The importance of design in affordable housing

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Regardless of your politics, everyone agrees on one simple fact: The lack of affordable housing is the most serious problem facing Santa Cruz.

We simply disagree on how to address it.

Currently, the city is engaged in an impressive effort to increase workforce availability and affordable housing, and downtown we’re seeing an impressive lineup of trucks, bulldozers, and workers preparing for hundreds of new housing units.

The height and density of this new construction remains controversial to many citizens of our community.

Our reality is stark.

Our affordable housing crisis cannot be addressed without increasing our density. The opposing density means that you care more about the city’s aesthetics or “ambience” than the urgency of the people who live here.

But density isn’t everything.

Design is also important. Here, we are in luck.

Let’s take a look at the buildings that went down Pacific Street after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that left the city center in disarray. Post-earthquake regulations and guidelines required builders to construct upper floors that retreated from the street. We’ve got taller, denser buildings without the pedestrian experience of walking a canyon that looks like Wall Street.

Solar studies have inspired designs that allow for successful sidewalk restaurant experiences, and we have diverse buildings (no massive blocks), diverse visual planes, and attractive windows. Today most of the opposition to high-rise buildings, which was huge during the redevelopment process, has evaporated.

From a pedestrian view, you can see only the first one or two floors of each of the new buildings erected after the earthquake. Architectural amenities were pivotal to the success and community acceptance of the increased density that occurred in the city center after the earthquake.

And now we come to another important topic: the San Lorenzo River and its role in creating additional housing units in the city center. We’ve ignored the San Lorenzo River for far too long.

We need better access to it.

That’s why new, denser buildings must include increased open space and new river lanes.

Design regulations require new buildings on Front and River streets to face the river—not empty walls and trash cans. This is essential to the success of these projects.

Residents will exit their front doors onto the riverwalk. Builders, designers, and planners can create an attractive outdoor space, including perhaps restaurants, between new buildings and embankments.

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The residents would become agents and supporters of the river and would make it an attractive public space rather than a simple drainage ditch and a sacrifice area for social problems. Think of how many world-class cities are opening up to downtown rivers rather than turning their backs on this open space.

Concern similar to these types of design issues is critical if we are to have any hope of gathering continued support for existing plans for downtown residential construction. Ultimately, downtown construction plans for the current city council will likely be successful, but only with continued activism and support on the part of housing and social justice activists.

The Santa Cruz City Planning Department and its Department of Economic Development need to support the work of these activists by asking developers to heed these design concerns.

So far, based on project proposals circulating in these sections, design plays a role.

But it is critical that city and council planners not allow existing subsidies to increase the density of affordable projects resulting in lower costs (“value engineering”) on existing projects. This will undermine community support to see the affordable housing effort come to its successful conclusion.

Let us work to ensure that a strong public commitment now to increase density for affordable housing does not lead to a backlash that undermines long-term support for this effort.

Mike Rutkin is a five-time former mayor of Santa Cruz and lecturer and director of the Merrill College Field Study Program at UCSD. He lived in Santa Cruz for 53 years.

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