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I got a little card in the mail saying that there's an application to tear down a frankly ugly old house around the corner and an invisible but funky little old house next door to it, remove three of ten (or seven, depending on how they're counted) heritage trees, and build six condos and three townhouses. So I went to the planning commission meeting last night to find out more and figure out whether I like the idea.
I'm not absolutely against growth and increased density in my neighborhood. It's a downtown neighborhood in a city which can't escape growing. We made certain bargains thirty years ago -- greenbelt around the city, nature preserves within the city, and some guarantees for affordable housing (which were betrayed for twenty-odd years, frankly). One of the ways those bargains were to be met was infill in my neighborhood. Since my neighborhood had a plethora of vacant lots and some lightish industrial that was dying off (which is an irritation right there) it was no real problem. Then the Pretty Big One (Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989) took out a significant number of single-family homes and canny people planned multiple units on the properties that could support that (many of the lots in Santa Cruz are small, especially on the street-facing dimension).
So my question about the development wasn't around nine units where there had been two, or even "do they have to remove those trees?!" It was: "how much are these units going to cost, and who's going to get to live there?" My neighborhood is an excellent neighborhood. It's walking distance to almost everything you need for California urban living: three grocery stores (two Mexican and one hippie): a fancy bakery: two laundromats: two video rentals: a florist: good schools K-12: the main library: the Civic auditorium, three nightclubs, two gay bars (well, as gay as a town our size can support, which means they have gay djs at least some nights): City Hall: the police station: two drug stores, including the big Long's which is also a general store and the little one at the satellite medical clinic: the main Post Office: the new soccer fields: the art and history museum: a kajillion coffee houses: the wetlands nature preserve: the skate park: tennis courts: and the beach -- including Main Beach, where the Boardwalk is, and Steamer Lane, where the surfing competitions are held. If you're a little more dedicated to walking, you can also walk to the great big park where the swimming pool and the baseball fields and the big communal picnic grounds are, or across the river to the County Building where the Courthouse and the elections department and the tax people and sherriff are. And the jail. And in the future, the natural history museum will be over by the soccer fields.
So after being really obscure most of the time we've lived here, suddenly our neighjborhood has been discovered by developers and people with monehy. This disturbs me. Remember how excellent my neighborhood is? What's also cool about it is that it is a working class neighborhood. There's multigenerational Hispanic families tumbling out of the detached houses and young guys crowded into apartments. Unlike in some neighborhoods in this town, you can actually hear children playing on summer nights (children, not metaphorical children). The paleta man walks around ringing his bell, the filipino ice cream truck drives around playing waltz music, the tamale lady comes to your door. Hell, even the chicken lady is evidence, with her house made of nudred yuear-old cable cars cobbled together and the treehouse high up in the baby oak tree and her garishly painted slogan-bedecked vans parked out front. So far, gentrification has made only small inroads. So my question about the development wasn't around nine units where there had been two, or even "do they have to remove those trees?!" It was: "how much are these units going to cost, and who's going to get to live there?"
Guess which question did not get addressed, even after I raised it.
The way this stuff works is that first the planning commission staff reports on the project, with a slideshow showing the neighborhood and the proposed project drawings: then the developers make a presentation: then the public gets to speak: then the developer gets to answer the public's concerns: then the hearing is closed and the commission discusses and votes on the project (hearing closed means we don't get to talk anymore, but the commission does the rest of their business publicly, not closed).
I spoke first. I thought I had their attention. Commissioners nodded when I said "workign class" and when I talked about Santa Cruz being one of the least affordable communities in the nation and the schools being walking distance and the fact that our schools are losing enrollment because working-class families can't afford to live here.
Then some stupidheads who've lived in the neighborhood a few years were freaking out because Students Might Live in Them! And there are speeders in the neighborhood! And -- just. idiotic. crap.
Guess whose concerns were answered by the developer and whose concerns were not?
I forgot to say, the sticking point for the project is the heritage trees. Actually, one of them. There's a mature date palm nobody cares about even though it's beautiful --the city's Urban Forester (yes, we have one of those, doesn't your city have one?) recommended that it would be real nice if the palm were relocated and not just chopped up, but didn't think it was necessary to require that as a condition. There's a pine that the developer would like to take out but could leave if the city insists on it. Finally, there's a coast live oak that's large and smack in the middle of the property that the Forester thinks is protected by law and the developer sure hopes that the city can make an exception for because it's impossible to design around, though the Planning Commission staff thinks they could design around it. Because the Forester can't "make a finding" for the removal of the tree, the Planning Commission can't just greenlight the project and override the law: they have to send the project to the City Council with a recommendation, which is what they did.
Because the City Council is the policy arm of the local government, and they get to make exemptions to laws, and the other parts I think don't.
So. I didn't have no effect on the subsequent discussion. (I should have spoken last instead of first, I'll remember that next time, or I'll bring a partner to speak first or something) I introduced the words "working," "families," and "rentals" into the discussion. Nobody was talking about those things before. Afterwards, they were. But. Oh. My. Dog. what happened to those words . . .
I don't know about other places, but in California and I think the rest of the US, these all have different political meanings: "working class families," "working class," "working," and "families," "working families," In fact, "working class families" and "working families" generally refer to opposite ends of the working class. -- "working" without "class" tends to refer to those people who have fancy white-collar jobs and think we live in a classless society and think that because they have a high salary they're exempt from class relations and they're secure in their upward climb.
So members of the planning commission dropped the word "class" and assured themselves they were very much in favor of working families committed to urban living who could walk to the store. So they talked about "working" people and they talked about "families" and they talked about "how can we keep these units from being rented?" and they villainized students and talked about their deep desire to put speedbumps all over my neighborhood.
This is when I realized that the Planning Commission is my enemy.
After the hearing I confronted Mark Primack, the architect, who looks a little like Richard Gere in "Chicago," and asked him about costs and rentals and he evaded me and referred me to the owner of the land, who wouldn't talk to me either though he was happy to talk to the lady who had said that she was worried because nine units on that property would mean more crime(stupid, stupid, stupid. Dark, uninhabited corners are where crime takes place. You put a nice development with windows right on the street there, crime is goin to go down).
So I'm pissed. And uncertain of where to go with this. The development actually looks nice. It's laid out according to modern theories of urban villages, which means that there's an interior open space -- a patio? I hope it's not a lawn, but that's not my business -- offstreet parking (which looks annoying, but Mark said that he had no flexibility on the parking spaces and driveway because of city rules, and that sitting the units on top of parking places would have made them isolating and ugly and people wouldn't stay in them), and porches. I for one am very glad about the porches. I think homes have to have porches to be an intermediate space between them and the outside. Large apartment buildings, similarly, should have an entry space -- a lobby, an atrium, or a courtyard. Something. The condominiums are large for one-bedroom units -- 740-800 square feet for most of them, one at 1700 square feet. So why isn't the larger one, at least, two-bedroom? So people with school-aged children can live in it? Anyway, I just want to scream about the fact that these people blithely ignore this question.
Before the hearings comissions and the City Council have an open comment section of the agenda for the public to comment on relevant issues that are not on the nioght's agenda. Traditionally people use this as a time to try to influence the outcome of some larger ongoing issue. Last night a delegation of workers came to comment on the project at La Bahia, which is an old beach hotel across from the Cocoanut Grove end of the Boardwalk (Cocoanut Grove is a ballroom which is actually kind of nasty except for its wonderful views and lovely natural lighting). It's kind of very rundown, and I believe has been elevated from being poor people housing to student housing in the last couople years.
The city has been trying to figure out how to host larger conferences. It would be ideal for a resort town that everybody wants to visit anyway. Business falls off a lot in the winter. However, every proposal for a large conference center that has come up so far has had deadly flaws and we haven't had any of them go through. So Barry Swenson came up with this great plan to buy La Bahia and with city money make it a conference center. Only the first pass through they said they were going to just remodel what they had there and add a little height to get more rooms in, and they were going to use all union labor to build it and to staff the hotel when it was built. And the second pass through they said they were going to make it a little taller, and the terms they were offering the unions were a little sketchier. Then the third pass through they said they were going to make the building a little taller and, well, they weren't going to use union labor for the framing because they were going to contract that out. Only it turns out the height they were proposing in the third pass is actually twenty feet lower than what's really in the plans, due to the magic of averaging.
So this is what the labor people said: we need well-paying jobs in town. Barry Swenson's pulling a bait-and-switch. All of the unions, including the teachers, the Teamsters, and SEIU, are opposed to this project.
I should have realized right then that nodding and smiling on the part of the Planning Commission means absolutely nothing.
I'm not absolutely against growth and increased density in my neighborhood. It's a downtown neighborhood in a city which can't escape growing. We made certain bargains thirty years ago -- greenbelt around the city, nature preserves within the city, and some guarantees for affordable housing (which were betrayed for twenty-odd years, frankly). One of the ways those bargains were to be met was infill in my neighborhood. Since my neighborhood had a plethora of vacant lots and some lightish industrial that was dying off (which is an irritation right there) it was no real problem. Then the Pretty Big One (Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989) took out a significant number of single-family homes and canny people planned multiple units on the properties that could support that (many of the lots in Santa Cruz are small, especially on the street-facing dimension).
So my question about the development wasn't around nine units where there had been two, or even "do they have to remove those trees?!" It was: "how much are these units going to cost, and who's going to get to live there?" My neighborhood is an excellent neighborhood. It's walking distance to almost everything you need for California urban living: three grocery stores (two Mexican and one hippie): a fancy bakery: two laundromats: two video rentals: a florist: good schools K-12: the main library: the Civic auditorium, three nightclubs, two gay bars (well, as gay as a town our size can support, which means they have gay djs at least some nights): City Hall: the police station: two drug stores, including the big Long's which is also a general store and the little one at the satellite medical clinic: the main Post Office: the new soccer fields: the art and history museum: a kajillion coffee houses: the wetlands nature preserve: the skate park: tennis courts: and the beach -- including Main Beach, where the Boardwalk is, and Steamer Lane, where the surfing competitions are held. If you're a little more dedicated to walking, you can also walk to the great big park where the swimming pool and the baseball fields and the big communal picnic grounds are, or across the river to the County Building where the Courthouse and the elections department and the tax people and sherriff are. And the jail. And in the future, the natural history museum will be over by the soccer fields.
So after being really obscure most of the time we've lived here, suddenly our neighjborhood has been discovered by developers and people with monehy. This disturbs me. Remember how excellent my neighborhood is? What's also cool about it is that it is a working class neighborhood. There's multigenerational Hispanic families tumbling out of the detached houses and young guys crowded into apartments. Unlike in some neighborhoods in this town, you can actually hear children playing on summer nights (children, not metaphorical children). The paleta man walks around ringing his bell, the filipino ice cream truck drives around playing waltz music, the tamale lady comes to your door. Hell, even the chicken lady is evidence, with her house made of nudred yuear-old cable cars cobbled together and the treehouse high up in the baby oak tree and her garishly painted slogan-bedecked vans parked out front. So far, gentrification has made only small inroads. So my question about the development wasn't around nine units where there had been two, or even "do they have to remove those trees?!" It was: "how much are these units going to cost, and who's going to get to live there?"
Guess which question did not get addressed, even after I raised it.
The way this stuff works is that first the planning commission staff reports on the project, with a slideshow showing the neighborhood and the proposed project drawings: then the developers make a presentation: then the public gets to speak: then the developer gets to answer the public's concerns: then the hearing is closed and the commission discusses and votes on the project (hearing closed means we don't get to talk anymore, but the commission does the rest of their business publicly, not closed).
I spoke first. I thought I had their attention. Commissioners nodded when I said "workign class" and when I talked about Santa Cruz being one of the least affordable communities in the nation and the schools being walking distance and the fact that our schools are losing enrollment because working-class families can't afford to live here.
Then some stupidheads who've lived in the neighborhood a few years were freaking out because Students Might Live in Them! And there are speeders in the neighborhood! And -- just. idiotic. crap.
Guess whose concerns were answered by the developer and whose concerns were not?
I forgot to say, the sticking point for the project is the heritage trees. Actually, one of them. There's a mature date palm nobody cares about even though it's beautiful --the city's Urban Forester (yes, we have one of those, doesn't your city have one?) recommended that it would be real nice if the palm were relocated and not just chopped up, but didn't think it was necessary to require that as a condition. There's a pine that the developer would like to take out but could leave if the city insists on it. Finally, there's a coast live oak that's large and smack in the middle of the property that the Forester thinks is protected by law and the developer sure hopes that the city can make an exception for because it's impossible to design around, though the Planning Commission staff thinks they could design around it. Because the Forester can't "make a finding" for the removal of the tree, the Planning Commission can't just greenlight the project and override the law: they have to send the project to the City Council with a recommendation, which is what they did.
Because the City Council is the policy arm of the local government, and they get to make exemptions to laws, and the other parts I think don't.
So. I didn't have no effect on the subsequent discussion. (I should have spoken last instead of first, I'll remember that next time, or I'll bring a partner to speak first or something) I introduced the words "working," "families," and "rentals" into the discussion. Nobody was talking about those things before. Afterwards, they were. But. Oh. My. Dog. what happened to those words . . .
I don't know about other places, but in California and I think the rest of the US, these all have different political meanings: "working class families," "working class," "working," and "families," "working families," In fact, "working class families" and "working families" generally refer to opposite ends of the working class. -- "working" without "class" tends to refer to those people who have fancy white-collar jobs and think we live in a classless society and think that because they have a high salary they're exempt from class relations and they're secure in their upward climb.
So members of the planning commission dropped the word "class" and assured themselves they were very much in favor of working families committed to urban living who could walk to the store. So they talked about "working" people and they talked about "families" and they talked about "how can we keep these units from being rented?" and they villainized students and talked about their deep desire to put speedbumps all over my neighborhood.
This is when I realized that the Planning Commission is my enemy.
After the hearing I confronted Mark Primack, the architect, who looks a little like Richard Gere in "Chicago," and asked him about costs and rentals and he evaded me and referred me to the owner of the land, who wouldn't talk to me either though he was happy to talk to the lady who had said that she was worried because nine units on that property would mean more crime(stupid, stupid, stupid. Dark, uninhabited corners are where crime takes place. You put a nice development with windows right on the street there, crime is goin to go down).
So I'm pissed. And uncertain of where to go with this. The development actually looks nice. It's laid out according to modern theories of urban villages, which means that there's an interior open space -- a patio? I hope it's not a lawn, but that's not my business -- offstreet parking (which looks annoying, but Mark said that he had no flexibility on the parking spaces and driveway because of city rules, and that sitting the units on top of parking places would have made them isolating and ugly and people wouldn't stay in them), and porches. I for one am very glad about the porches. I think homes have to have porches to be an intermediate space between them and the outside. Large apartment buildings, similarly, should have an entry space -- a lobby, an atrium, or a courtyard. Something. The condominiums are large for one-bedroom units -- 740-800 square feet for most of them, one at 1700 square feet. So why isn't the larger one, at least, two-bedroom? So people with school-aged children can live in it? Anyway, I just want to scream about the fact that these people blithely ignore this question.
Before the hearings comissions and the City Council have an open comment section of the agenda for the public to comment on relevant issues that are not on the nioght's agenda. Traditionally people use this as a time to try to influence the outcome of some larger ongoing issue. Last night a delegation of workers came to comment on the project at La Bahia, which is an old beach hotel across from the Cocoanut Grove end of the Boardwalk (Cocoanut Grove is a ballroom which is actually kind of nasty except for its wonderful views and lovely natural lighting). It's kind of very rundown, and I believe has been elevated from being poor people housing to student housing in the last couople years.
The city has been trying to figure out how to host larger conferences. It would be ideal for a resort town that everybody wants to visit anyway. Business falls off a lot in the winter. However, every proposal for a large conference center that has come up so far has had deadly flaws and we haven't had any of them go through. So Barry Swenson came up with this great plan to buy La Bahia and with city money make it a conference center. Only the first pass through they said they were going to just remodel what they had there and add a little height to get more rooms in, and they were going to use all union labor to build it and to staff the hotel when it was built. And the second pass through they said they were going to make it a little taller, and the terms they were offering the unions were a little sketchier. Then the third pass through they said they were going to make the building a little taller and, well, they weren't going to use union labor for the framing because they were going to contract that out. Only it turns out the height they were proposing in the third pass is actually twenty feet lower than what's really in the plans, due to the magic of averaging.
So this is what the labor people said: we need well-paying jobs in town. Barry Swenson's pulling a bait-and-switch. All of the unions, including the teachers, the Teamsters, and SEIU, are opposed to this project.
I should have realized right then that nodding and smiling on the part of the Planning Commission means absolutely nothing.
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