Cottage Health on Thursday announced an ambitious plan to provide more-affordable home-ownership opportunities for employees of the healthcare organization.

The plan involves a total of 204 new homes in Santa Barbara and Goleta that will be available for purchase by its employees.

The new housing — constructed at two locations — will be offered to medical professionals at below-market rates.

The cost of housing has been an issue ever since he moved to Santa Barbara, said Ron Werft, Cottage’s president and CEO.

About a third of the nonprofit health system’s 5,000 employees currently commute from outside of the Santa Barbara area.

Providing lower-cost homes will allow the health organization to not only attract employees but retain them for a long time, Werft said.  

“If home ownership is important to an employee at Cottage, and it is important to most employees at Cottage, we often times lose that employee,” Werft said.

“They might be here for two or three or five years, and then their life changes. And it’s time they want to enjoy the privileges and benefits of homeownership, and they have to move somewhere else.”

Cottage has had success with providing lower-cost housing in the past. In 2012, Cottage built 81 homes at its Bella Riviera condominium project on Santa Barbara’s Upper Eastside.

Cottage says 145 healthcare professionals benefitted from the low-cost housing at Bella Riviera. The site currently has 84 employees on a waitlist for one of the residences.

Werft said he is not sure what the application process for the new locations will be, but Cottage likely will use a lottery system as it did with Bella Riviera.

Construction at both locations is set to begin in 2028, and the first homes for purchase are expected to be available in 2029.

Werft said that Cottage currently is working to gain approvals from the cities of Santa Barbara and Goleta for construction.

The first of the new housing locations will be at the current Cottage Rehabilitation Hospital at 2415 De La Vina St., and will feature 44 homes.

Werft said that Cottage is in the process of moving rehabilitation patients over to its new location adjacent to Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital on Patterson Avenue.

When the transfer is complete, the building will be torn down to make way for the new housing.

The second site is near Goleta hospital. Cottage has agreed to purchase 160 units at that location that will be available to hospital employees.  

Werft credited the hospital’s board of directors for its support of the plan, and said not every organization can do something like this.

“They are extremely supportive of these projects and supportive of our employees, and this will require significant funding from the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital Foundation,” he said. “And our board is responsible for that.”