A Trammell Crow affiliate wants to tear down a cluster of commercial buildings on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto and put up 200 apartments in their place. High Street Residential has asked the city to rezone the 720 San Antonio Road site from Service Commercial to Planned Community/Planned Home zoning, clearing the way for an eight-story residential building next to the AC Hotel Palo Alto.
The proposal, first reported by The Real Deal, would demolish the existing commercial buildings currently on the property to make room for the new complex. According to the city of Palo Alto's own project page, the request is for council prescreening of the rezoning — described as a request to allow construction of a residential building with 200 rental units in an eight-story structure. That framing matters: the city's materials describe this stage as a prescreening request, not an approval, and the evidence reviewed does not establish whether the rezoning itself has been granted.
The unit mix pitched for the site leans heavily toward smaller apartments, per the same report: 25 studios, 113 one-bedrooms, 44 two-bedrooms and 18 three-bedroom units. Amenities are expected to include outdoor amenity spaces, a fitness room, a pool lounge and private balconies for some units, the report notes.
What Happens Before Anything Gets Built
Any formal rezoning application for the property would still need to clear hearings before three separate city bodies. A staff report filed with the Planning and Transportation Commission states that a formal application to rezone the property to the Planned Community/Planned Home designation would be subject to review by the Planning and Transportation Commission, the Architectural Review Board and the City Council. That is a multi-step process, and the staff-report language reviewed does not indicate how far along the project currently stands in that sequence.
High Street Residential, the entity behind the proposal, is a subsidiary of Trammell Crow, the report notes. Palo Alto is under pressure to move projects like this forward: the city carries a state-mandated target of 6,086 new housing units by 2031, a figure tied to the state's regional housing allocation process.
A Region Where Deliveries Have Slowed to a Trickle
The timing lines up with a broader slowdown in Bay Area apartment construction. Deliveries totaled just 3,396 units through the end of the third quarter of 2026, compared with 9,579 units in the same nine-month stretch of 2025 — a 62.9% year-over-year drop, according to data from Kidder Mathews. New construction, in other words, has slowed to a trickle even as the region's population pressures mount.
Incoming artificial intelligence workers have bolstered the Bay Area's housing crunch, the report notes, adding fresh demand just as the delivery pipeline thins out. Even so, the amount of multifamily housing under construction regionwide was actually up: there were 19,156 units under construction in the Bay Area in the third quarter of 2026, a 28.0% increase from the 14,964 units under construction a year earlier, per the Kidder Mathews data. Vacancy, meanwhile, tightened to 3.8% from 4.8% a year prior, and the average asking rent climbed to $2,910 per unit per month, up 7.7% year over year.
Other Projects Taking Shape Nearby
The San Antonio Road proposal is not the only housing push underway in the area. Minority Television Project has proposed a six-story, 70-apartment building at 555 College Avenue with roughly 8,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, using transit-oriented development provisions under Senate Bill 79, the report notes. The nonprofit purchased that property in 2023 for $7.1 million and has separately proposed converting an office building at 127 Lytton Avenue into 24 housing units.
Across the border in East Palo Alto, Woodland Park Communities has submitted pre-applications for two residential projects expected to deliver nearly 800 new residences through a combination of renovations and new construction — including 645 new apartment units, the renovation of 536 existing units, and 174 for-sale townhomes. And in March, SummerHill Homes bought two properties at 4335 and 4345 West El Camino Real with plans to build a 29-unit townhome community, according to the same account.
