The Sebastopol Area Senior Center is looking for a new place to call home
The senior center is outgrowing its little building on High Street
At the recent city council goal-setting meeting, Sebastopol Area Senior Center Director Katie Davis announced during public comment that the senior center had become so popular that it was actually having to turn people away from its events. The center has been growing by about 20% a year, Davis said. It got almost 30,000 visits last year from roughly 2,200 individuals at the center’s picturesque building on High Street—and they are simply running out of room.
“That number is just up and up and up, year over year,” Davis told the Sebastopol Times. “And the older population is just going to continue to increase. So we’re kind of at a pivotal point of growth. We’ve just maxed out of our center.”
Davis said they’re turning away about 100 people a month because the center’s classes and workshops are simply oversubscribed.
“Our staff really started noticing the waitlist issue about six to eight months ago,” Davis said. “Then maybe three months ago, we started an all-volunteer Expansion Committee.”
The Expansion Committee is made up of local community members and Senior Center board members, who are working together to figure out how to get more space for the senior center’s programs.
At first they considered expanding the center’s existing building, but Davis said every plan they came up with—enclosing the garage, expanding into their parking lot or the side yard—had problems.
“It seems like every time we talked about it, there’s a cost analysis that doesn’t really add up,” she said. “It’s expensive to do construction projects. And then there’s code issues and all kinds of ADA stuff that we’re trying to figure out. And we wouldn’t gain any meaningful amount of space from those kinds of changes.”
Searching for a new site
The Expansion Committee also began looking at other properties. Almost immediately, the perfect site appeared: the Church of Latter Day Saints property at 8100 Valentine Avenue in Sebastopol. The property is selling for $3,095,000 and has been on the market for almost a year.
“It was just a stunning building—tons of space, a big, big lot. It’s on [bus route] 24 so there’s public transit. It’s fairly walkable from downtown, though it’s not in the downtown corridor, which is not ideal. But anyway, unfortunately, I am told, the rumor is it was just sold to some developers, which is such a bummer for our community, because it was such an incredible space.” (The Sebastopol Times reached out to the realtor who represents this property, but we haven’t heard back from him yet to confirm its status.)
In the meantime, representatives from the senior center began meeting with the city of Sebastopol, which owns the current senior center building, to see if they could get the High Street property appraised.
“We had a meeting with a former city manager and the mayor and Mark [Rincón-Ibarra], the new public works guy, and a couple of our board members, talking about, ‘Okay, can we leverage the value of our property? Maybe the city can sell that property?’ she said. “It’s incredibly valuable. It’s got a commercial kitchen. It’s downtown. The zoning is commercial, too.”
According to Davis, “The former city manager approved the appraisal costs for the next fiscal year, so in July, at some point, we’ll be able to get an appraisal of the property, just so, if there’s a property that comes up for sale, maybe we can act on it a little quicker,” she said.
They’ve also considered other sites, including the old CVS building and the O’Reilly complex, each of which, according to Davis, had its own problems. The CVS building is priced at roughly $3 million and would require a huge renovation. O’Reilly would be a rental—and that’s a whole other headache.
“Right now, we are in a city building and so we pay $1 a year in rent,” Davis said, joking that she didn’t think the O’Reilly owner would meet that price. “If we move to a new place and have to pay rent, that could impact how we raise money and how we're able to offer services.”
What about a strategic partnership with another local nonprofit?
Davis said the senior center has also reached out to some other nonprofits, like the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center, to see if they’d like to look for a new building together.
“The community center is struggling with their building,” she said. “It’s not a long-term, viable solution, with being in the floodplain and all, and so, what if we could save this city overhead by kind of operating out of the same space?”
Davis is enormously grateful for the city’s commitment to the Senior Center, but she said it’s been a little hard to navigate communications within the city.
“I feel like there are some siloed conversations happening,” she said. “You know, the city has an ad hoc committee dedicated to the library, which is serving so many families of people and youth, and they’re out of space. And then the city has an ad hoc committee to figure out the Community Center building. I don’t know how these ad hocs are communicating or if they’re thinking strategically. I’m not sure. But that’s my plea to the city: can we have a more concerted, strategic conversation so that all of the needs can be met?”
Mayor Stephen Zollman has floated his vision for creating a large civic and nonprofit hub, that could house the library, city hall, the senior center and many of the city’s nonprofits. Davis said she’s heard about this plan through the city’s nonprofit collaborative.
“He wants to advocate for the hub, which I think is great. But I feel like it’s a little abstract at this point. I’m a little worried that it might take too long, and we’ve got seniors that need services now,” Davis said. “But yes, we’re very willing to continue that conversation. I just, quite frankly, don’t know if it will come to fruition.”
In the meantime
In the meantime, the senior center has started holding classes at other sites around town.
“In the short term, we’ve just added four new classes at Soft Medicine. They’re giving us a killer deal on rent in one of their downstairs spaces, so that’s been great,” Davis said. “We’ve also worked with Wischemann Hall for a long time. So we do classes over there, and then we do the Dance Art Space. So we’re kind of doing all this off-site programming—kind of trying to put a band-aid on the wait list.”
“We’ll continue to explore off-site spaces, but the intent is to offer a kind of hub for seniors to come in and have a meal, meet with friends, socialize, take a class and get wraparound services,” she said. “And when we piecemeal and do things off-site, they don’t get that same level of service.”
It’s been an idea of mine for a long time to have a multigenerational, non-profit hub with preschool, seniors and teens in the same building!
It has become apparent that Rite Aide (218 N Main) has become an untenable business operation. Most of its stock has dwindled to much less than optimal. Has there been any investigation of its status? It would be an ideal location for a community hub.