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The Tall Tree Plan: Palo Alto Builds ADUs for Family | ADU Adventures EP024 · ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard

0:31
SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm James, and I'm glad you're here, because today we're going back to Palo Alto, California.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: We've been here before, back in episode 11, and if you heard that one, you know we spent most of it on the numbers.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: The market, the math, what a backyard home does to a balance sheet, and one of the most expensive zip codes in America.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: This time I want to talk about something else, though.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about a tree.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: There's a redwood tree on the edge of Palo Alto that has been standing in the same spot for about a thousand years.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: The city is named for it, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately because Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away, and Thanksgiving is one day year when most of us sit down and actually look at our own family tree, face to face.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Not the chart, the people.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes when you look, you notice things.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Mom is moving a little slower than last year.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: Dad asks the same question twice, doesn't really realize it.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: Nobody says anything because it's Thanksgiving and the turkey's on the table and there's football and smiles and laughter, but you saw it.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: And maybe you're gonna drive home thinking about it.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: That's the episode, the tall tree, the family tree, and what you do after the dishes are done.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: So let's dive in.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you about El Palo Alto.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: It's a coastal redwood, and it stands on the bank of San Francisquito Creek, at the northern edge of the city, right where Palo Alto meets Menlo Park.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: According to Palo Alto Historical Association records, it has been rooted in that spot for roughly a millennium.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: When locals counted the rings on part of the tree that fell off, they got 960.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: Think about what that means.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: This tree was already past five hundred years old when Columbus sailed.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: It was nearly eight hundred when the first Europeans walked past it.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: And here's the part I love, because the timing is almost too good.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: In the fall of seventeen sixty nine, a Spanish expedition led by Gaspar de Portola came up from San Diego looking for Monterey Bay.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: They missed it, they got lost, and instead they stumbled onto San Francisco Bay, which nobody in Europe even knew existed.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: They used the tree as a landmark, because back when it wasn't one tree, it was two, twin trunks, visible from the hills for miles.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: And according to the Historical Association, Portolo's party camped beneath it from november sixth to november eleventh, seventeen sixty nine, the first week of November, under the tall tree a group of tired people a long way from home, taking a few days to rest before the next hard stretch.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: Sound familiar?
3:09
SPEAKER_00: The Spanish called the twins Palos Colorados, the red trees, later just El Palo Alto, the tall tree.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: A Franciscan priest put it on the map.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Then in 1776, according to the Historical Association, another Padre raised a cross beneath it to mark the spot for a mission, though the mission ended up in Santa Clara instead.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: And the twins were tall enough that on a clear day you could see them from the hills near Belmont, a dozen miles north.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: For a long time, before there were roads, this tree was how people found their way.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: When Leland Stanford built his stock farm on the land and then founded a university with his wife Jane, they put that tree on the university seal.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: The town that grew up around the farm took the tree's name.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's what most people don't know.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: The tree almost didn't make it.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: A windstorm in the mid-1880s took down the weaker of the two trunks.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: Then the Southern Pacific Railroad laid its tracks right beneath what was left, and for decades, according to the historical society, locomotive smoke poisoned the tree from below.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: The depot half a mile south was called Big Tree Station.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: People were naming things after a tree they were slowly killing.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: And then somebody paid attention.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: First the Stanfords, then the city of Palo Alto, and a long line of local caregivers.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: And the historical association describes what that care looks like today.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Soil and mulch at the base, dead limbs pruned, pest treatments, and a pipe that runs all the way up the trunk to mist the top of the tree, because the creek that used to feed it doesn't run the way it once did.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: In 1926, the native sons of the Golden West set a bronze plaque in a granite boulder at its base.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: It's still there.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: A thousand-year-old tree is standing today because at some point people stopped admiring it and started tending to it.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: I want you to hold on to that thought because we're going to talk about Thanksgiving.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Not the holiday, but the table specifically.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: Because there's something I've come to believe after a lot of conversations with a lot of families.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Thanksgiving is an annual inspection.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: It's the one day year where a huge portion of the family tree is in one room, and the people who live far away get to see the people who stayed, up close for a few hours, with their guard down, or maybe not.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: And every year something is a little different.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's small at first.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Mom used to run the kitchen like a general.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: This year she sat down halfway through and let your sister take over.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: Dad used to carve.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: This year he handed the knife to you and made a joke about his hands.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Somebody told the same story twice.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: Somebody got up the stairs slower than you remember.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: Nobody says anything.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: That's the rule.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: It's Thanksgiving.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: You want to be grateful.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to ruin the day.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: You're doing your best as it is.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: But on the drive home, you and your spouse have a conversation.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Did you notice?
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I noticed.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: I want to be careful here because I'm not a doctor and it this isn't a medical show.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to tell you what any of those things really mean.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they mean nothing.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they mean a lot.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: That's a conversation for your parents and their doctor.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: What I can tell you is what those things mean for the house.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: And they often mean the house your parents lived in was designed for people who could carry groceries up a flight of stairs and get in and out of a bathtub without thinking about if I might fall.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: And at some point that house stops fitting the people inside.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: And it's never all at once.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: The way the railroad smoke got up that tree slowly from below, while everybody's busy naming things after it.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: And here's the hard part.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: The house you live in, the one with your kids and your job and your life, is probably 45 minutes away.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Or four hours.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you have to jump on a flight.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Or in Palo Alto's case, with the Census Bureau reporting a median household income of$231,000 and a median house value that tops two million plus, the house you live in might be in a different state entirely, because that's where the kids could afford to settle.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: And the census also tells you the other half the story.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: 82.3% of Palo Alto adults have a bachelor's degree or higher.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: 85.7% of residents were living in the same house a year ago.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: This is a city of people who got educated, got established, and stayed put.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: The kids got educated too.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: They just couldn't stay put because the house their parents bought decades ago now sits in a market where the census can't even print the median.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: So the family tree has a problem.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: All the roots are here, the branches grew somewhere else.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: And the people in the middle, that's you, are driving back and forth trying to hold it together with phone calls and holiday visits.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: This is exactly what family integrity planning is for.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: It's the idea that a family should get to stay close across generations, and that the home should be the thing that makes that possible instead of the thing that gets in the way.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: In Palo Alto specifically, the numbers make the case.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: According to the census, nineteen point nine percent of Palo Alto residents are 65 or older.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: That's one in five.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: In a city that the rest of the world thinks as young engineers and startups, one in five at the table has been here a long time.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: And the house they're sitting in is probably one they raised you in.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: So what do you do?
8:45
SPEAKER_00: You do what the city did with the tree.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: You stop admiring the family and start tending to it.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: And here's what that looks like, particularly in Palo Alto.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: The city has a pretty good guidebook.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: It was updated in 2025.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: The headline is simple.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: ADUs are permitted by right on every single family and multifamily lot in the city.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: You don't need a hearing, you don't need to convince anyone.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: That's the law.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: The rules, as the guidebook lays them out, a detached ADU can be up to 800 square feet on any eligible lot, and under the city's own standards up to 900 square feet for one bedroom, or a thousand for two or more.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Four foot setbacks from the side and rear property lines, 16 feet of height, or 18 within a half a mile of transit, with an extra two feet allowed to match the pitch of the main house's roof, which tells you the city cares about the ADU looking like it belongs.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: And here's one I want to say twice because people don't believe it.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: There's no parking required for a new ADU.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: None.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: So even if you convert your garage, you don't need to replace the spaces.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: And Palo Alto homeowners are using this.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: The city's own annual ADU report published in February of 2025, that 136 new applications were filled out in 2024, and 124 of those applications were issued.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: Since 2015, that's 800 applications and 624 permits.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Back in 2015, the whole city only filed 10.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: So in nine years, this went from a rare thing to something more than 100 of your neighbors do every year, and the numbers keep climbing significantly.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to turn those rules into a calendar.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: Because the hard part of all of this isn't the zoning, it's time.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: And take all of these rules with a grain of salt because regulations change all the time.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: These don't really account for fire regulations.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: So if you're considering building an ADU in Palo Alto, California, you definitely want to connect with a specialist who can walk through all of the steps with a lot more detail than even the guidebook provides.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: Just food for thought.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, here's what I would suggest.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: And I'll call it the fourth Thursday plan, just for the sake of the holiday.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: It's November.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: You sit at the table and you start to notice these things that we notice.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: You don't fix anything on Thanksgiving.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: It's impossible.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: You just let yourself see.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: Then in December, you may have a conversation, not a big one, but a small one.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: Mom, Dad, have you thought about what the house looks like in five years?
11:18
SPEAKER_00: You'll be surprised a lot of parents have been thinking about it for a while.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: I know mine were.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: And they were waiting for someone to ask or for the conversation to naturally bubble up.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of them would rather have you close than be moved somewhere they don't know.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: The ADU conversation goes two ways, by the way, at least it has from my experience.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's a home for them in your backyard, and sometimes it's a home for you in theirs.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: Really depends on the age range of everyone involved.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: So the house they love stays in the family and someone is close enough to help.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: This is exactly the setup that I have in my personal life, where currently my little brother lives with his wife in our one and a half bedroom ADU behind my parents' property.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: The ADU was always put in there to be that flexible housing to get them off the ground, and then my parents could move in because it's already prepared for aging in place.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: But let's continue on this path.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: January through March, you find out what's possible.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: It's always the best time of year to do it too.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: Palo Alto's guidebook walks through the feasibility stage, and this is where a design build team or any ADU specialists earn its keep.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Because the question isn't, can I build an ADU?
12:34
SPEAKER_00: The state already answered that.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: Sure, you can build an ADU.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: The real question is, can I build one that works for the people that I love?
12:42
SPEAKER_00: What can I build?
12:44
SPEAKER_00: And what kind of investment is this going to be for me?
12:47
SPEAKER_00: It's spring.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: Now you're in spring.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: You've made your decision, you've got your design, you've got your permits, you've got your build ready to go.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: So that next Thanksgiving, you're sitting at a different table.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Same people, shorter drive.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole point.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: One year.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: And that's the whole plan.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: It takes about a year.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: The same amount of time it takes to build a float for the rose parade, if you heard the last episode.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: And the reason I would do it with a design build team like Acton, instead of piecing it together with a bunch of contractors or working with an architect, is the same reason the city runs a pipe up the trunk for that tree instead of just hoping for rain.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: When you're building for someone who's getting older, every detail is load-bearing.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Threshold at the door, the width of the hallway, where the bathroom is relative to the bed, whether the shower has a step.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: A plan that works for a 30-year-old renter is not automatically a plan that works for your mom when she's 78.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Let me get specific, because this is where families often get it wrong.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: The ADU that works for an aging parent is almost always a single level.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: No loft, no stairs, no step up into the bathroom.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: The front door has a flat threshold.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: You could roll a suitcase over it.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: The hallway, if there is one, is wide enough for two people to pass, or one if they're using a walker.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: The shower is a walk-in with a bench and a place to put a grab bar later, even if nobody needs it today.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: And the light switches are where a hand naturally reaches.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: Kitchen is small, and everything is within a step or two.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: And the whole thing sits as close to the house as you can make it work functionally, because distance between your back door and theirs is a distance you'll walk at two in the morning when the phone rings.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: None of that costs more to think about, but it costs more to fix later.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole argument for design build.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: One team that designs it and builds it with no handoff in the middle, and how those details survive from the first sketch to the last inspection.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: No middlemen, no confusion.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: Nobody in the chain gets to say that wasn't in my drawings or that wasn't my job.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: You build it once, you build it right, because the person who's going to live in it is the person who raised you.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Now I want to tell you something about Acton that I haven't told you before.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: Stan Acton, who founded this company more than 35 years ago, grew up in Palo Alto.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to tell you the whole story today, and I'll be honest about why.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: It's too big for the last five minutes of this episode.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: There's a tree in it, and it's not the one we talked about in Act One.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: There's a kid and a climb, and a lesson about what it takes to keep something standing that I think about every time we start a new project that actin.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: So here's what I'm going to do instead.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: We'll come back to Palo Alto.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: There's a whole episode in Stan, and and probably a whole third episode in this city.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Because the more I dig, the more I find.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: Consider this the first of maybe a few, like a like a little chain.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: But I'll give you this much.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: When Stan talks about building, he doesn't talk about square footage first.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: He talks about roots.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: About the fact that a house isn't a thing you finish.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: It's a thing you tend.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: The same way El Palo Alto on the creek is still standing because somebody kept showing up with mulch and pruning saws and a pipe full of water.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: A home stays a home because somebody keeps paying attention to the people inside.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: That's what we're really building when we build an ADU.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: We're not adding square footage.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: We're adding a way for the family tree to stay rooted in one place while the branches keep growing.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: So this Thanksgiving, when you look down the table and you notice what you notice, I'm not asking you to say anything.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: Eat some pie, watch the game, be with family and smile.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: But the drive home, when your spouses ask, did you see that?
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Let the answer be, yeah, I think I know what we need to talk about.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for spending this time with me today, and thank you for caring about the people at your table enough to think about this before you have to.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being a part of the conversation on ADUs because they're something I'm passionate about.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: If you're in Palo Alto or anywhere in the Bay Area or Southern California, and this episode hit you a little close to home, I'd love you to take one step before the holidays because now is the best time of year to get started.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: Acton ADU's been designing and building here for more than 35 years.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: We're local.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: Stan grew up here.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: We know these lots, these neighborhoods, and these conversations, and we know these trees.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: With Acton, there are no middlemen, no surprises, just one team from the first conversation to the day we hand you your keys.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: So there's no pressure.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: Just visit ActonADU.com or call us today at 408-539-1908 to set up a free call.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: We'll look at the property, talk about your family, and you can tell us honestly what you're really looking for and what's possible for next Thanksgiving.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: And remember, a thousand year old tree is standing because somebody decided to tend it.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: Your family tree can be too.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm James.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: This has been ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard, and I'll see you next time.