A Goleta warehouse owner wants the city to rezone the property so he can add employee housing units and public storage, and the City Council is considering it.
At the June 4 meeting, the council approved further study to consider rezoning the property at 30 S. La Patera Lane.
The warehouse property is zoned for business use, but changing it to general industrial use would allow those changes as well as adding electric vehicle charging stations, owner Kip Bradley said.
However, it will be awhile before Bradley even knows whether he will be able to make those changes.
The study to consider the rezone could take a minimum of nine months, according to Laurel Perez, a planner from Suzanne Elledge Planning and Permitting Services who is working with Bradley on the project.
Perez will have to file a formal rezone request with the city, a development plan for the warehouse, and work with the city to determine whether there can be employee units. Once the city says the application is complete, there would be an environmental analysis and Planning Commission review before the City Council gets the final word on the rezone.
As of now, it is unclear whether Bradley will get to have employee units as part of the project.
“Right now, there’s not a clear permit pathway forward for those four employee units,” Perez said. “That might be something where after we file the formal application for the rezone that we hear back from staff that there isn’t a permit avenue available to us to allow these employee units.”
Perez hopes the city’s need for more housing, specifically employee housing, will motivate the city to design a way to allow for housing as part of the project.
“We all know in this community how important employee housing is,” Perez said. “Something that is designed in a way that will keep that housing opportunity at an affordable level is critically important to our community, so we’re hopeful.”
Perez said the employee units will likely be units around 1,000 square feet with two bedrooms.
Bradley’s other plans include converting a portion of the warehouse to an indoor personal mini-storage facility. Approximately 96,286 square feet of the existing warehouse would be converted for a mini-storage facility while 60,000 square feet would remain for existing industrial, research and development, and warehouse uses, according to the city staff report.
No changes are proposed for the exterior of the building, but the proposal includes eight electrical vehicle charging stations and outdoor storage.
Perez said the building functions and has been consistently used as an industrial building since the 1950s.
The property was originally zoned for industrial use when the city became incorporated, but it was later changed for business use. Changing the zoning back to industrial use would legalize the uses currently at the warehouse, Perez said.
“You have this situation where you’re not able to expand on that use under the current zoning. It is very difficult to lease to a new industrial tenant when they see that the current zone district doesn’t allow for industrial use,” Perez said. “It sets up this really complicated situation for the landowner and for those tenants that exist there today.”
With a rezone, Perez said, “it would really allow this building to function as it was intended to function.”
