Canopy development good to go
Design Review Board approved the 80-unit condominium development at the north end of town on Tuesday
City Ventures’ Canopy project—an 80-unit, three-story, solar all-electric condominium project behind the O’Reilly buildings on the north end of town—got the go-ahead this week when Sebastopol’s Design Review Board unanimously approved the project—despite two of the board members’ serious reservations.
The Sebastopol City Council had already approved the project on a four to one vote on April 2. (Councilmember Sandra Maurer was the dissenting vote; she agreed with the development’s neighbors that it was out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood.)
The Design Review Board’s approval was really just the cherry on top—and a rather pre-ordained cherry, given that the developer had applied under SB330, otherwise known as the Housing Crisis Act of 2019.
This act requires that the city use only “objective design standards” to judge the development and limits the number of public meetings and hearings to five. The Design Review Board was the fifth and last meeting—the final hoop the developer had to jump through.
It was a strangely anticlimactic moment. Afterall, the project had been in the works for six years.
According to City Ventures vice president Samantha Hauser, “The project was first discussed with the city in 2018, and it was brought to the DRB and Planning Commission for study sessions in 2019. That was a plan for 103 homes, and they were still at that point two and three stories. Based on all of the feedback that we received, we really increased the distance from the property line; we worked on designing around the trees; and then we reduced the amount of homes from 103 down to 80 with 16 ADUs that are on the ground floor of some of the homes. (They're not separate units.)”
Despite the redesign, the development will require the removal of 43 trees from the 6.1 acre site, 29 of them protected native trees such as oaks, firs, and redwoods—something tree board and DRB member Christine Level characterized as an “environmental disaster that we were forced into by the state.” Level insisted that the tree portion of the design be voted on separately. It passed on a narrow 3 to 2 vote with Level and Board Member Lynn Deedler abstaining.
There will still be almost 100 mature trees left on the site.
Level and Deedler weren’t the development’s only opponents in the room. Several of its neighbors, who had opposed the project in the past for reasons of its size and scale, were in the chamber or on Zoom during the meeting. Because public hearings had already been held at the city council meeting on April 2 and a previous DRB meeting, no public comment was allowed on this topic.
Who is Canopy for?
Canopy is a market-rate development, and its 3-bedroom units will sell for between $600,000 and $800,000. Ten percent of the units are required to be sold as “affordable,” and these will sell for between $300,000 and $400,000.
“The goal here was to bring high quality housing that’s attainable to young families and first time homebuyers,” Hauser said, and in fact the development has playgrounds and family-friendly pedestrian paths.
But it’s also been designed with seniors in mind.
“Through the community meeting process and through both study sessions that we had, we heard a lot of feedback on how the city really wanted to cater to seniors,” Hauser said, “so something like 36% of the homes are ADA-accessible, and that doesn't include the ADUs. With the ADUs, it’s over 50% ADA accessible.”
How could a three-story home be ADA accessible? The answer: the ADA-accessible units have elevators.
Hauser said City Ventures hopes to have building permits in hand by the end of the year, which means they could start building, weather permitting, by next spring.
“It really depends on the weather,” Hauser said.
I'd like to clarify that it was not just that the city council held a public hearing, the design review board held its own public hearing allowing members of the public to comment at its first 'final' meeting of the Canopy project in April. The meeting this week was a continuance of the April design review board meeting and therefore there was no additional public comment period, nor was one required.