Stanford
Portola Terrace
Workforce apartments

Portola Terrace is an integrated community of Stanford faculty homes and affordable housing for the local workforce, designed with environmental sustainability and wildfire resilience as top priorities.

Housing

Background

In 2015, Stanford and the Portola Valley Town Council discussed the challenges resulting from the local workforce driving long distances to reach their jobs and talented educational professionals moving away due to a shortage of affordable housing nearby.

To help address the regional housing crisis, Stanford worked with the Town Council to put forth a housing concept on its land that supports the needs of the Town and university. Portola Terrace is a community of homes that maintains the natural beauty of the surrounding area. These residences will provide housing for the town’s workforce and enable local teachers, first responders and others to live in the community where they work.

Overview

The housing is organized around a centrally located picnic and play area to create a family-friendly neighborhood with easy access to new and existing trails.

The residences will:

Occupy only 10.8 acres of the property, leaving the other 64.2 acres as open space

Include 12 affordable workforce apartments across three two-story buildings

Have 27 single-family faculty homes that are all two stories

Housing development for 39 units

Portola Terrace Will Help Make Portola Valley a Special Place to Live and Work

The residences include twice the number of affordable housing units required by the State Density Bonus Law. They will be funded, constructed, and operated by the university, with eligibility criteria set by the Town, and all housing units will be built at the same time. Portola Terrace is intentionally configured as a cluster development, utilizing this law to occupy only six of the 75 acres (8 percent of the property), thereby safeguarding the large oak woodland. 

The law was created to produce more affordable housing through incentives and waivers that make the housing economically and physically feasible to build. Property tax revenues, fees and other taxes from Portola Terrace will also increase funding for the Town, Portola Valley and Sequoia Union High School Districts, as well as Woodside Fire Protection District.