Santa Rosa apartment project riles historic neighborhood

A developer’s plan to build 20 new apartments near two of northeast Santa Rosa’s historic residential areas has riled residents unaccustomed to the project’s size and spare contemporary architecture.

In the process, it has revived a debate - largely dormant during the post-recession years of housing stagnation - over how the city can encourage new construction while preserving the character of existing neighborhoods.

The way the City Council resolves the dispute in the coming weeks could send a strong message about how it views the balance between these two often-competing forces during a period of intense political pressure to increase the city’s housing stock.

“This is something that is going to come up again and again as infill developments are proposed in neighborhoods around the city in coming years,” said Bill Vosburg, a retired Santa Rosa Junior College English professor who owns a small home just east of the project and is spearheading the opposition.

Builder Jeff Luchetti and a few investors last year purchased a vacant 1.1-acre property on North Street from investor Dick Schultze, whose purchased it from the family that once owned the neighboring moving company, Schultz Brothers Van & Storage.

Schultze had previously tried and failed to develop the lot, which was rezoned to medium-density residential housing in 2004 following goals outlined in the 1991 General Plan update. The new zoning allows up to 18 residential units per acre.

He sought to build 60 condominiums on the site and surrounding warehouse properties around 2006, but he said “the neighborhood went nuts” and the housing bust eventually put the kibosh on those plans.

The property has remained a weedy storage lot for moving trucks and trailers ever since, defying Schultze’s subsequent efforts to develop it, once as a complex of small industrial spaces and, two years ago, as housing.

After the most recent proposal fell through when the city required a deep setback meant to accommodate the future widening of North Street, Schultze said he “gave up” and put the property on the market. That’s when Luchetti, president of Santa Rosa-based Jeff Luchetti Construction, put together a small investment group called Grange Road LLC and bought the lot. He hired Santa Rosa architect Warren Hedgpeth, a member of the city’s Design Review Board, to design a modern but tasteful complex.

“It was born out of our desire to have a nice-looking apartment building that represented the 21st century,” Luchetti said of the design.

He said he never expected any opposition to the project because the site is zoned for the exact density he proposed, and because of the site’s industrial past.

The property was the former home of a Southern Pacific Railroad depot out of which fruit, hops and cattle were shipped to points east in the late 1880s and early 1900s. It sits adjacent to a large Bekins warehouse, just north of the YMCA parking lot, and across North Street from a vacant former food pantry and a flooring warehouse.

“I didn’t think there would be much interest in it at all,” Luchetti said of his project.

But there was plenty, almost all of it negative, from residents who live in the surrounding neighborhoods. The majority of the area is developed with single-family homes, many of them historic.

More than 100 people have signed a petition against the project. Many turned out at a meeting of the Design Review Board, which approved the project on a 3-1 vote last month. Neighbors have appealed to the City Council.

“This is the talk of the neighborhood,” said Lea Goode-Harris, an artist who has lived two blocks west of the site for 20 years.

Her home is the picture of suburban tranquility of a bygone era. The 1908 Queen Anne Victorian is complete with gabled roof, decorative shingles, wide front porch, verdant gardens and white picket fence.

To Goode-Harris, the prospect of a three-story apartment complex designed in such a modern style is an affront to the neighborhood and flouts city guidelines calling for projects to be compatible with surrounding homes.

She said she welcomes some housing at that location, but feels it should be no more than two stories and redesigned to blend in better with what’s there already.

Goode-Harris doesn’t believe the current demand for additional housing should trump aesthetic concerns.

“Why are these two established neighborhoods having to pay the price for Santa Rosa having a housing crisis?” she said.

A neighbor who lives even closer to the project also is strongly opposed to its size and design.

Joan Art, 86, is a retired special education teacher who lives in a ranch-style home just across Stewart Street from the Bekins warehouse. She said she would welcome a more modest project on the vacant lot she called an “eyesore,” but what’s been proposed strikes her as “monstrous.”

“Any other design than this might have worked,” Art said. “But this was just so in-your-face.”

The project, called North Street Apartments, originally called for 22 units but was scaled back to 20 after neighbors objected to the use of a city right-of-way between the lot and an adjacent warehouse.

It now calls for two buildings of two- and three-bedroom apartments that are two stories high at the north and south ends and three stories in the center. The tallest point would be 35 feet high, 10 feet lower than what’s allowed by the zoning, Luchetti said.

The buildings have what Hedgpeth calls a “signature butterfly canopy roof,” small wood-clad projecting balconies, and a color scheme of alternating grays and browns.

Hedgpeth declined a request to discuss his inspiration for the design, citing his decision not to participate in the Design Review Board’s debate on his project.

But in a project narrative, he writes that apartment buildings are a natural consequence, if unforeseen by many, of the approval of urban growth boundaries around the city in 1996.

He says the project “moves toward filling a drastic shortage of rental housing in our community” and notes that it is not located in the nearby McDonald Avenue historic preservation district.

Hedgpeth writes that he took inspiration for the building more from the industrial history of the area than past residential styles. The upswept roof took cues from a modest laundromat in the Junior College area as well as the Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, a mid-20th-century design featuring a dramatically upswept, curvaceous roof.

While some residents argue the apartments should reflect the character of surrounding homes, Hedgpeth rejects that idea, fearing the “synthetic quality” of projects like the Windsor Town Green.

“Santa Rosa does not need banal, lifeless higher-density housing, nor does it need forced history,” Hedgpeth writes.

But Vosburg points to the parts of the city’s design guidelines suggesting projects “integrate new developments carefully into existing neighborhoods” and that multifamily projects should be “compatible with existing surrounding homes and structures.”

The rules are even stricter for historic properties and districts, which the site is near but not in. The McDonald Preservation District begins on Stewart Street, a half-block east of the site.

Nevertheless, there is language in the code meant to protect the edges of historic districts from jarring changes. It calls on “all commercial projects adjacent to districts,” including apartment buildings, to also conform to the historic standards. Developers in such areas should “design new construction so that the architectural character of the neighborhood is maintained” and make it “compatible in height and proportion with adjacent structures.”

Vosburg argues that the standards should be applied to the project because the site is “adjacent” to the historic district in the sense it is “near.” Another definition of “adjacent,” and arguably more common in land-use contexts, is “bordering.”

City planner Patrick Streeter said the city doesn’t define “adjacent” in the guidelines, but notes they are just that - non-binding guidelines to be used by city policy boards.

The Design Review Board approved the project on a 3-1 vote, with Chairman Doug Hilberman, an architect, voting against it.

Vosburg said the neighborhood opposition is so fierce not just because of the single project but because of what it portends for the other warehouse properties in the area. The medium-density zoning extends beyond the industrial areas to cover several blocks of single-family homes. He and other neighbors contend they had no idea such zoning was ever imposed on the area.

“This is a test case for what could happen when those other buildings come down,” Vosburg said.

But to Luchetti, the project is a test of whether the city is going to be run by the emotional reaction of residents or by a rational, predictable process that has long called for higher-density housing.

“The best way to solve the problem of high rent rates is to provide inventory, and this is just stalling that process,” Luchetti said.

The appeal heads to the City Council on Sept. 22.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the investor who previously tried to develop North Street property. It is Dick Schultze, who is unrelated to the former owners of the neighboring business, Schultz Brothers Van & Storage.