Clocktower developer: ‘It’s not possible’ for politics to stop housing project that could rise to nearly 200 feet

Since the project application’s unveiling in April, no development has garnered the same curiosity and furor as the 16-story mixed-use tower proposed behind downtown Santa Cruz’s town clock.

In a resumé filled with first-of-their-kind projects in Santa Cruz County, local developer Workbench’s Clocktower Center proposal could prove to be its most ambitious to date. At 16 stories and rising to 192 feet, with 260 housing units and ground-floor commercial space, the Clocktower Center is a wholly new kind of project, in both scale and density, for Santa Cruz County; but it’s one Workbench says is sorely needed in the most unaffordable housing market in the United States. (Workbench previously said the project was 18 stories, but the number has since been amended.)

It is also a project the community cannot stop, according to the developer. The Workbench team, led by co-founder Tim Gordin, formally introduced the proposal to the people of Santa Cruz in a virtual meeting held over Zoom on Wednesday. According to Gordin’s tally, about 225 tuned in and asked around 300 questions in a live Q&A chat over the course of the nearly two-hour meeting. 

Twice, people asked whether the community could stop the project. Twice, Workbench’s co-founder Jamileh Cannon said no. 

“Is it possible to stop this project?” Keith McHenry wrote in the virtual Q&A chat box. McHenry leads Food Not Bombs, a local organization that hosts an open-air soup kitchen at the town clock on weekends. 

“It’s not possible to stop it, but we are very open to your constructive feedback and to making improvements,” Cannon replied. 

The final question squeezed into the Q&A before the meeting ended was from a person named Laura Quick. 

“I see the same questions being asked with widely varying answers depending on who in Workbench is answering them,” Quick wrote. “Can this project be stopped? Yes or no.” 

“No,” Cannon replied. 

Thanks to a deluge of housing bills passed in Sacramento over the past several years, state legislators have agreed that power over housing production now belongs chiefly with developers such as Workbench. For the most part, local political bodies can control where housing goes through zoning, and niche details on what it looks like through design standards; however, the power to reject a project that meets that wide framework has largely dissolved.

Still, the state has granted further special treatment for developers who also propose affordable housing. Local zoning for the Clocktower Center lot allows buildings 35 to 50 feet tall. However, since Workbench has committed to including a certain percentage of its units as income-restricted, affordable housing, state law allows it to double its housing units and bypass any height restrictions as if the rules around height did not exist. 

Responding to one anonymous attendee who asked how the Clocktower Center project could rise to such heights given the zoning code capping height at 50 feet, city planner Tim Maier said state law allowed it. 

“Height in excess of that stated in the Municipal Code may be requested” by the developer through state density bonus laws, he said, adding that “the city’s ability to not grant such a request is limited.” 

The Clocktower Center is in only the pre-application phase, a nascent stage in the life of a development proposal that seeks a green light from city planners for the broad shape of a project before the developer dives into the nitty-gritty details. Many of the Clocktower Center’s details are still to be sorted. The developer has also proposed an eight-story, 104-foot mixed-use alternative for the site that would yield 174 housing units, 24 of which would be income-restricted. 

“Truthfully, we don’t know what the project will be yet,” Gordin said during the meeting. 

Workbench has made headlines with its vision for the redevelopment of the Food Bin along Mission Street in Santa Cruz, a project being led by Food Bin owner Doug Wallace. That proposal, a five-story, 59-unit project, has drawn intense objection from surrounding neighbors. Gordin and Cannon maintained that the scope and scale were legal in the eyes of the state. The city council voted on May 28 to approve the project, but shrink the vision down to 48 units. Workbench said that decision was an overreach and could lead to legal trouble for the city, as state law prohibits city councils from making such drastic changes to a legal project. 

During that meeting, neighbors and city council members had a common refrain: Just because you can build these large projects doesn’t mean you should. That notion was repeated in the Q&A section during Wednesday’s Clocktower Center meeting. Workbench co-founders Gordin and Sibley Simon said the state’s mandate that Santa Cruz build more than five times as much housing over the next eight years as it did during the previous eight means the housing projects have to be maxed out when possible. 

“I think it is imperative that we work to create as much sustainable housing in Santa Cruz … I think that the scale of Santa Cruz hasn’t changed in 95 years [since the city’s tallest building, the Palomar Hotel, was built] and that is a huge tragedy,” Simon wrote. 

Maier said Wednesday’s virtual conference is the first of what will be several meetings on the project. 

“This is not the end of conversations,” Maier said. “This will be an ongoing dialogue.”

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