The Palo Alto Baylands Have Two Halves, and Only One of Them Is Quiet This Year

Walk into the Baylands from the parking lot off Embarcadero Road and you have a choice most people make without thinking about it: turn left toward the duck pond and the Lucy Evans Nature Interpretive Center, or turn right toward the water treatment plant and the old landfill hills of Byxbee Park. Almost everyone turns left. That's where the trail is prettiest, the birding is best, and the loop feels like it hasn't changed since your kids were small.

Turn right instead, and you walk into the busiest stretch of shoreline in Palo Alto right now. A living levee is being built by hand. A housing project that would have been unthinkable five years ago just got approved. And a fifteen-year-old political fight over ten acres of scrubland just reopened. None of it shows up if you only ever go left.

The Loop You Already Know

The west side of the preserve is the version most residents carry in their heads: the boardwalk over Harriet Mundy Marsh, the Adobe Creek Loop, the Baylands Athletic Center fields on weekend mornings. It's also, by one measure, doing better than it has in years. In August, Baylands Golf Links earned Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary status from Audubon International, a designation that puts it among a small group of courses recognized for habitat management and reduced chemical use. Superintendent Patrick Tuttle, who has run the grounds crew since March 2024, led the effort. It's a quiet piece of good news, the kind that doesn't require anyone to argue about it at a city council meeting.

This half of the Baylands isn't where the story is this fall. It's the control group. It tells you what stability looks like here, so the contrast on the other side of Embarcadero actually registers.

Turn Right and the Story Changes

The east side of the preserve has always been the working half: the Regional Water Quality Control Plant, the airport, office parks that back up against the marsh. It's also where all three of this year's real changes are happening, and none of them were planned together.

The first is underway right now and you can watch it happen. Along the marsh edge near Byxbee Park, the city is finishing a horizontal living levee, a sloped berm planted with native vegetation instead of poured concrete. Treated wastewater from the peninsula runs through the soil, where microbial activity strips out nutrients before the water reaches the bay. Heidi Nutters of the San Francisco Estuary Partnership described watching volunteers plant it as putting "the frosting on the cake." The project was expected to reach completion around spring 2026, after years of design work, and it's the kind of infrastructure that looks like nothing from a distance and then, up close, is clearly a construction site.

The second change is housing, and it's the one with no precedent on this side of the highway. In March 2026, the City Council unanimously approved a 145-unit townhome development from San Francisco developer Strada Investment Group at 2100 Geng Road, just south of the Baylands Athletic Center. Council members noted at the time that housing projects on this side of the highway have historically been extremely rare, and it's the first residential development ever approved on Palo Alto's east side of Highway 101, a stretch of the city that has been office parks and playing fields for as long as anyone can remember. The project required removing 218 trees on site and 52 more off site, 129 of them classified as protected, in exchange for a promise to plant 648 new trees, more than double what comes down. A month later, in April 2026, city officials began reviewing a second proposal from Maryland-based developer BGO for 62 more townhomes at 2225 East Bayshore Road, on the site of two commercial buildings near Embarcadero Road. If both projects move forward, this quiet office corridor next to the athletic fields will have added more than 200 new homes in a matter of months, on land that has never held housing before.

The third change is the one that goes back furthest, and it just resurfaced in a way most residents didn't see coming. In 2011, 63% of Palo Alto voters approved Measure E, which stripped "parkland" protection from a 10-acre strip near the treatment plant so the city could potentially build a waste-to-energy plant there. That plant was never built. The technology was judged too expensive and too complex, and the site sat as an undedicated in-between space for fifteen years. In June 2026, the Parks and Recreation Commission voted 3-2 to recommend restoring parkland status to the entire site, effectively undoing the 2011 vote. Commissioner Shani Kleinhaus, who opposed Measure E back then, put the underlying question plainly: "Why is nature so expendable?"

Why All Three Landed in the Same Year

It's tempting to read these three stories as one coordinated plan for the Baylands. They aren't. Each is running on its own legal clock, and 2026 is simply the year those clocks happen to converge.

The living levee's timeline is technical: it took years of permitting and pilot testing, modeled on an earlier experiment at the Oro Loma Sanitary District, before it was ready to build. The housing timeline is driven by state law. Geng Road moved forward under California's builder's remedy provision, which lets developers bypass local density limits when a city's housing plan isn't certified, a window that Palo Alto and cities across the state have been navigating for the past few years. East Bayshore Road is riding the same wave, part of what city officials describe as a broader shift of residential builders into commercial areas east of the highway. And the Measure E reversal has its own clock built into the original ballot language, which allowed parkland status to be restored if the city didn't build the waste-to-energy plant within a decade. Fifteen years is well past that deadline. The vote wasn't a sudden change of heart. It was a fuse that had been lit in 2011 and finally burned down.

That's the actual shape of what's happening at the Baylands this year: three separate, unrelated decisions, each obeying its own rulebook, all arriving on the same quarter-mile of shoreline at the same time. Nobody planned it that way. It just worked out that way.

What's Worth Doing There This Month

None of this changes what makes the west side of the Baylands worth visiting right now. The 42nd annual Palo Alto Weekly Moonlight Run & Walk takes place on the evening of September 25, with a 5K walk, a 5K run, and a 10K run starting from the preserve. If you'd rather make it a habit than a one-off, the BayLands FrontRunners have been running the trails on Saturday mornings for decades, with a 3, 5, or 7-mile option and a standing invitation to bring the dog. The group is old enough to have built the trellis and benches at the picnic area back in 2002, which tells you something about how long people have been making this loop part of their week.

If you do decide to explore the east side this fall, expect to see equipment near Byxbee Park and construction fencing around the Geng Road site. It's not a sign that the preserve is being compromised. It's a sign that the parts of it nobody usually looks at are finally catching up to the parts everyone already loves.

The Baylands aren't becoming a different place. They're becoming a place with two very different paces, one that's been stable for decades and one that's compressing years of overdue decisions into a single season. Knowing which half you're standing in changes how you read everything you see there.

If you're thinking about how a changing edge like this affects home values in the surrounding streets, or you're simply curious what it means for a neighborhood when its industrial fringe starts filling in with housing, I'd welcome the conversation. Fani Realty works this stretch of the Peninsula closely, and Rayyan Fani is glad to walk through what it means for your own plans. Request a personalized consultation and market valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.