Quick Take
Lookout politics columnist Mike Rotkin is worried about planning for SoLa, the south of Laurel Street area the City of Santa Cruz hopes will blossom into a thriving entertainment district. Rotkin thinks the plans raise major questions about who will benefit and how public services will keep pace. Relying on his decades of experience, he harkens back to the late 1990s, when plans for redevelopment in the neighborhoods near the Beach Boardwalk suddenly collapsed. Without clear funding strategies and transit solutions, rushing forward risks repeating past planning missteps, he writes.
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We need to talk about the South of Laurel Street entertainment district in the city of Santa Cruz.
It’s a big piece of the downtown planning changes approved by the city council and promoted by Mayor Fred Keeley and it sits in a somewhat run-down section of our downtown between the south end of the mall and the beach area.
Leaving aside for a moment the controversial question of how tall buildings in the area will be allowed to go (12 stories has been suggested), the community still has many good questions about who will live in this proposed new housing and what mechanisms the city will use to ensure that a significant portion of the housing will be affordable by workers in Santa Cruz like schoolteachers, city and county employees, firefighters and police officers.
Clearly, the city is pinning a lot of its hope for affordability on the proposed new transfer sales tax and affordable housing parcel tax, known as the Workforce Housing Affordability Act, If it passes in November, this tax will raise about $5 million a year (some of which can be bonded and brought forward). And that will help.
But how much land and building cost can that subsidize if massive new building is planned for the SoLa area?
In the past, redevelopment could have been used to capture the new tax increments and plow them back into the area under construction, as happened in the downtown rebuilding after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. But where will the funding come from to build the public parks and open space this new construction will require if this is going to be a livable neighborhood?
If a significant portion of the new housing in this area and that being constructed just north of Laurel Street is rented by people working in San Jose, a traffic nightmare will be created unless the city has a clear plan for public transit alternatives in the area.
Improvements are coming to the Metropolitan Transit District service for our community, but many of those are over a year off and depend on a number of unknowns, such as the price of hydrogen fuel and the effectiveness of a new fleet of buses that depends on a rather untested new technology. Are most of the commuters over the hill going to take the Highway 17 express to work every day?
Metro has no plans to handle that new level of demand in the near or middle future.
Obviously, there is a hope that the new residents of the entertainment district – students, young professionals, etc. – will be the customers of the new businesses envisioned for the area. But is that a sufficient economic base for this new enterprise?
These are not unreasonable questions for citizens to ask about the new SoLa entertainment district, and at least some of them need to be answered before we get too far into the implementation of the new plan.
In 1997 and 1998, when I was serving on the Santa Cruz City Council, Ceil Cirillo had a forceful vision. Cirillo had done a magnificent job of bringing back our downtown after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the city was planning a major new development initiative in the beach area. The planning director at the time, Eileen Fogarty, was brought along with the project, even if a bit reluctantly.
The basic idea was a deal between the Santa Cruz Seaside Company, which owns the Beach Boardwalk, under the direction of Charles Canfield, and the city. Seaside would build massive amounts of decent, affordable housing in the Beach Flats neighborhood for the low-income, mostly Latino residents there, upgrade the landscaping at the Boardwalk parking lots, and build a major new factory outlet over one of its existing parking lots (bringing in a lot of new city taxes and profit for the Seaside Company). In exchange, the city would move 3rd Street over away from the San Lorenzo River and create more space for Seaside Company parking lots. The city would also approve permits for a new La Bahia hotel, bringing more transient occupancy and sales taxes to the city coffers.
In my humble opinion, it was a pretty good deal for both parties and for the general public.
However, under pressure from redevelopment director Cirillo, the city council brought forward the planning changes to 3rd Street and approvals of the new square footage of the factory outlet before we got Seaside to fully sign off on the deal.
The environmental report on the project called for the virtual destruction of every traffic intersection between the beach area and the Highway 1-Highway 9 intersection. Residents throughout the city went berserk, and at the next election elected a super-anti-growth majority that threw out the entire plan.
There might well have been ways to scale back the factory outlet, provide better public transit alternatives, etc. and do other things to rescue that plan, if it had been done in the right order. But bringing forth a half-baked plan without all of the benefits guaranteed to balance some of the problems turned out to be a disaster.
I fear the same for the new SoLa entertainment district approved by the city.
The necessary ducks are simply not lined up to ensure the success of this plan. Citizens have a right to a lot more answers before they jump on board this fast-moving train.