The California Coastal Commission last week approved the long-discussed and debated Cruz Hotel project proposed at the corner of Front and Laurel streets in downtown Santa Cruz. The project had been appealed to the Coastal Commission, as expected, following the Santa Cruz City Council’s 5-1 approval of the hotel in March.
The 232-room, six-story hotel has been in the works for four years. The developer, SCFS Ventures LLC, has been represented in public meetings by local developer Owen Lawlor. The Coastal Commission’s 8-1 approval Thursday came with a bevy of conditions, negotiated largely in lieu of the hotel reserving 25% of its rooms for low-income guests. Instead, the hotel will reserve 20 rooms, or 8.6%, for low-income visitors, lease four affordable housing units to low-income, full-time hotel employees, and contribute $750,000 to the city’s affordable housing trust fund and $5 million to help finance a low-cost cabin project at Greyhound Rock County Park on the North Coast.
Prior to his vote in support, Coastal Commissioner Justin Cummings, who also serves as Santa Cruz County’s District 3 supervisor and is a former mayor of Santa Cruz, said he was initially against the project when it first came up during his time on the Santa Cruz City Council. But he said the agreements around low-cost accommodations did much to fulfill the Coastal Commission’s goals of expanding coastal access and amenities to more people.
“While I opposed this project on a number of different occasions, I do feel like where we’ve arrived at today is the middle ground,” Cummings said. “[The developers] are going to be able to make a profit on this project and we’re going to be able to provide low-cost accommodations, and I think that when we get to these kinds of points of disagreement, it means we’ve gotten to a good project because we were able to build consensus.”
Lawlor said the Cruz Hotel fits into the broader redevelopment of the Front Street corridor and the city’s aim to reconnect to the San Lorenzo River. He said the agreement to provide four off-site housing units for low-income employees is not something he or his partners have done previously, but that it’s a win-win accommodation and “we will figure it out.”
Lawlor told Lookout that the start of construction is at least 10 months away.
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