- Tom BrezsnyWho is Going To Live in All of Those Places? Part 6
Continuing the conversation…about all those big buildings going up around town and trying to understand the sea change that’s underway as Santa Cruz plays catch up on the housing curve after 40 years of slow/no growth policies.
The epicenter for the current wave of new housing is Downtown Santa Cruz, although a 6 story, 105 unit housing project next to Dominican Oaks and a 5 story, 63 unit project sandwiched in on Capitola Road and a 5 story, 173 unit development at the corner of Thurber and Soquel (goodbye Pumpkin Patch!) and a whopping 5 story, 351 unit project on a combined 20 smaller parcels on Ocean St (among others) are all earth-shaking enough in size to catch one’s attention…
A 15 minute stroll up Pacific and down Front is all it takes to appreciate the scale of the change that’s coming. Dozens of new buildings with thousands of new residential units have either been recently completed or recently started or recently added to the burgeoning queue of the City’s (and County’s) pre-application pipeline.
Of course, Downtown is no stranger to big change…A quick spin in the Way Back Machine reminds us that there was a big rebuild after the 1955 flood. There was also a radical redo that transformed the staid old confines of Downtown into the Pacific Garden Mall in the late 1960s/early 1970s. More recently, there was massive reconstruction after 1989, when the Loma Prieta quake shook us to our core and took out 40% of the Downtown building stock.
It’s been more than thirty years since the last rebirth of the Downtown, and lately it has felt like it might be time for another one, given the empty storefronts on Pacific, the never ending social issues, the waning demand for office space, the general demise of movie theaters and the ongoing struggles of local merchants trying to compete with big box stores and digital behemoths like Amazon.
Although there hasn’t been a recent earthquake or natural disaster, the wave of new housing that’s in the pipeline, certainly feels like another seismic shift, on par with any of the previous revisions/rebuilds/renewals that have reshaped Downtown – one destined to push mix and density to groundbreaking new heights, (literally and figuratively).
For the first time, we aren’t just replacing or dressing up what’s there. Instead we’re radically altering the fundamental character of Downtown – not just viewing it as retail space or as mixed retail/office space, but rather as a synchronized whole of residential retail/office space and an environment where all of the parts are mutually supportive. At least I think that’s what the idea is…
Next Week…who is supposed to move Downtown?
