Palo Alto homeowners along Edgewood Drive will be allowed to build fences all the way to the top of the San Francisquito Creek bank, after the city council approved a new stream-protection ordinance that carves out an exception for their properties. The move reverses a longstanding rule that required a five-foot gap between the bank's edge and any new fence.
The city council's approval follows months of debate over how to balance environmental protections for the creek corridor against residents' concerns about what happens in that unfenced buffer strip. As reported by Palo Alto Online, the ordinance is broadly meant to protect the environmentally sensitive riparian corridor, especially in the city's open space preserves, while giving Edgewood Drive an explicit carve-out. San Francisquito Creek, which flows through East Palo Alto, Palo Alto and Menlo Park, is normally dry except during particularly rainy seasons, per the same report.
Residents Cited Years of Encampment Problems
Daniel Hansen, who represented the Edgewood Neighborhood Alliance at the council meeting, argued that the old five-foot setback effectively created a corridor for encampments along the creek. He told the council that neighbors had experienced burglaries, trespassing, stolen property, trash and human waste associated with people living in or near the creek bed, according to the Palo Alto Online account. In a separate handout filed with the Santa Clara Valley Water District in November 2024, Hansen wrote that “the residents along Edgewood Drive have been living with unhoused encampments in the creek for years, along with the human waste, garbage, noise, open fires and crime they occasion,” a claim he reiterated to the Santa Clara Valley Water District.
The ordinance states its own goals plainly: to preserve riparian resources, protect improvements from flooding and bank erosion, and minimize stormwater pollution, language that closely tracks Palo Alto's existing municipal code on stream protection. The code includes a five-foot setback for new fences from a creek bank. The code lists amendments in 2007 and 2020.
New Setback Zones Replace the Old Standard
Beyond the Edgewood Drive exception, the new ordinance establishes 150-foot setbacks from the creek bank in newly defined foothills and baylands subareas. Residential-estate properties are exempt from that 150-foot standard and instead retain a 25-foot central-subarea setback, with the central subarea defined as the stretch between Foothill Expressway and U.S. Highway 101. The ordinance also creates a slope-stability protection area where development is generally prohibited, set at 20 feet from the top of bank in the central subarea and 25 feet in the baylands and foothills areas.
Those figures mark a shift from earlier proposals. City staff had previously floated increasing setbacks from stream edges from the existing 20 feet to 30 feet for urbanized areas between Foothill Expressway and Highway 101, including Edgewood Drive, Palo Alto Online reported in September 2025. That earlier framework differs from the subarea-specific setbacks ultimately reflected in the ordinance, and the record does not establish how the two proposals were reconciled.
A Carve-Out for Properties Behind Floodwalls
The ordinance also expands protection to properties separated from the stream by a floodwall, not just those directly abutting one. City Planning and Development Director Jonathan Lait said the floodwall language clarifies the draft and responds to public comments received during the council meeting.
That provision became central to a dispute involving Silicon Valley International School, which is separated from San Francisquito Creek by a trail of the same name. Mindie Romanowsky, who represents the school, raised concerns that the ordinance's original wording could have required the school to observe a 150-foot setback encroaching on more than 30% of its property. In a letter to the council, the law firm Jorgenson, Siegel, McClure & Flegel argued that a floodwall separation reduces both flooding risk and impacts to riparian value regardless of any intervening structures. A staff report from the Planning and Transportation Commission had separately found that floodwall installation substantially reduces riparian habitat value.
Commission Vote and Council Approval
The Planning and Transportation Commission unanimously recommended the ordinance in May 2026 and later voted to exempt Edgewood Drive properties from its standard provisions. City council members discussed the measure only briefly before voting, following what the dossier describes as robust public comment and the commission's unanimous recommendation. Vice Mayor Greer Stone praised the process, saying it reached a compromise across different stakeholder groups.
Under the new rules, homeowners may still apply for exceptions to property setbacks elsewhere along the creek. Any applicant seeking a setback exception must provide review by a qualified biologist along with a finding that no physical or legal alternative exists, while the director of public works must separately approve any exception to the slope-stability protection area once a streambank stability analysis has been submitted.
The city's own stream-protection code also preserves a longstanding, narrower allowance for Edgewood Drive: a fence or wall up to 10 feet high may be located at the rear of a single-family residential site adjacent to San Francisquito Creek and fronting Edgewood Drive, provided the site's flood-control easement was reconfigured after January 1, 2002, according to Palo Alto's municipal code. The broader streamside review area, meanwhile, continues to cover properties abutting a stream or within 50 feet of the top of a stream bank, except where a public street separates the property from the creek.
