As a battle over building heights heats up between downtown preservationists and affordable-housing advocates, at least one Santa Barbara developer is responding to the clash by offering city officials a choice that clearly crystallizes the debate.
The developer for the “Radio Square” project in the 200 block of West Carrillo Street — currently a corner shopping center anchored by Carrows Restaurant — will ask the Planning Commission on Thursday to choose between having a project with taller buildings, or one with a greatly pared-down affordable housing component.
(Click here for the follow-up story.)
The choice highlights the difficulty of simultaneously maintaining Santa Barbara’s small-town charm and retaining its middle-class workforce in a community where the $1.2 million median home price has long been out of reach to most people.
The first option will be a version of the developer’s original proposal: a four-story building with 21 of the complex’s 55 units affordable to middle-class families.
The second option eliminates the entire fourth floor, but also does away with all but four affordable units. (Under this plan, it would include a total of 31 units.)
“We are coming forth with a good-faith effort to provide the community — via the Planning Commission — the opportunity to choose, to prioritize between the competing alternatives,” said Steve Yates, CEO of Conceptual Motion, a development strategy firm representing the landowner, DBN Carrillo LLC.
FYI
The Santa Barbara Planning Commission meeting is at 1 p.m. Thursday in council chambers at City Hall, De la Guerra Plaza.
Yates said the decision to offer a second alternative was prompted by the Historic Landmarks Commission’s cool reception of the proposal, as well as an ongoing effort by a group of former city officials to put a measure on the ballot asking voters to lower the building-height limits to 40 feet in the historic downtown district from 60 feet.
In the original proposal, the height of the Radio Square building would be a little over 50 feet; in the alternative, it would come to exactly 40.
Yates, who also serves as the subsection director of the Santa Barbara County Chapter of the American Planning Association, said it is not economically feasible to offer more affordable housing units in a three-story building.
“What underwrites the affordable housing is the market-rate housing,” he said.
If approved, the developer will level all the businesses in the area, including the all-night Carrows and Spudnuts restaurants.
(Click here to view the report; information on the new alternative starts on page six.)
