When that lease neared its end, set to expire in 2026, AXIS wanted to stay in Menlo Park and move into the former CVS space at Menlo Station after the drugstore closed. Because many parcels in the Downtown Specific Plan zoning area required gyms and wellness centers to get individual permits, the move needed Planning Commission approval, which the city granted back in 2025, a full year before this June's rule change, before AXIS could take a space just a few blocks from where it had operated for nearly three decades. Owner Scott Norton told the commission the business didn't want to go anywhere else and was relieved to find a way to stay. The new location will include a merchandise area, locker room, saunas, and a recovery room, on top of the main training floor.
That is a business with almost thirty years of history in this city, and it still had to clear a permitting hurdle just to relocate a few blocks. That approval predates this year's rewrite by about a year, and it is exactly the kind of friction the June 23, 2026 vote is trying to remove for the next wellness studio or boutique gym operator considering Santa Cruz Avenue.
The other half of the street is already loud
None of this happened in a vacuum of quiet storefronts. While the vacancy problem persisted on one side of the ledger, the restaurant side of downtown had its own run. Springline completed its restaurant lineup when Alisios opened on June 11, 2026. A few blocks away, on the west side of downtown at 827 Santa Cruz Ave, Yeobo, Darling tells a separate story: it's the project of chefs who built their reputation on a Michelin-starred restaurant in Palo Alto before bringing their own Korean and Taiwanese concept to Menlo Park. The contrast is part of what makes the vacancy issue so visible. You can be seated for dinner at a nearly full restaurant and still see a dark, taped-over window two doors down. Both things have been true on the same block for over a year, and the zoning vote is the city's attempt to close that gap from the other direction.
What this week on the street actually looks like
If you want a sense of what downtown feels like right now, rather than what a headline says about it, Friday night is the easiest way to check. The next Fourth Fridays event runs August 28, 2026 from 6 to 9 p.m., with live music staged up and down the avenue. The lineup includes The Song Gardeners at the Evelyn Stage, on the site of the former Pharmica, the Dale Nesbitt Jazz Band at a brand new stage in front of Wells Fargo, and the local cover band Up and To The Right playing the 600 Block Plaza in front of Starbucks. Steve Koehler's balloon act is set up at the Chase Bank Plaza near Cheeky Monkey, Rick Sanders is playing Gallery House, and Feldman's Books hosts Melodious Thunk. The event is produced by the Downtown Menlo Fund and dinner reservations are encouraged, since restaurants along the route tend to fill up.
The Sunday farmers market on Chestnut Street between Santa Cruz Avenue and Menlo Avenue runs year-round from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with the usual mix of California produce, fish, eggs, flowers, and live music. It is the kind of fixture that doesn't change with a zoning vote and doesn't need to.
Watching the next vacancy fill
The honest way to think about the June 23 vote is as a test of a theory. The theory was that Santa Cruz Avenue's empty storefronts were a rules problem more than a demand problem, and that widening the list of eligible tenants would do more for occupancy than another round of retail recruitment ever could. Over the next year, the storefronts to watch are the larger, harder-to-lease spaces that sat vacant longest under the old rules, the ones too big for a boutique and previously off-limits to a gym or spa. If one of those becomes a fitness studio or a wellness space instead of staying dark, that's the zoning change working as intended. If it doesn't, the vacancy problem was never really about zoning at all.
Either way, the street you walk this fall will tell you more than the council minutes did.
If you're weighing a move in Menlo Park or want a read on how these downtown shifts might touch your own street or property value, the Lyn Jason Cobb Team is happy to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
