Townhome boom emerges in Santa Rosa as needed affordable option

Ana Buenrostro and Jose Romero took the necessary steps in preparation to buy their first home.

They saved for a down payment by living with family. Each holds solid jobs. Buenrostro works as a human resources manager and Romero is a technician for AT&T. Yet in the Sonoma County housing market, they realized how tough it would be to find something affordable.

The couple quickly saw over the summer there were few options for houses priced around $500,000 — and many of those were in need of repairs. Their quest was more difficult, since they needed at least a three-bedroom home to have room for their children age 8, 10 and 20.

“We would have put more money into fixing” houses in the $500,000 range, Buenrostro said.

The family found its alternative in Santa Rosa when they were on the SMART Trail south of downtown and noticed the Paseo Vista complex. It’s a subdivision of eventually 135 townhouses in southwest Santa Rosa. Prices now start around $450,000. In August, the couple bought a townhome there for $433,000 and moved into the community northeast of Dutton and Hearn avenues.

“They are not huge, but they are perfect,” Buenrostro said. “All the bedrooms are upstairs. They are very spacious. There are brand new appliances. You can’t beat the price and also the (mortgage) interest rate.”

The couple’s homebuying experience is being replicated across Santa Rosa where there has been an influx of townhome construction, particularly in and around the Roseland area. Some of the homes are for sale, while others are leased.

There’s about 200 units at Sendero Townhomes bordering Highway 12 at Stony Point Road, and another 110 homes in the Village Station complex near the eastern end of Sebastopol Road. Sendero, built by Gallaher Homes, has monthly rents from $1,595 for studio apartments, to $2,695 for the townhomes.

Townhouses are multistory residences that share one or two walls with adjacent neighbors, but have their own entrances. They are ubiquitous in East Coast cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. However, they have been the rare exception for Californians, who preferred suburban lots and lawns. A recent drive around southwest Santa Rosa shows that is quickly changing. Amid a protracted housing crunch, about 500 townhomes have been built or are under construction in that section of the city alone.

“It's going to be an era of diverse and creative approaches to housing,” said Keith Woods, CEO of North Coast Builders Exchange, the main local trade group for contractors. “You're going to see a little bit of everything.”

The main reason for the spurt of townhouses? It’s simple math, developers say. They can sell more units in the same amount of space as their multimillion-dollar home projects.

“I think in many cases they finally pencil out,” said Mike Gasparini, who along with business partner Allan Henderson developed the Paseo Vista townhome project.

The developers were ready to start building Paseo Vista in 2008, then the Great Recession occurred. There was also a delay, because the land was under county jurisdiction before being annexed into the city of Santa Rosa. Construction finally got going in late 2017. About 50 townhomes are finished and sold to families like Buenrostro and Romero.

The popularity of townhouses has spread beyond starter homes in up-and-coming urban areas. For example, there’s the new Round Barn development in Santa Rosa’s high-end Fountaingrove section featuring 237 solar-powered townhomes. The complex includes homes starting at $600,000, plus a community pool, hot tub and playground area.

The attraction of the Round Barn enclave is buyers can get a lot more home for the money than they could in a single-family home, said Phil Kerr, CEO of City Ventures, the San Francisco builder of the complex.

The farmhouse-style units have three or four bedrooms and up to 1,900 square feet of living space. Buyers have been older couples who no longer want the upkeep of a single-family home and people moving from San Francisco for the additional space in a more affordable market.

“They're getting a lot more in terms of livability than they might be getting in an older single-family home and paying less for that,” Kerr said.

City Ventures found there was an appetite for townhouses when it built the Windsor Town Green Village development on the town square.

“We really saw when we did that project, which is about 25 townhomes, the demand for townhomes in Sonoma County,” Kerr said.

The home style also has been built for low-income families, notably Burbank Housing’s 48 “duet style” townhomes that are part of the 4-acre Lantana Homes complex next to Elsie Allen High School.

By opting to build townhomes, Santa Rosa nonprofit affordable housing developer Burbank Housing was allowed to place more units in the development. That’s critical given the dearth of affordable housing for lower-income families in Sonoma County.

The units have all been sold and residents should start moving in by next spring, said Larry Florin, CEO of Burbank Housing. In fact, the nonprofit had more than 400 applications for the 48 homes. They are three-bedroom townhouses with about 1,250 square feet of living space.

“They’re starter homes. There's nothing fancy about them. They're intended to get these folks into homeownership,” Florin said.

Before the 2017 North Bay fires, Santa Rosa leaders had set a goal of building 2,500 affordable housing units in the city by 2023. The need, however, has been heightened with nearby fires in 2019 and this year.

Given the steep cost of a single-family home in Sonoma County, townhouses likely will continue to be a significant portion of affordable homes built countywide. In September, the county’s median price of an existing home was $715,000, up 9.5% compared to the same month a year ago. Such a price tag can put homeownership out of reach for many area families.

“We’re trying to figure out a way in Santa Rosa to give people the experience of homeownership, without getting up into the $600,000 and $700,000 price range that single-family homes are in that area,” said Will Scott, director of sales at Blue Mountain Communities, developer of the Village Station project.

“The area's historically tougher for first-time homebuyers to get into their homes,” Scott said.

And buying a townhome doesn’t have to mean giving up green space, another stereotype ending with the new projects. At Village Station on Sebastopol Road, the townhouse subdivision was built so homeowners can look at landscaped areas in the rear of their properties rather than an alley. There’s also a dog park.

“This still gives people that feeling of a traditional home,” Scott said of the townhouse community.

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 707-521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @BillSwindell.