On the fourth Sunday of the month, State Street between Second and Fourth closes to cars and fills with something between 1,500 and 3,000 people. Fifty or sixty vendor tents line the block. A ceramicist named Kate Rotondo sets up a booth for her business, Equal Clay, and later tells a reporter what she likes about it: watching dogs walk by, running into neighbors, "seeing people going about their day." Wine gets poured by the glass. A local musician plays for tips. By 5 p.m. the tents come down and the cars come back.
This is HEAD WEST Marketplace, and downtown Los Altos has been running it monthly since 2023. It is, in effect, a small and recurring answer to a much bigger question the city is about to put in front of voters: what should the parking plazas at the heart of downtown actually be for. In November, Los Altos residents will decide a version of that same question, except the ballot measure covers permanent square footage rather than one Sunday a month, and it has already cost more than $2 million to ask.
The Measure Nobody Put on the Ballot Voluntarily
The short version: this March, two residents, Barbara Loebner and Lucinda Langley-Andrews, filed a Notice of Intent to circulate a petition for what's now called the Los Altos Downtown Parking Plazas Ordinance. The petition needed enough valid signatures to qualify. It got them, badly, with the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters certifying 2,676 valid signatures, or roughly 117 percent of what was required.
Under state election law, that left the City Council with two options: adopt the ordinance outright or send it to voters. On June 23, 2026, after a packed chambers and a long meeting, the council chose the ballot. The measure is now headed to Los Altos voters on November 3, 2026, and it would require voter approval before nearly any change is made to the city's publicly owned parking lots, including the ones downtown.
The council's own staff report before that vote raised concerns about what the ordinance might restrict down the line. Jon Baer, president of Friends of Los Altos, pushed back on that framing during public comment.
"To summarize the report: the sky is falling or could fall," Baer said. "There are lots of 'coulds,' not 'woulds.'"
That exchange captures the tenor of the whole debate. Nobody disagrees on the facts. They disagree on what the facts mean for a handful of parking lots most residents park in without a second thought.
What's Actually Sitting on Those Plazas
The city identified Plazas 1, 2, and 3 as the most workable sites for a new downtown park, based on staff's analysis of every downtown parking plaza. The concept, which the city calls "Downtown Park with Parking," would trade some surface parking for green space while trying to preserve access for deliveries and emergency vehicles.
Here's what's on the table, plaza by plaza, based on city and resident-organized sources:
| Plaza | Today | What's Under Discussion |
|---|---|---|
| Plaza 1 | Surface parking lot | Candidate site for the new downtown park |
| Plaza 2 | Surface parking lot | Candidate site for the park; the Los Altos Stage Company has separately reserved half the plaza for a possible future theater, a project the city says is not part of its own park plan |
| Plaza 3 | Surface parking lot | Candidate site for the park |
| Plaza 7 | Surface parking lot | Declared surplus land in 2024, flagged as a possible housing site |
| Plaza 8 | Surface parking lot | Declared surplus land in 2024, flagged as a possible housing site |
For scale, the city's 2024 Downtown Parking Strategy counted 2,504 total vehicle parking spaces downtown, including 395 on-street spaces and 1,305 public off-street spaces. Whatever changes at Plazas 1 through 3 would touch a small slice of that total. Whether that slice matters is exactly what residents disagree about.
A resident group called ForLosAltos, organized around the ballot initiative, argues the project would remove a portion of the Chinese pistache heritage trees that shade those lots and warns the design work has moved faster than the public conversation about what the park is actually for. The city's lead design consultant on the project is Watry Design, a firm whose core specialty is parking structures, hired under a contract worth just under $2.3 million for design and community engagement work alone.
That number is worth sitting with for a second, because it sits right next to a much smaller one from the same three blocks.
The Fourth Sunday Already Tested This
A single 10-by-10 vendor booth at HEAD WEST costs $200 on State Street. The city's design and engagement contract for the same stretch of downtown runs more than 11,000 times that. One buys a Sunday. The other is buying a plan for what happens to those blocks permanently.
HEAD WEST isn't new to Los Altos. It launched here in 2023 as an offshoot of a market series that started in Emeryville in 2017, and the Los Altos Village Association brought it downtown specifically to get people onto State Street who might not otherwise stop. LAVA's executive director, Scott Hunter, put it plainly when the market first arrived: the goal was to get people to "discover us, see what's here" and shed what he called downtown's "coat of invisibility."
Three years later, the market runs every fourth Sunday from March through October, presented by LAVA and sponsored by State Street Market, with two dates left on this year's calendar: September 27 and October 25, both from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. It draws 35 to 70 booths depending on the month and pulls foot traffic that would be the envy of most weekday afternoons downtown. Residents who show up don't need a ballot measure to know that closing a few blocks to cars, for a few hours, brings people out.
The Downtown Park proposal is trying to make some version of that permanent. The market proves the appetite exists. It doesn't settle what permanent should look like, which is the actual argument on the ballot.
The Restaurants Are Making the Same Bet, Just With Longer Leases
Foot traffic downtown isn't only showing up one Sunday a month. It's showing up in who's opening kitchens here.
Daiji Uehara runs Hiroshi, an eight-seat omakase counter in downtown Los Altos, and the demand for it was strong enough that his team is now exporting the concept. Earlier this year, the same group opened Rikyu, a matcha cafe and Japanese sando shop in Palo Alto, using Hiroshi as its literal central kitchen and putting Hiroshi's executive chef, Masakazu Nonomura, in charge of both menus. That's not a Los Altos restaurant closing and reopening somewhere else. It's a Los Altos restaurant successful enough to spin off a second location in a different downtown entirely.
Back on State Street, the roster keeps stacking up. State Street Market anchors the block as a food hall with rotating vendors. The Grotto Speakeasy operates as an intimate bar tucked beneath Cetrella. Los Altos Grill, part of the Hillstone Restaurant Group, has held its spot at 233 Third Street for years as a steady anchor. Newer names drawing attention this year include Zen for udon, Mala Mala for malatang, and DEMI. The current lineup on the block runs from Turkish plates at Urfa Bistro to Greek fare at Barbayani Taverna, which is a wider range than downtown offered even a few years ago.
None of these operators are betting on downtown Los Altos becoming quieter. They're betting on the same foot traffic the city is trying to formalize with a park and the same foot traffic HEAD WEST already proves shows up when there's a reason to walk instead of park.
What This Actually Means for the Next Two Sundays
If you live near downtown, the practical version of all this is simple. Mark September 27 and October 25 for HEAD WEST, both running 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. along State Street between Second and Fourth. Expect live music, wine by the glass, and the same 35 to 70 booth range that's shown up all season. Those two markets will be the last of this year's run before the ballot measure lands in front of voters on November 3.
Whatever happens with Measure D, downtown Los Altos has already demonstrated, six hours at a time, what a car-free version of these blocks does to foot traffic, and the restaurant scene has already priced that demand into new leases. The ballot measure isn't asking residents to imagine something untested. It's asking them to decide how much of that experiment, if any, becomes permanent, and at what cost to the parking spaces everyone still uses the other twenty-nine days of the month.
Whichever way the vote lands, the people who will feel it first are the ones who already park there, eat there, and show up on the fourth Sunday. If you're thinking about what these kinds of shifts mean for property and daily life in downtown Los Altos over the longer run, Rabeet Noor tracks these local changes closely and is glad to talk through what it means for your own plans, whenever you're ready.
