Pacific Station South is a seven-story project with 70 below-market-rate apartments on the 800 block of Pacific Avenue. (Stephen Baxter — Santa Cruz Local file)
Meeting: 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 22
- Attend at 809 Center St., Santa Cruz.
- Join on Zoom or call 833-548-0276, meeting ID 946 8440 1344. The meeting will be streamed on the city’s website.
- To comment ahead of the meeting, email [email protected] by 5 p.m. Monday.
SANTA CRUZ >> As the City of Santa Cruz moves forward with a plan to expand downtown, the Santa Cruz City Council on Tuesday is set to consider a strategy to temper new building heights and support below-market-rent homes.
The proposed city rules seek to entice developers away from using the state rules that can allow unlimited height in favor of a city “Downtown Density Bonus.”
Developers that use the Downtown Density Bonus would limit new builds to 12 stories with 75% more density than existing rules allow, or up to the heights approved in the Downtown Plan and Downtown Plan Expansion (85 feet or roughly eight stories in most areas) with no density restrictions.
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Both options would require a review process by a committee of architects for the design and materials of the proposed building.
In return for the restricted height, developers would not need to include 20% affordable housing in the new building, as city law mandates. Instead, they could pay for a larger number of below-market-rate units in or near the downtown area, or elsewhere in the city within the Coastal Zone.
Developers that use the proposed Downtown Density Bonus could also forgo building below-market-rate homes entirely and instead pay the city’s affordable housing trust fund $60 per square foot of their new apartments. The city would spend at least half of the money on building and preserving housing for low-income residents in or near downtown, or elsewhere in the Coastal Zone. A single housing development could raise more than $10 million for the trust fund, according to a city staff report.
State density bonus laws allow housing proposals that far exceed the scale many residents expect, such as a proposed 16-story building on Pacific Avenue near the Town Clock. The laws allow developments with affordable housing to be taller and denser than local rules allow. With enough affordable housing, some projects can have no height restrictions.
The state laws also effectively reduce the percentage of new homes required to be offered at below-market rents.
City inclusionary rules require 20% of new homes to be affordable. But by state law, that rule doesn’t apply to units added through the density bonus. The density bonus essentially waters down the inclusionary rule, and the total number of affordable units in projects with a density bonus is often closer to 12%.
The Downtown Density Bonus aims to keep the total number of affordable new homes closer to 20%.
Based on discussion at Tuesday’s city council meeting, city staff plan to incorporate the new Downtown Density Bonus policy into the draft amendments to the Downtown Specific Plan. Within about a month, city staff expect to release the draft plan and residents will then have 45 days to give feedback.
The updates to the Downtown Specific Plan will need to be approved by the California Coastal Commision and could be adopted as early as summer 2025, according to a city staff report.
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Jesse Kathan is a staff reporter for Santa Cruz Local through the California Local News Fellowship. They hold a master's degree in science communications from UC Santa Cruz.