This is awesome. Not only is Zareen's one of the best restaurants in Palo Alto, it also has one of the best owners!

Such a great idea. There must be a way to tax it!
(Sorry to say, I'm not kidding.)

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There's a few other restaurants in the area that pack their employees in like sardines in a variety of housing. Some ok housing. Some are basically Dickensian flophouses. Other people in the biz, plumbers,PG&E workers etc all know it. Apparently reporters, police, and other city and county officials don't.

We need more affordable housing. We can't rely on business owners to do this.

There used to be plenty of housing all up and down the socio-economic spectrum. Now we simply have too many people crushed into our small region with nowhere to expand to.

@Facts and Figures: We do have affordable housing: $400 for a 2-bedroom at Lytton Gardens. Also, Greenhouse apartments on San Antonio Road. But no one is policing them so the scammers are living there and the City Council is aware of this. [Portion removed.]They are stealing housing from our full-time blue collar workers.

Wonderful to see this kind of initiative and helping those who work hard to get affordable housing. However, I disagree with the assertion that: "If things go on like the way they are ... the only things you will see when you decide to have dinner" are Chipotle, McDonald's and "big chain restaurants." My unscientific personal observation is that chain restaurants in our areas seem to be on the decline, while local, diverse cuisine is on the rise. The demand is there to support local businesses of high quality. Overall, market forces seem to be working right now in terms of the options available for quality restaurants.

Sounds like she’s helping the precariat transition towards what Boots Riley would call WorryFree.

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"East Palo Alto recently made headlines for breaking the $1 million mark on median home prices."

Wowsers!!

What Zareen is doing is fantastic! She is actually trying to solve a problem - and doing it! But no, an extraordinary number of people have made negative comments. "Palo Alto" refers to "scammers" and adds:

"There are immigrants who live in Lytton Gardens because they don't speak enough English to be employed. They are stealing housing from our full-time blue collar workers."

This is wrong and untrue on so many levels! And the same writer finds it "strange" that a small business owner in Palo Alto can afford to buy a house in Menlo Park. Zareen has been working incredibly hard for her business and on behalf of her employees. She doesn't want people living in their cars. According to the article, she found a house for less than $1million, (which was incredibly lucky,) and is paying the mortgage by charging a reasonable rent. "Palo Alto"'s racism is so overt. Go Zareen!! I'll be eating at your restaurant even more in the future!

How much is the rent & what % of their take-home pay?

Indentured servitude comes in many forms & colors.

What a sad state of affairs this area is in. To Palo Alto and the rest of the Bay Area: how could have let your housing crisis get so bad that one of the best restaurants in this city can't pay its workers enough for them to afford nearby housing?

To all those who claim that people and companies who try to build more housing are "ruining what was great about Palo Alto", I hope you are beginning to realize that YOU are ruining Palo Alto.

Some of Palo Alto is beautiful and historic and should stay that way (Old Palo Alto, Professorville, Crescent Village, Town and Country, etc) and should stay that way. Many other parts are ugly, unremarkable, cheaply, quickly built 50s/60s suburbia. Build more housing in these areas, and build the infrastructure to match.

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QUOTE: Some of Palo Alto is beautiful and historic and should stay that way (Old Palo Alto, Professorville, Crescent Village, Town and Country, etc) and should stay that way. Many other parts are ugly, unremarkable, cheaply, quickly built 50s/60s suburbia.

Southgate (near Peers Park) is a nice neighborhood as is the area around North California Avenue.

You have to remember... at one time the working-class resided primarily in the south & southeastern portion of Palo Alto (South Palo Alto/Ventura/Barron Park/Charleston/Midtown etc.).

Are those the areas you suggest gutting?

@Ellen: The immigrant remark is irrelevant to the owner of the restaurant, it's a fact. The immigrants I am talking about do not work at the restaurant. Also, the Menlo Park and strange quote was not mine, it was a person with the same alias, different neighborhood. Consider reading more carefully.

The southern part of Palo Alto is just as "nice" as the northern part if you consider the homeowners doing their part to make the neighborhood nice by looking after the property, keeping the front looking smart with fresh paint and pleasant landscaping. There are those houses though that are a blight with several cars parked without wheels or in a similar state of disrepair, loads of trash stored anywhere and refuse cans left on the street all week. But this happens in the northern side too.

I am not sure that there are many "ugly" areas where things can be torn down to build ugly pack and stack housing.

Resident: I have no doubt the people who live in the southern parts of Palo Alto maintain their homes very well. That doesn't make the home any more well-built.

You and R. Davis are making this out to be about the "wealthy" side of Palo Alto vs the "poor" working class side. Maybe it was like that 30 years ago. Today, anyone who owns a house in Palo Alto is enormously wealthy. Those "poor" south Palo Alto homes currently start at 3 million dollars. The idea that I'm suggesting displacing the working class is preposterous: i'm suggesting exactly the opposite: making the southern park of Palo Alto affordable again to the working class by building more housing!

Joe, you completely misunderstand me.

My point is that the southern part of Palo Alto is just as nice because so many of us here spent lots of money $2+ million to buy a home here. You cannot say that it is not as wealthy as the north just because someone there may have spent over a million to buy a home there 20 years or so ago.

We all paid what we were willing to pay when we bought our homes regardless of the number. The north/south divide may be that the homes on the north are worth more than the south, but it doesn't follow that those homeowners in the south are "lower income" or less worthy to take pride in their neighborhoods.

The south of Palo Alto also deserves to have nice neighborhoods kept intact. Please do not suggest that the south should be turned into pack and stack housing.

Due to repeated violations of our Terms of Use, comments from this poster are automatically removed. Why?

@Joe/Stanford
QUOTE: You and R. Davis are making this out to be about the "wealthy" side of Palo Alto vs the "poor" working class side.

Let's backtrack a bit. What I said was:

"...at one time the working-class resided primarily in the south & southeastern portion of Palo Alto (South Palo Alto/Ventura/Barron Park/Charleston/Midtown etc.).

Are those the areas you suggest gutting?"


Curious. In what Palo Alto neighborhoods are you suggesting that more housing be built?

I love love love Zareens so much and want it to thrive. I will be sure to leave a bigger tip the next time I go. They really are the best Indian food around and I've had a lot. I've always loved their staff also.

> how could have let your housing crisis get so bad that one of the best restaurants in this city can't pay its workers enough for them to afford nearby housing?

Uh. Maybe the restaurant isn't paying them well enough to begin with. Earning minimum wage + tips won't go very far towards rental expenses in many cities around here.

A kid down the street is making $18.00/hour working at In & Out Burger...roughly $2800/month. I would imagine that the owner of this particular restaurant would have to pay her foodservers at least $30.00/hour which would also be accentuated by tips for them to break free of this magnanimous living arrangement.

I seriously doubt she is paying them that much. On the other hand, if the housing was provided for free, that would be another story & one worth mentioning.

"Curious. In what Palo Alto neighborhoods are you suggesting that more housing be built?"

How about at Stanford? There are thousands of undeveloped acres there.

Let me restate my argument, I think I was not clear enough initially:

1. We desperately need more housing in Palo Alto.

2. If we have to build somewhere, it should be in certain parts of south Palo Alto because the housing stock there is objectively lower quality and more deserving of replacement. It is objectively lower quality because it was built in the 50s/60s, a time when developers aimed to mass-produce low density housing as quickly and cheaply as possible.

My argument has nothing to do with what kind of people live in what part of town. It is solely based on the quality of the housing stock.

FYI: there is a term normal people use for this "pack and stack" housing you keep mentioning. They're called "apartments".

Joe

I strongly disagree with your idea that south Palo Alto is full of deteriorating poorly built properties just waiting demolition. From what I see driving and walking around the south part of the city there are a few homes in their original 50s/60s condition, but most have been updated with various upgrades and remodels and many have already been demolished and rebuilt with state of the art modern designs and materials.

I suspect you have no idea of how nice some of the neighborhoods in south Palo Alto have become. They are not the slum area you seem to feel that could be upgraded to what you call high rise apartments, or slums of the future, or any other name you seem to prefer for stack and pack housing.

Resident: If you're going to characterize my post as claiming that south Palo Alto is a "slum area just waiting for demolition", then it is clearly impossible to have a thoughtful and honest debate with you.

>>> 2. If we have to build somewhere, it should be in certain parts of south Palo Alto because the housing stock there is objectively lower quality and more deserving of replacement. It is objectively lower quality because it was built in the 50s/60s, a time when developers aimed to mass-produce low density housing as quickly and cheaply as possible.


Then Eichlers (Charleston neighborhood & beyond) + the Brown & Kaufman designs (cheaper-looking versions of an Eichler in Midtown) must go along with most of the older 1940s-built houses south of the Santa Clara County courthouse...all the way down to Charleston/Arastadero Road (Ventura neighborhood).

Not sure if the current owners are going to go for that unless some developer offers them above-market prices to get out of Dodge. Same with Barron Park (which was once an unincorporated part of PA).