The Marc, at 3885 State St. in Santa Barbara, features 89 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments with lease rates between $2,900 and $3,750 a month. 
The Marc looks to connect tenents through communal spaces like a common room, pool and outdoor gardens, according to Tripp Dubois of The Kor Group. 
Many of The Marc’s units abut the complex’s three courtyards, the final touches for which are being added before next weekend’s grand opening.
When questions about affordability and workforce housing under Santa Barbara’s Average Unit Density Program come up at City Hall, a common answer is that there’s not enough data for concrete answers.
For all the discussion and planning the city has had over the 2013 housing program, only one large development project has been completed.
The goal of the AUD program is to encourage the development of smaller, more-affordable workforce housing that is close to public transportation, commercial services and parks in a city with a dearth of rental housing and a high cost of living.
One of the program’s first applicants was The Marc at 3885 State St., which is celebrating its grand opening from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Feb. 25 and 26 with tours, music, refreshments and a raffle.
Already 25 percent pre-leased, the 89-unit apartment complex next to La Cumbre Plaza bills itself as modern, spacious and luxurious, and the first large-scale residential project to be built in the city in 30 years.
Its one-, two- and three-bedroom units range from 646 to 1,026 square feet, and it features a rooftop garden with a fire pit, a 24-hour fitness center, three themed courtyards, a common room, and a pool and jacuzzi.
The Marc is also home to 2,500 square feet of commercial retail space, though there are no tenants yet.
The project was developed by The Kor Group of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara-based REthink Development and affiliates of Westport Capital Partners LLC.
The name is a reference to San Marcos Pass, which is visible from the building’s north-facing windows.
“We wanted a name that inspired the community and the area,” said Tripp Dubois, managing partner and vice president of sales and marketing with The Kor Group. “It’s representative of the neighborhood.”
The indoor and outdoor communal spaces, he added, are for residents to live, work and play together and connect.
“We wanted a modern feel for it, we wanted a coastal feel as well, so the colors represent that,” Dubois said. “We wanted to make landscaping indigenous with the area.
“From the beginning, we wanted to make sure, as a modern lifestyle, it’s about indoor-outdoor living.”
Next weekend’s opening comes roughly three years into the overall development journey, said Greg Reitz, founder and principal at REthink Development.
Aside from the plan-checking process — the city is not used to the complex structural calculations behind putting a large residential complex above an underground parking lot, he said — the city review process went smoothly and as expected, despite the project being one of the pioneering AUD developments.
“Some people see the modern architecture and think that that’s out of context for Santa Barbara,” Reitz said. “But the reality is that a lot of the buildings that have been built up there on Upper State Street are midcentury buildings and have modern architecture to them.”
George Buell, the city’s community development director, told Noozhawk that The Marc is the first market-rate apartment complex larger than 10 units to be built in Santa Barbara in recent memory.
It’s also the first large AUD project to be completed.
Rent at The Marc, which ranges from $2,900 per month to $3,750, straddles the line of what AUD would consider affordable.
Whether AUD projects will be priced low enough to serve as reliable workforce housing has been a constant point of discussion at City Hall.
At a December City Council meeting, city planners said there was not yet enough data available to determine whether the program is meeting its goal of supplying housing for the local workforce.
Buell said the target income range for the program is for households earning 120 percent to 200 percent of the area’s median income.
“The Marc would not hit this target income range for one-person households,” he said in an email. “However, it could be within this range for households of two or more people, albeit in some circumstances the rents would be toward the top of the range.”
Recently, Buell added, the City Council has asked the newly formed Housing Task Force to explore whether the target income range should be adjusted downward.
Dubois said The Marc was developed for “all walks of life.”
“It was really in general for locals,” he said. “Our feeling was (residents) would be from varied backgrounds.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.