California has judged the old Sunset magazine campus in Menlo Park eligible for the historic register. Now the woman who once ran the magazine from that compound is publicly telling the city to let a developer tear it down for 665 apartments.

At 80 Willow Road, two state policies are pulling in opposite directions. Residents and preservationists spent their own money getting the 1951 campus onto California's historic register; the attorney general is now invoking the state's housing-streamlining law to push the city toward approving its demolition. A former editor-in-chief who ran the magazine there has just sided publicly with the developer — and no official has yet resolved which law prevails.

Peggy Northrop ran Sunset when the magazine still operated out of the red-tiled, oak-shaded compound at 80 Willow Road. This week, in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, she came down on the side of demolition, arguing that the exact size of whatever replaces the campus matters far less than the fact that something much larger belongs there. The suburban-idyll ideal the building sells, she wrote, is finished — unaffordable for all but a wealthy few.

It is a pointed break with her old allies. For nearly two years the loudest voices around the property have been the ones trying to save it, and on the preservation question they have been winning even as they lose the housing one.

On May 9, 2025, the California State Historical Resources Commission voted 6-0↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) that the campus could be listed as historic — a step that also placed it on the California Register of Historical Resources. Commissioners called the building architecturally important and found it had kept its integrity, according to the Palo Alto Daily Post. The nomination was paid for by the Menlo Park Historical Association, working with two preservation consultants, and rested on the argument that architect Cliff May's 1951 design — his first commercial use of the California ranch style, with its expanses of glass and sliding doors — invented the indoor-outdoor aesthetic the magazine sold to the West.

The developer has never accepted the premise. N17 founder Oisín Heneghan told the commission the building was obsolete and the nomination had been engineered by anti-housing activists to block construction; the real historic emergency, he argued, is the housing crisis itself. Heneghan represents the property's owner, Vitaly Yusufov — the son of a former Russian energy minister — who bought the site in 2019 and has been renting it out as co-working space. N17's Willow Park proposal would replace the low-rise campus with a 665-home, 458-foot mixed-use complex — offices, a hotel and retail wrapped around the apartments, 100 of them deed-restricted as affordable — as The Dissent reported last month.

Here is where the two fights collide. AB 2011↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), the 2022 law that lets qualifying apartment projects skip discretionary review, contains a carve-out written into its own eligibility rules: it does not apply to a project that "would require the demolition of a historic structure that was placed on a national, state, or local historic register." The listing preservationists secured is, on its face, exactly the kind of trigger meant to pull a project off that streamlined track. A consultant's report to the state Senate Housing Committee, cited by the Daily Post, warned it was unclear what mitigation Menlo Park could even require now that the site is newly identified as historic — preserving the building, redesigning the towers, or something else.

Yet the state's top lawyer has pushed the opposite way. In a July 29 notice reported by the SF Chronicle↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), Attorney General Rob Bonta told Menlo Park it broke housing law by manufacturing new grounds to deny N17 streamlined approval and by billing the developer $302,938 to review an application the city was trying to kill. Bonta leaned on AB 2011 and the builder's-remedy provisions of the Housing Accountability Act. N17 has threatened to sue to force approval.

Neither the city nor Bonta's office has publicly explained how a historic listing squares with the fast-track approval the attorney general says the law requires. That silence is the gap Northrop's op-ed steps into — and the reason her defection carries more than nostalgia. The people who saved the building on paper still need an official willing to rule that the paper wins.