Another marathon
post-midnight City Council meeting Monday to determine the fate of new housing
at the east side Corona Train Station. Couple of observations and things
learned along the way. Earlier in the meeting, PEP Housing said that its latest
“affordable housing” project on Petaluma Blvd will cost $540,000. per apartment
to build.
My interests in the Corona Train
Station project were originally for providing high density housing, a sense of
place and a train station for the future. Affordable housing wasn’t really
something I knew anything about. But I now realize that if you don’t build
affordable housing within walking distance to public transit and shopping then
it isn’t affordable housing because you need a car to get around. But low
income folks are the ones who can least afford to also own and drive a car.
As part of the marathon
Monday night meeting, the City Council not only approved the developer’s
proposal for Corona Station, but also the developer’s scheme for a new 5 story building
with roughly 400 market rate housing units on the empty SMART parcel next door
to the downtown train station. Recall that the City Council had passed a
resolution a couple of years back requiring that “inclusionary affordable
housing” must be built by the developer on site in new housing projects. But
Monday night, again, our City said “just kidding” and approved a plan for the
developer to pay an in-lieu fee of $860,000 to the city and donate a 2.5 acre
lot instead of building the approximately 50 required affordable housing units
at the downtown train station. See above. It costs 50 x $540,000 = $27 million
to build 50 affordable units.
Confused? I am. These are
confusing times. My sympathy for our City Council members as, once again, a
somewhat angry mob stood up to speak up at the podium in favor of higher
density housing, more affordable housing, building a walkable neighborhood, and
the possibility of inclusion of some lower income folks into our increasingly
wealthy exclusive Petaluma population.
A slim majority of the City
Council voted Monday night to approve a development project at the Corona
Station that no one but the developer likes mostly because of the threat that,
otherwise, a SMART station might not get built at all in east Petaluma anytime
soon. At Corona this will be 110 single family houses with 17 of them
designated affordable. Also the Council approved a 5 story building concept for
the downtown train station that has had no public review process and will not
have inclusionary affordable housing.
I am not one to point the
finger of shame and blame. No doubt each City Council member made the best
decision that they each thought they could make given the myriad of seemingly
conflicting opportunities, problems and supposed solutions presented. I will
say though that the process I have closely observed over the past 12 months did
get narrowly approved Monday night in a fit of desperation more so than with any
sense of building a positive inclusive vision for our future. The developer
walked out with exactly what he wanted. Maybe this leads to the second train
station getting built sometime soon.
