San Lorenzo Valley vets housing site set to double
Some two years after plans to convert a San Lorenzo Valley motel into affordable veteran housing were announced, the property's new owners say they expect the Highway 9 site's capacity to nearly double in size by the end of 2024.
The Veterans Village of Santa Cruz County, a Santa Cruz County Veterans Memorial Building program, first opened last year to tenants, including some of whom had already been residing at the former lodge during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The site, situated on 6 acres of land at the former Jaye's Timberlane Resort at 8705 Highway 9, was purchased through a combination of private fundraising and a $6.4 million state Project Homekey grant in order to provide housing to vulnerable and formerly homeless veterans and their families. Two other Project Homekey supportive housing recipients in the county have included Housing Matters' completed seven-unit Casa Azul on River Street in Santa Cruz and the in-progress 36-unit Park Haven Plaza in Soquel.
“The overall culture there at the village is so cool,” said Veterans Memorial Building Director Chris Cottingham, who is overseeing the Vets Village development. “You've got kids running around together slug-hunting. It's a fun family atmosphere.”
The pandemic, this past winter's atmospheric river-driven flooding, mudslides and downed trees, plus rising interest rates and construction costs, have contributed to unexpected delays in getting the project fully operational by this year, Cottingham said. Storm-related damages to San Lorenzo Valley and beyond “hammered” the property and triggered a federal natural disaster designation and earned the development extensions on the state's tight development timeline, he said.
Vets Village leaders are filling seven of the development's current 11 available units, according to Cottingham. Federal housing vouchers apply for tenants making up to 30% of Santa Cruz County's median income. The choice to not populate the site full to capacity, Cottingham said, was intentional. As such, the limitation, he said, does not come from a lack of interested tenants nor occupant turnover — though two former tenants have been assisted in finding lodging elsewhere when
they proved not to be the “right fit for the program,” he said.
“We know that we're going to be doing this development and when we execute the development, we are going to have to relocate some of the veterans that are there and kind of play a little bit of musical chairs,” Cottingham said. “So, we're leaving a little bit of our capacity to be able to accommodate that development.”
Early next year, Cottingham expects to begin construction on an estimated $5 million infrastructure project that will involve the installation of a new sewer system and an updated electric system, plus moving 10 new one-bedroom modular housing units onto the land. He said this week that they were in the final stages of pulling needed Santa Cruz County permits for the work.
“I consider it an extreme success that we've been able to house a lot of veterans for the last two years that would've been homeless otherwise,” Cottingham said. “Where a lot of other developments may have made the decision to just have the property vacant and fenced until it was ready for development, we've funded our own program to house these veterans. Because our goal, again, is to make sure these veterans stay housed.”
Last weekend, a special Veterans Day band fundraiser helped draw in about $8,000, after expenses, to bolster programming for the Vets Village, according to Cottingham.
Miles away, near the intersection of Park Avenue and the Highway 1 onramps, Novin Development also has made progress in preparing for its Park Haven Plaza modular housing development. Property owner Abe Novin said in an update to the Sentinel last month that his team had poured the foundation and footing in preparation for the apartments' deliveries. Novin said at the time that he estimated project completion within seven to eight months after experiencing timeline setbacks over the winter, as with the Veterans Village.
“It will be really needed, quite honestly,” Novin said of the pending housing project.