Even as a 41-unit affordable housing apartment building takes shape at the city’s south entrance at Exchange Street, another even larger complex is moving toward construction on the north side, at Dry Creek Road near Grove Street.
The Dry Creek Commons, as Burbank Housing is calling their 58-unit apartments at 155 Dry Creek Rd., is rolling down the permitting pathway headed for a late-2023 construction start.
A city-owned property, it was acquired in 2003 for the development of low to moderate income housing by the city’s redevelopment agency. When the state dissolved redevelopment agencies in 2012, the city council elected to retain that purpose and assumed title for the 3.53 acre site.
Last month, Karen Massey of Burbank Housing presented the planning commission a revised vision of the project, to be located along Dry Creek Road behind Big John’s. A February workshop before the commission drew their general approval but asked for a handful of changes, and Burbank’s presentation this time sought the planning commission’s final approval.
General configuration of the two-building, four-story project remains unchanged, as Massey described it: “The project will provide 58 units, including 28 1-bedroom units, 15 2-bedroom units and 15 3-bedroom units. First priority to five units will be offered to Reach for Home. The total number of residents in the project is estimated at approximately 264 residents.” Rents would range between $595 and $1,729 per month.
The category of affordable housing need, measured in Average Mean Income (AMI) figures of between 30% and 60% of AMI, would be available to extremely-low, very-low and low-income families. All of the units in the project will be offered under an initial one-year lease, and all prospective residents will be required to meet eligibility and screening requirements, said Massey.
Five units offered to Reach for Home will be made available to their clients, clarified Massey, “including those who currently reside in interim housing and are in need of permanent housing.” Reach for Home is the Healdsburg nonprofit that seeks to find housing for the homeless North County population. They are also building out the L&M Village on the north end of town, to provide short-term shelter for the area’s homeless in 22 units at 15 Healdsburg Ave., again in cooperation with Burbank Housing.
Margaret Sluyk, CEO of Reach for Home, told the commission that people are wondering where residents are going to go from the L&M Village project, set to open later this year. That shelter is a first stop in the effort to rescue people from homelessness, but the five rooms at Dry Creek Commons would be an additional part of “the housing pipeline that we need to get to functional zero homeless here in Healdsburg.”
The planning commission’s issues with the February plan included an inadequate number of laundry facilities; concern about ingress/egress issues using a proposed left-turn lane onto Dry Creek Rd.; and building massing, siting and color scheme preferences.
Burbank addressed all of those concerns, upping the laundry room from seven to 14 appliances and adding a table for folding, and backing off a dark blue paint scheme to a more organic green. They threw in an expanded bicycle storage area from 32 to 60 spaces, at the urging of Commissioner Connor McKay. “This definitely exceeds what we usually see in a Burbank project,” said Massey. “It’s more in keeping with Davis or another college town.”
Parking and Gridlock
While several outstanding issues could be smoothed over at the more recent meeting Sept. 27—the color of the buildings still wasn’t quite right, and maybe they could use one more laundry station—as with most housing projects, parking and traffic became an overwhelming concern. With 264 projected residents, a parking lot for 104 vehicles, the physical challenges of getting into and out of the parking lot at one driveway without causing gridlock, or at least the potential for frustrated drivers, appeared insurmountable.
The complex’s parking lot is to be located on the east side of the project against the railroad tracks (a SMART right-of-way) and a Geysers Reclaimed Water pipeline easement which forbids any trees, pavement or lights along the length of the property on both the east and south sides. An additional city utility easement on Dry Creek pushes the setback almost 30 feet from the street itself.
Those easements, and the presence of a half acre of wetlands in the middle of the project site, “significantly constrained” the affordable housing developer in creating their plans, said Massey.
Initially the plans presented by Burbank called for a left or right turn option on exiting the lot. But the driveway on Dry Creek is too close to the pedestrian signal at the Foss Creek Pathway to make a left turn easily, and there’s currently a traffic island in the middle of Dry Creek that would need to be moved or removed.
The proposed option: a right turn only out of the parking lot, sending traffic west half a block to the Grove Street intersection, which would be reconfigured to allow a U-turn. That did not prove a popular solution.
“At this point, I do everything I can to avoid that intersection,” said Commissioner Carol Hunt, referring to the common backup at Dry Creek and Grove. “The U-turn and the whole traffic component gives me a lot of anxiety.”
Commissioner Jerry Eddinger, in one of his last meetings as a planning commissioner, was even more outspoken about the situation: “I know in my mind that it won’t work… It’s a mess right now, and we’ve already left it up to the city—and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way,” he said.
The idea of adding a U-turn option at Grove Street did little to cool Eddinger’s reaction. “It makes no sense that we should create an issue if we don’t have to,” he said, pointing out that there’s considerable commercial traffic onto Grove from Dry Creek anyway. “The city needs to take another look.”
“Yes, a U-turn is possible by shifting lane lines on Dry Creek Road to the north, allowing sufficient physical space for a U-Turn, without having to relocate curb lines,” said Public Works Director and City Engineer Larry Zimmer.
He added that while “there is limited ability to widen the intersection of Grove Street and Dry Creek Road because of existing structure and facility constraints,” the city has already looked at the possibility of roundabouts on Dry Creek at the 101 intersection to relieve backup at that junction.
Frustrated drivers like Commissioner Hunt may see some relief in such recent improvements as the addition of the flashing yellow left turn arrows on Dry Creek Road and other measures. “The city has recently (about a month ago) changed (fine tuned) the existing coordinated traffic signal timing at the intersections of Dry Creek/Grove, Dry Creek/Healdsburg and the Foss Creek Trail,” Zimmer told the Tribune on Oct. 17.
Phil Luks, the chair of the planning commission, tried to move the project along and leave the detail work—including the controversial U-turn option—to the engineers. “My overall sense is that whatever comes out tonight, it will be the wrong decision,” he said. “ I think we should in any case recommend to staff that they work with public works to continually monitor these things.”
So Luks moved to grant Burbank Housing the planning commission’s approval, with conditions that a new color be found, another laundry station be added and whatever is done about that ingress/egress problem would meet with the approval of the city when Burbank applies for a building permit.
“It is anticipated building permits will be applied for in early Spring 2023,” said Massey. “Construction is estimated to take approximately 18-24 months to complete.”
Additional information on the proposed affordable housing project can be found online at www.burbankhousing.org/coming-soon/155-dry-creek.
