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Greer Stone discusses city issues with the Palo Alto Weekly on Sept. 14. Video by Palo Alto Online.
Palo Alto’s housing crisis hits close to home for Greer Stone, a Gunn High School teacher who is making his second bid for a City Council seat.
In a recent interview, Stone said it’s a “real struggle” for him and his wife, a teacher at Menlo-Atherton High School, to make monthly rent payments on their one-bedroom Midtown apartment. One of his colleagues at Gunn recently packed up and left the Bay Area because she can’t afford to live in the area, he said.
“I think we’re going to continue to see that loss of talent and professionalism not only within our school district but with other essential employees within the community if we can’t start to really grasp this issue,” Stone said.
Yet his approach to housing differs markedly from that championed by other housing advocates in the race for four council seats. Unlike Steven Lee and Cari Templeton, who supported recent legislative proposals that loosen zoning regulations in single-family neighborhoods to encourage more duplexes and triplexes, Greer sees such bills as blunt tools that will not deliver the types of affordable housing that the community really needs.
“Blunt upzoning not only does not accomplish objective of lowering housing prices, but it also leads to gentrification in communities where upzoning occurs,” Stone said, citing examples in San Francisco, Chicago and Harlem, where a housing boom resulted in both an influx of residents and a decrease in the African American population.
Stone wants to create more affordable housing by using the city’s zoning powers and the proceeds from a new business tax. To make housing development more competitive with office development, he wants to increase impact fees for commercial growth (and use the proceeds to support below-market-rate housing), restore the city’s limit on new downtown office space that the council abolished in 2018, and refurbish some existing office space as housing — an effort that he hopes could become more viable as telecommuting cements itself as a new norm for many employees.
Stone also wants to raise the city’s “inclusionary housing” requirement (the percentage of units that a housing developer needs to designate for below-market-rate units) from the current level of 15% to 20%. He also wants to implement what’s known as the “Palmer fix” and extend the inclusionary-housing policy to newly developed rental properties.
A primary component in his housing plan is preservation of existing residences. He wants to institute a “no net loss” policy on housing, which would prohibit destruction of below-market-rate units unless the housing will be replaced with an equal or greater number of units. He would also support giving residents who would be displaced by such projects the right of first refusal on the new housing as well as rental assistance during their time of displacement.
“The most affordable housing we have is in our existing housing stock,” Stone wrote in a Palo Alto Neighborhoods questionnaire. “Had this policy existed, we never would have lost the affordable housing and vibrant community at the President Hotel.”
Stone, a former attorney who served on the city’s Human Relations Commission and currently is vice-chair of the Santa Clara County Human Rights Commission, said he was disappointed to see the city approve in June a proposal to convert the President Hotel, an apartment complex at 488 University Ave., into a luxury hotel. While the council had publicly opposed the conversion project, it was advised by the city’s legal staff to approve the project to avoid litigation (while the council directed City Attorney Molly Stump in June to release a public document explaining the deeply unpopular decision, that explanation has not been provided as of late September).
Stone saw that decision as nothing short of capitulation by the city.
“It’s so critical to be able to have the conviction and understanding that we will fight for certain things that we think are important enough,” Stone said at a Sept. 12 forum sponsored by Palo Alto Sensible Zoning, a political action committee that supports slow-growth policies and that has endorsed Stone.
‘It’s so critical to be able to have the conviction and understanding that we will fight for certain things that we think are important enough.’
Greer Stone, City Council candidate
Stone, who chairs the county Human Rights Commission’s Justice Review Committee, also believes the council hasn’t done enough to address recent incidents of police misconduct in Palo Alto. He supports reversing the council’s December decision that internal Police Department conflicts should not be reviewed by the independent police auditor (the change, which appears to have been spurred by an incident in which a high-ranking white officer used racist language against a Black officer, now directs such incidents to Human Resources, effectively shielding it from public disclosure).
Stone also wants to follow the example of Eugene, Oregon, where mental-health professionals and social service workers rather than police officers respond to calls that involve mental health issues. The Eugene program, which is known as CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On the Streets) and which has been in place since 1989, also saves Eugene about $15 million annually, Stone said.
“If we can save money through that and reinvest it back into better training, as well as getting the traffic enforcement team up and running again, and make sure the streets are safer — I think that’s all going to be key,” Stone said.
Stone believes Palo Alto is at an “inflection point,” with the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic recession and the social unrest over police brutality converging to create an opportunity for fundamental change. In April, one month into the COVID-19 shutdown, he penned a guest opinion for the Weekly that urged city officials to address the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on Black and Latino communities, recapped some of the darkest chapters of world history, and expressed his hope that a “shared humanity” that will help the community overcome the virus.
“Few moments in history have brought humanity together better than this crisis, and there is some strange beauty in knowing we’re all fighting these struggles together as a global collective,” Stone wrote.
Read profiles of the nine other candidates:
• Rebecca Eisenberg: Swinging for the fences
• Lydia Kou: Playing zone defense
• Steven Lee: Proudly progressive
• Raven Malone: Seeking social justice
• Greg Tanaka: Following the money
• Cari Templeton: Ready to listen
More election coverage:
• VIDEOS: Watch our debate and interviews with the 10 City Council candidates in Palo Alto
Watching Greer in the forums and debates, he has really separated himself as an articulate and thoughtful candidate. Given his long time experience with Palo Alto as a local who grew up here, he has seen the changes and recognizes the challenges. He’s earned my support.