Affordable Housing Project Returns to ARB

By Oliver Lukacs and Jorge Casuso
Staff Writers

May 18 -- The second round of a bitter battle over a 44-unit affordable housing project on Main Street will be fought at the Architectural Review Board Monday night by opponents who fear it will destroy their neighborhood and backers who contend it will give low-income families a chance to live in one of the city’s most desirable areas.

The four-story, 113-bedroom Community Corporation development -- which is exempt from City Council and Planning Commission review by an ordinance to encourage affordable housing -- was sent back for redesign last month after several ARB members found the building was too massive and lacked storefronts along Main Street.

The redesign moves three one-bedroom units from Main Street to Pacific Street, relocates tenant walkways on the upper floors to the Main Street side (pushing back the façade five feet) and reduces the width of the pedestrian passageway on Main Street to five feet.

The redesign also breaks up the façade by adding articulation, tones down the colors and adds 300 square feet of retail space to enhance pedestrian activity along Main Street. There will also be more landscaping along Pacific, where the building faces a row of houses.

“We would like the ARB approval,” said Joan Ling, the executive director of Community Corp., which runs 2,000 units in 80 buildings in the city. “We’ll see what happens.

“I don’t really have any expectations,” Ling added. “People who oppose the project are multi-faceted. Some won’t stop until the project is killed.”

Opponents of the proposed 27,046-square-foot development with 82 subterranean parking spaces argue that the proposed design changes don’t go near far enough to scale down a development.

“The insensitivity to the surrounding neighborhood and the people who will have to look at and live with this towering mass is nothing short of insulting,” Suzanne Caplan, a neighbor who testified against the project at the ARB meeting April 7, wrote in a letter to the board.

While some opponents welcome the lower façade along Main, they are disappointed that Community Corp. did not heed suggestions to eliminate the building’s courtyard in order to lower the height of the entire project one floor.

Jeffrey Weinstein, a member of Friends of Ocean Park, the neighborhood group opposed to the project, said in a letter to the board that the walkways make the project “look like a cheap motel” and the painted wood, fiberglass panels, metal siding, and nail-on aluminum windows gives the project “an industrial look or feel.”

“Without question,” wrote Weinstein, “as currently designed, the proposed building will have a deleterious effect on the existing neighborhood, and cause the local neighborhood to depreciate in appearance and value.”

Supporters contend the project comprised of five buildings surrounding a courtyard that will house roughly four residents per unit will give low-income families a chance at a decent life in a safe neighborhood.

Opponents, they contend, have resorted to “threats and character assassinations” in an effort to kill the project, Ling said.

“There are allegations we lied, that the architect misrepresented the project,” Ling said. “It makes it very difficult to have a dialogue… It’s no longer traffic and mass anymore when they have shifted to threats and allegations.”

Supporters contend that the opposition is fueled by fears that the low-income residents will increase crime and lower property values, a fear they have not aired publicly.

Ling contends that the opponents of the low-income project are many of the same people who supported the 133-unit market rate project on the old Boulangerie site catty corner from the proposed development.

“The same people supported the Boulangerie project and the Boulangerie project is more dense than our project,” Ling said.

No matter what the board does Monday night, it is almost certain that the decision would be appealed to the Planning Commission, which would serve in the capacity of the ARB.

In its report to the board, City staff, which recommends approval of the project, notes that the ARB does not have the authority to ask for such major changes as reducing the height of the project.