Construction begins on very low-income housing project
For one local organization tasked with getting people into housing, a glaring bottleneck to its efforts was in connecting clients with stable, long-term affordable opportunities.
“As an organization, we’ve done everything from first touch, outreach, engagement, emergency shelter, supportive services, both on-campus for over 200 people in our emergency shelter programs … and we support over 250 households in the community,” said Housing Matters Executive Director Phil Kramer. “So, up ‘til now, we’ve kind of done all the steps up to housing.”
Two years after Housing Matters purchased a more than 115-year-old Victorian home across the street from the organization’s Coral Street campus in the Harvey West business park, construction has begun to convert the two-story building into a seven-unit apartment building. The nonprofit organization purchased the former
dental office for $825,000 on March 20, 2019, after it had been vacant for some 20 years. Developer New Way Homes — led by former Housing Matters treasurer Sibley Simon — has taken on the lead in turning that investment into housing.
“This is the first time Housing Matters will own permanent housing,” Simon said during a tour of the construction site last week.
Once construction, including lifting the historic 801 River St. house up about 3 feet and gutting its first floor, is complete this fall, the site will be passed to Housing Matters’ control and be within a stone’s throw of the organization and its services. The historic building is eligible for conversion from a singlefamily home to apartment units due to its somewhat atypical zoning designation as “community commercial,” Simon said.
The very-low-income permanent supportive housing units will serve as a sort of small-scale pilot project, said Simon, for a recent city-approved 120-unit housing project in the works for the Housing Matters campus,
also under development by New Way Homes. The 801 River St. site’s waiting list already is full, officials said, and each of its tenants — likely those transitioning out of Housing Matters’ Recuperative Care Center shelter program — will be connected with some type of supportive services.
“On average, the Recuperative Care Center has served 65 to 70 patients every year and every one of those patients, guests while they’re in the Recuperative Care Center, is without housing. That’s why they’re in the Recuperative Care Center, they do not have a safe and stable healthy home to return to,” Kramer said. “So no, seven (units) is really just a start for us.”
Housing goals
The Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments, in its Regional Housing Needs Allocation recommendations, has set a goal for the city of Santa Cruz to add 168 similar verylow-income affordable housing units locally by 2023. According to a city housing plan update before the City Council on
Tuesday, of 867 residential units permitted by the city since 2015, 12 have been for deed-restricted very-low-income affordable living spaces.
Very-low-income households are defined as those with incomes generally greater than 30% and as high as 50% of the area’s median household income, meaning those single-occupant households that made about $46,350 or less annually in 2020, per state numbers.
Housing Matters was in enough of a financially stable situation at the time the 801 River St. property became available for the organization to make its purchase, Kramer said. While the nonprofit has struggled with loss of long-standing federal emergency shelter and transitional housing program funding in recent years as national attention has refocused on housing outcomes rather than shelter opportunities, other parts of the organization have remained in a strong place, Kramer and Simon said.
“There’s a difference between the financial health of an orga
nization and the financial health of a particular program,” Simon said. “There’s more funding going into homelessness very recently from the state of California and Housing Matters has received this five-year Bezos Day 1 grant
and an increase in donations from this community from individual donors. All this means that the organization as a whole is out of debt, has reserves and is able to sometimes, strategically take on new initiatives that it thinks are going to have the biggest impact.”