Quick Take
After nearly five years of community discussion and debate, the Santa Cruz City Council on Tuesday approved the city's Downtown Plan Expansion, a vision that promises to reshape the built environment of a city facing the mounting pressures of growth.
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The Santa Cruz City Council greenlit a plan Tuesday night to expand the city’s downtown and create a new entertainment district anchored by a new Santa Cruz Warriors basketball arena and taller, denser housing development. The vote was unanimous.
The effort, which rezones roughly 29 acres south of Laurel Street to welcome higher-intensity development and 1,600 new apartments, promises to permanently overhaul the physical feel of downtown Santa Cruz, in direct response to mounting pressures of growth and state mandates from the state to build more housing.
The path to Tuesday’s vote extends back nearly five years, filled with trade-offs, revisions and at-times tense exchanges between what can broadly be called the growth-friendly and growth-wary factions, the two sides that make up Santa Cruz’s main political divide and have long colored local elections and ballot measures.
Apropos of that arc, Tuesday night came with a final, 11th-hour compromise on what has been the plan’s most anxiety-inducing aspect: building height. Councilmember Scott Newsome, whose District 4 encompasses the south of Laurel neighborhood, proposed lowering the height limits from 12 stories to eight.
The eight-story agreement marked the latest twist in a long and winding debate around height, which downtown expansion visions have whittled over the years from 15- and 17-story buildings, to 12, and now eight.
Newsome, who said the decision on the plan represented “probably the most important vote we will take as elected leaders in our community,” said persistent community feedback had convinced him that the building heights “can be, and should be, cut back to eight stories.”
“This is an extraordinary moment that will impact our city for at least the next 50 years,” Newsome said.
A major point of contention was whether the city could actually keep developers from building taller than eight stories, given the state’s density bonus laws that allow projects with certain levels of affordable housing to ignore height restrictions. As part of the downtown expansion plan, the city council also approved its own local downtown density bonus program, which seeks to incentivize developers to temper building height.
Although the compromise might work to settle some nerves over the intense development ahead, several members of the political group Santa Cruzans for Responsible Development left the meeting unsatisfied. In light of the state’s density bonus rules, they argued the city’s decision to upzone the south of Laurel Street parcels was superfluous.
After the meeting, local advocates with the group, Gillian Greensite and Rick Longinotti, said an environmental lawsuit against the city remained on the table.
The city’s land-use changes now go to the California Coastal Commission for a final approval, since the new neighborhood sits within the coastal zone. It is unclear when the Coastal Commission might take up the issue.
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