City considering plan for St. Mike’s corridor
Proposal would include needed housing
Opportunities to loosen Santa Fe’s tight housing market and pave the way for business development along the St. Michael’s Drive corridor may be opening up as city officials consider an ordinance that would create an “overlay’ district along a 1.25-mile stretch of road between St. Francis Drive and Cerrillos Road. Formally called the Midtown Local Innovation Corridor, or Midtown LINC for short, the overlay district is an attempt to redesign, rework and rejuvenate a six-lane road lined by strip malls and parking lots. St. Mike’s also functions as a “link” between the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center. “It has so much going for it, bookended by two major powerhouses — the university on one end and the hospital on the other,” said Matt O’Reilly, the city’s asset development manager. “It’s the only major commercial corridor that doesn’t have overlay in it.” Overlay districts can be thought of as zoning maps superimposed over existing maps establishing special development requirements within certain areas. The city already has overlay districts in the historic downtown and east side, along most of Cerrillos Road, Airport Road and St. Francis Drive. Creating the overlay district is in line with the city’s general plan, adopted in 1999, that calls for that stretch of road to be a “redevelopment corridor” targeting mixed-use development.
While there had been some talk of reducing the number of lanes to two in each direction, O’Reilly said that’s not in the plans.
“Under the ordinance, we don’t do anything with the street because we can’t,” O’Reilly said, pointing out St. Michael’s Drive is a state highway.
That’s not to say reducing lanes and allowing for parallel parking couldn’t come up in the future. He said the city has been in talks with the Department of Transportation about transferring the street to the city.
“We’ll worry about that later,” he said. “The priority now is to move this forward.”
If it does move forward, O’Reilly said it will take time for redevelopment of the area to really take form — maybe 20 or 30 years, he said. He cited the Tierra Contenta development on the city’s south side, which, after 25 years, is still only halfway built out. “That’s to put it in perspective. It will happen slowly,” he said.
While years in the making, the resolution designating the St. Michael’s corridor part of an overlay district was recently brought forward by Mayor Javier Gonzales and District 2 City Councilor Peter Ives.
“The idea is to create opportunities for increased housing in the area, as well as opportunities for new business,” Ives said this week. “We’re looking to stimulate change that will
result in smarter development and increased opportunity for new development.”
The proposal is slated to go before the City Council’s Public Works Committee on Monday when a public hearing is planned. The plan is for the City Council to take up the measure, with another public hearing, on Oct. 26.
Will incentives be enough?
The proposed ordinance not only establishes development requirements — such as standards for landscaping, architecture, signage and lighting — but it also offers incentives to property owners for uses such as housing development. Recent studies have shown that Santa Fe’s rental housing market is at capacity, that there’s a shortage of 2,400 rental units to meet the demand and that more than 50 percent of Santa Fe’s workforce commutes into town. That can be partially rectified by adopting a zoning overlay along St. Michael’s. In 2011, the Santa Fe Association of Realtors conducted a housing investigation on the corridor. The resulting document suggested that there was the potential for another 1,000 multi-family dwelling units along the St. Michael’s corridor. “We have been hurting for workforce housing, affordable housing and housing for young people for years,” O’Reilly said, also noting recent rejections of proposed housing developments in other parts of the city. “We might have found a place where it’s OK to build residential housing, even if it’s just in 1 percent of the city.”
The area within the district totals 373 acres, out of 33,600 acres within the city limits.
The overlay district encourages housing development in a couple of ways. One, it offers incentives to developers for qualifying projects by removing or reducing fees for construction permits, plan review and development, and water budgeting, as well as impact fees. It also removes the city’s current maximum residential density limit of 29 units per acre.
Daniel Werwath, chief operating officer with New Mexico Inter-Faith Housing, a nonprofit that works for affordable housing development, likes the plan, but wonders whether it will be enough. “I do like the incentive-based approach. I think it lays a great groundwork, but I would love to see more funding that would help get projects off the ground,” he said. Rental housing development is so challenging in Santa Fe.”
The plan identifies “qualifying projects” eligible for incentives. They include new multi-family dwellings and those already permitted in the underlying zoning district. It excludes certain types of businesses, such as storage facilities, vehicle and equipment businesses, industrial, warehouse and freight, and sexually oriented businesses.
Re-making St. Mike’s
City officials and others think the Midtown LINC will help reshape the future of the 400-year-old city trying to rebrand itself as more than an arts and cultural center, and tourist destination. The vision for the future development of the corridor came through a series of studies and public outreach sessions.
The resolution calls for promotion of a “healthy, safe, and enjoyable environment” enhanced by pedestrian walkways and bicycle paths, landscaping and other amenities. Councilor Ives said it works to “redesign the city in such a way as to emphasize opportunities for people to live more healthy built into the community and to do it in a sustainable way.”
Ives said there’s still opportunity for the public to provide input into the project. “The ongoing meetings with the public will be interesting for people to attend and weigh in,” he said.
One previous effort to gather input into the direction the plan should take grew from a grassroots effort in Santa Fe’s creative community.
Organizers said the Re:Mike Festival in September 2014 was meant to motivate and mobilize the community to envision new possibilities for the utilitarian corridor and dream of an attractive urban boulevard in the future. Held at St. Michael’s Village West Shopping Center, the festival included food and drink from local vendors, live music and interactive displays that allowed people to use Styrofoam blocks to rebuild a model the streetscape.
Zane Fischer, co-coordinator of MIX Santa Fe, a crowdsourcing enterprise which, according to its website, was founded “to reconnect Santa Fe to itself,” helped organize Re:Mike, along with Werwath and others.
“I think a lot of (what’s in the ordinance) comes right out of the prototyping festival,” he said.
Fischer said the city’s long range planning office had already done a lot of work conducting surveys and doing outreach. “We didn’t want that to go away. There had been a lot of thinking done about it. Re:Mike was a way to try to galvanize that and keep it on the minds of politicians.”
The results, included in the staff report for Midtown LINC, showed that people wanted a bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly area with easy access to public transportation, housing and entertainment venues.
The elephant in the room
Tomás Rivera of Chainbreaker Collective, a selfdescribed economic and environmental justice organization in Santa Fe, doesn’t want the city to act too quickly in approving the overlay plan.
“We don’t oppose this; there’s a lot of good stuff in there,” he said. “But we think it lacks protections for neighbors. Without having laws in effect that protect residents, this will be a classic recipe for gentrification.”
Rivera said if the area becomes too attractive, it will push people in the adjacent Hopewell-Mann neighborhood out. “The issue is, if that neighborhood becomes a really hip neighborhood, people from outside the area will want to come live there,” he said. “But just five feet away, literally across the alley, we have the poorest neighborhood in Santa Fe and the most vulnerable for gentrification.”
On Thursday, members of Chainbreaker staged a demonstration on St. Michael’s Drive at the Rail Runner train crossing to raise awareness for their concerns.
Their mascot elephant (really a person in an elephant suit) representing the elephant in the room — that being the needs of the economically disadvantaged that no one wants to talk about — was there to help grab the attention of passersby.
Playing ‘the long game’
Until recently, Kate Noble headed the city’s economic development office. She helped coordinate Re:Mike from the city’s side and now that she’s taken a job in the private sector with a high-tech startup firm, she has a unique perspective about Midtown LINC.
“It’s pretty clear to me the city needs to make some moves to revitalize central areas of town, like St. Michael’s and Siler (Road). We need to have that potential for redevelopment in order to move the city forward,” she said.
Spurred by the presence of the arts collective Meow Wolf in a re-purposed bowling alley, new development in the previously industrial Siler Road area has grown organically. But Nobel said that, generally, “it’s always a good idea to have an intention” when it comes to urban planning. The Midtown LINC provides that.
“I hope to see bigger vision in the future,” she said, adding that the city is operating in a risk-adverse environment and has to be willing to take action.
“Progress is progress, but these things take time,” she said. “Making progress and making change is important because community development and housing development is the long game, and the city needs to play the long game.”