Santa Rosa’s plan to turn downtown garage into housing on pause amid opposition from business interests

A strategy to completely transform a city-owned parking garage in downtown Santa Rosa into housing appears to have hit a roadblock following opposition from the enterprise community.

The Third Avenue garage, at Third and D streets, was developed in 1965 and is the smallest of the city’s 5 garages with just below 200 spaces. It serves nearby business tenants and downtown website visitors.

It desires about $3 million in updates, and Santa Rosa officers think the metropolis can get additional worth out of the land if it is redeveloped as housing. Reworking city garages and other town-owned property could be a single of the easiest techniques to speed a very long-desired intention of growing housing in the city’s city middle.

But business and house house owners have pressured the metropolis to set the brakes on the garage conversion. They stress that they are not opposed to housing but don’t believe that the 3rd Avenue website is effectively suited for housing and say they want the metropolis to equilibrium residential growth with small business needs.

The pushback comes as many downtown merchants and business enterprise owners keep on to struggle right after two many years of pandemic problems.

Developer Hugh Futrell, whose organization has made housing and professional assignments downtown, claimed merchants and place of work tenants rely on the parking to serve their clients and workforces. A prolonged redevelopment and construction process also would harm downtown commerce, opponents contend.

Negotiations with builders can take many years and are “often in the end fruitless” and there is no promise a task will be created even just after the disruption to companies, he claimed.

“Through all this, place of work and retail leasing would be paralyzed and businesses and their workers seriously and unjustifiably harmed,” explained Futrell, who chairs the Downtown Action Firm, which manages the Santa Rosa Downtown District, a taxing entity fashioned to thoroughly clean up and endorse the city center.

The group’s board voted in November to oppose declaring the garage surplus land, a first action to placing city-owned house on the current market.

The Town Council was anticipated to look at the designation April 12 but the item was pulled off the agenda as the metropolis reevaluates its selections.

Councilman John Sawyer, whose relatives owned a downtown business enterprise for many years, reported delaying a choice will give the city extra time to discuss with stakeholders and evaluate other possibilities.

“This is a extremely common garage appropriate in the middle of downtown so we want to put the pause button on, do our investigation, have far more discussions with builders and make absolutely sure that we clearly fully grasp the impacts on the existing corporations,” Sawyer mentioned.

Santa Rosa has looked to infill redevelopment to spur housing and industrial development downtown for many years, and has additional incentives in recent decades to entice developers, like eased top limitations and parking specifications.

The hottest program for the 720-acre downtown region, authorised in late 2020, aims to incorporate 7,000 new homes by 2040 — about 2 times the earlier mark, which the city skipped by a mile. (By 2019, when operate on the new approach was underway, just 375 residences had been included.)

Team assessed city-owned properties for present use and viability of a long run housing progress and in January introduced the City Council with a few houses town officials determined as getting the most prospective, together with the 3rd Road garage.

The council gave Metropolis Hall the environmentally friendly mild to set the garage on the sector with the stipulation that the general public parking be changed as a condition of the sale. The council also signaled help for redeveloping a surface parking good deal on Fifth and B streets if the garage program was successful.

A strategy to redevelop a parking lot on Fifth and E streets behind Russian River Brewing Co.’s brewpub was opposed right after operator Natalie Cilurzo mentioned they’d have to relocate if the good deal was turned into housing.

The Metropolis Council talked about in a shut-doorway session late February the selling price and terms of a sale or lease for the Third Avenue garage but in April the city hit pause on the job soon after corporations grew wary of possible impacts.

Charles Evans, who owns the constructing that properties cafe Perch and Plow adjacent to the garage, stated there have been talks about redeveloping parking garages and tons downtown considering that he bought assets there about 30 decades ago.

This is the initial formal plan that has been put ahead, Evans reported, one particular of many house owners who voiced opposition to the proposal.

Evans expressed annoyance with what he explained as a deficiency of interaction between the metropolis and neighboring property proprietors relating to the prepare.

He questioned no matter if the town could legally designate the assets as surplus land simply because the garage was paid for through fees collected from the parking district. He pointed out that even if the city can, it would be hard to redevelop.