Planning Commission gives the nod to Pacific Knolls development
Planning Commission gives the nod to Pacific Knolls development
This 24-unit residential development on Healdsburg Avenue has been working its way through the planning process since 2022
Last week, on August 27, the Sebastopol Planning Commission approved a tentative map and conditional use permit for a 24-unit residential development called Pacific Knolls, near the corner of Healdsburg and Murphy avenues.
The project proposes to build 12 small apartments (under 750 square feet) along Healdsburg Avenue and 12 attached townhomes (under 1,200 square feet) at the back of the property adjacent to Murphy Avenue.
These are being built as rentals, though project architect Kathy Austin said they might be available for sale in the future.
“The size of the apartment units are pretty small, 740 square feet and 590, and this is a size that isn’t readily available in town,” Austin said. “And I think that there’s a real need. There’s a lot of single people who need a place to live or a couple that could share a smaller space. And while one of the units will be deed restricted, I think just because of the size of the units, relative to somebody trying to make a house payment, that these would be a lot more affordable.”
“I try to address what’s called the ‘missing middle,’” she continued. “It’s both the missing middle housing type, but also middle-income, and so it’s designed for that. We hope that that will be the case by the time we finally build the project. We’ll see.”
Here’s the site layout of the development (below). The only significant change to this plan is that the driveway to Healdsburg Avenue will be moved to the other side of the apartment block (and the apartment block moved 15 or so feet north) per the traffic study on the project.
A few people spoke in opposition to the project, and all of them agreed on one thing: the traffic on Healdsburg Avenue is hellish as it is, and this project will likely make it worse.
Planning Commission member Paul Fritz argued that the development’s location would make it more walkable and bike-able than most, but commission member Deborah Burnes said realistically, that’s not how people live in this town.
“Most people who live in Sebastopol don’t work in Sebastopol,” she said. “Most people who live in Sebastopol, drive their children to school. It’s an older community in Sebastopol; they don’t carry their groceries three blocks.”
Although she shared commenters concerns about traffic, Burnes said, “I don’t think it’s something we can just put on this project, which is far down the road,” in terms of the planning process, she noted. “I think it’s something we as a city need to really address and look at—how do we have the infrastructure to keep up with all the demand—because infrastructure in Sebastopol is a huge issue in and of itself.”
Commission member Kathy Oetinger echoed this concern, “ I’m having more and more concern about how the state of California has these great plans for urban growth and how we ought to accommodate housing for all the different levels, but they’re asking small towns to accomplish things that we don’t have the infrastructure for. We don’t have freeways, we don’t have all the major collector streets, or we don’t have any hope of getting them. We can’t even repair the streets we have.”
Although commission member Seth Hanley said he sympathized with people’s concerns about traffic, he was in favor of approving Pacific Knolls.
“I think we have to be clear as a community about what it is we’re actually trying to achieve,” he said. “And if we say we need more affordable housing, but we don’t want to build it, then we have a problem. So this site, I think, ticks all the boxes. It’s downtown. It’s adjacent to main arterial routes, cycling and walking distance to town, stores, amenities … it’s dense and of a scale that I think people can actually afford. If we can’t make this work, then we can’t make any of it work.”
In the end, the members of the planning commission voted 4 to 0 to approve a tentative map and conditional use permit for Pacific Knolls. The next step for this development is the city council, which will likely discuss the project in October.
See the city planning department staff report on Pacific Knolls here.
What’s up with the project next door?
The Pacific Knolls project wraps around another small development—the one directly on the corner of Healdsburg and Murphy avenues that has been in construction for literally years. (It’s shown as the blank spot in the upper lefthand corner of the site map above.)
Austin, who is also the architect on that project, gave a quick update on what’s happening with that development.
“I designed the project for a local family, and they sold it to someone who turned out to be a crook, who not only took them for a ton of money—they’re the lender—but also did a terrible job in construction.”
Then, to complicate matters, he died.
Austin said that after a ton of legal rigamarole and lots of remediation and repairs, the project is finally nearing completion.
“I am very sorry that it’s been so hard for the community to see this,” Austin said. “It’s been terrible for me as the architect. I’ve never had anything like this happen before, and I’ve been doing this work for 30 years. It’s been an anomaly. However, the client that owns it now is a great guy. He’s working really hard to wrap it up and get tenants in there as soon as possible.”