A construction crane hangs over Tennyson Street. June 14, 2024.
Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
As Tennyson Street has boomed over the past decade, local business owners have experienced perks and problems from all that massive development in the Berkeley neighborhood.
Certainly, hundreds of new homes mean hundreds of new potential customers — and many business owners Denverite spoke to said that’s a good thing.
For Jimmy Funkhouser — the owner of Feral, an outdoor gear store at 3936 Tennyson St. — the new homes and greater density have given him more shoppers. He’s all about what the developers are doing.
Well, almost.
Funkhouser grew tired of the city shutting down streets and sidewalks with too little notice when cranes moved in and out to construct those new developments. His business suffered the consequences.
For years, he wouldn’t find out about the closures until he showed up to work.
“Back then, most of the closures happened on weekdays, because it was just kind of understood that closing the street on a Saturday or Sunday was extremely disruptive,” Funkhouser said.
Still, surprises disrupted business, so he and others in the Tennyson Berkeley Business Association advocated for more notice from developers and the city.
And largely, that’s happened.
But the weekday closure timing has shifted.
“Over the last year, that started to change,” Funkhouser said. “We came to discover through observation that the majority of the closures were actually being approved for Saturday and Sunday, and we hadn’t really received any information on why that change happened,” Funkhouser said.
That was a disaster for Feral and other businesses.
“We do about half of our business on Saturday and about 70 to 80 percent of our business over the weekend,” Funkhouser said.
The FERAL Outdoor Gear Shop on Tennyson Street in Berkeley. June 14, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
So why is the DOTI issuing permits for street and sidewalk closures over weekends?
Cyndi Karvaski, a spokesperson for DOTI, said one of the agency’s big goals is to keep traffic moving, especially during weekday commutes. This means the city will only issue permits between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. on weekdays.
But on weekends, the city will permit closures between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., giving companies a longer window of time to move their cranes in and out.
A weekday permit can often result in a longer shutdown than a weekend permit, because the companies need more than seven hours to complete their work.
Also, DOTI has more factors than just local businesses to consider. Residents are affected by closures, as are local fire stations and schools.
But Funkhouser said Tennyson shutdowns have more impact on everyone during the weekends.
“Sure we all see the traffic problems and congestion problems that are happening in Denver, but Tennyson Street is not a commuter street,” Funkhouser said. “It’s not a street that people drive down to get to work.”
While moving the crane loading to the weekend was designed, in part, to increase safety, Funkhouser said doing so has the opposite effect.
“Safety issues come with doing this work on the weekend,” he said. “They’re literally parking cranes in the middle of the street on a busy Saturday, when traffic on Tennyson Street is four or five times what it would be on a weekday.”
The agency has told business owners the city would consider avoiding weekend closures on a case-by-case basis, but doing so would require approval from multiple people within the agency and slow things down.
People hang out outside MOB Coffee on Tennyson Street in Berkeley. June 14, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
The business owners met with Councilmember Amanda Sandoval who helped broker a conversation with DOTI.
Sandoval, whose family owned a business in the area that suffered through shutdowns related to countless construction problems, says she understands the business owners’ frustration.
Several years back, she worked with neighborhood business associations and the city to stop shutdowns during holidays, when shopping traffic is up.
She’s even explored the possibility of shutting down side streets instead of Tennyson over the weekends, but doing so has proved too cumbersome.
“The city’s too busy to get into a nuanced position where they can just say yes during the summertime on closing these other side streets and maintaining these local collectors open,” she said. “It’s just too complicated.”
Even so, she acknowledges shops and restaurants struggle to make ends meet during frequent shutdowns.
While the city offers funds to support businesses affected by long-term construction project closures, one-off incidents don’t apply. Most of the Tennyson closures last one day or two, as cranes go in or out, and are not an ongoing inconvenience. As such, the businesses aren’t eligible for available city support.
Ultimately, as Sandoval sees it, the businesses will benefit from hundreds of new customers in the area.
Funkhouser agrees. He just wishes the city planned according to his neighborhood’s business patterns and quit shutting down during prime shopping hours.
“It’s just crushing some of the businesses on the street right now, in a period where things are already pretty difficult,” Funkhouser said.
Benjamin and Christine Granillo bought their 2.25-acre property in San Bernardino County four decades ago. They built their home by hand and surrounded it with a lush grove of avocado, orange and lemon trees.
“We thought we’d be here for the rest of our life,” Christine Granillo, 77, said as she tended to her trees on a recent afternoon.
But their neighborhood in unincorporated Bloomington is rapidly transforming, as developers convert the 10 Freeway and its adjacent communities into a logistics corridor connecting goods shipped into Southern California ports with online shoppers across the nation. An industrial real estate company based in Orange County is demolishing 117 homes and ranches in rural Bloomington to make way for more than 2 millionsquare feet of warehousing space. The project will serve as yet another distribution center dedicated to storing and moving the vast array of products consumers want delivered to their doorsteps.
Benjamin and Christine Granillo, who built their home by hand in rural Bloomington, will soon look out on a sprawling online fulfillment center.
All the neighbors across the street from the Granillos sold their homes to the developer, and many have already been bulldozed. The Granillos opted not to sell — and now look out their stately front gate at the rubble, soon to be supplanted with a 479,000-square-foot fulfillment center. Their street will become a busy truck route. Next door will be a parking lot with hundreds of truck and trailer stalls.
Christine Granillo mourns the loss of her neighbors and her view of the San Bernardino Mountains. But, she added, “What can you do about it? There’s really nothing you can do about it.”
In November 2022, San Bernardino County supervisors voted 4-0 to approve the Bloomington Business Park, a 213-acre industrial park that promises to bring several thousand jobs to Bloomington, a majority Latino community of 23,000 residents.
The deal came with trade-offs familiar to the Inland Empire communities being asked to shoulder the massive distribution centers integral to America’s online shopping habit: An environmental impact report found the development would have “significant and unavoidable” impacts on air quality. But it would bring jobs to a working-class community in need of them, and Howard Industrial Partners has pledged to provide millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements: new streets with traffic lights and sidewalks; a modern sewer system in an area that still relies on aging septic systems.
And because the warehouse project would be about 50 feet from Zimmerman Elementary School, the developer agreed to pay $44.5 million to the Colton Joint Unified School District in a land swap that will usher in a state-of-the-art school nearby.
Joaquin Castillejos, with the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, advocates for residents whose neighborhoods are targeted for warehouse projects. But he said people are feeling the impact of years of poor planning.
Gary Grossich, a member of Bloomington’s Municipal Advisory Council, recommended that supervisors support the development. Surrounding cities like Rialto and Fontana are embracing warehouse development, he said, and this was an opportunity for Bloomington to reap the benefits of a booming industry.
“The warehouse industry was the hot market,” he said, “and that was the only way that myself and others could see that we were going to get to the greater good, which is to get more sheriff’s deputies, more public safety, more services for our community and eventually balance our books.”
Mike Tunney, vice president of development at Howard Industrial Partners, said the developer shares those goals. “Overcoming these types of challenges and opportunities are the fundamental tenets of our development philosophy,” Tunney said.
But the project has left Bloomington fractured, with a stinging sense of winners and losers: Many who sold their homes say they got a good price and were happy to move on, while many of the neighbors left behind see a future with more concrete and semi-trailers and a hollowing out of the community’s rural culture.
Esmeralda Tabares, left, calls the conversion of rural neighborhoods to industrial developments “just a complete shift in the culture and lifestyle” of Bloomington.
Esmeralda Tabares, 23, part of a group called Concerned Neighbors of Bloomington, described the transition from rural residential to industrial development as “just a complete shift in the culture and lifestyle we have.” Many Bloomington residents ride horses; her family owns a plant nursery.
She questions why San Bernardino County is relying on a developer to provide the community with critical infrastructure such as sidewalks and sewers.
“It’s just easier for them to shift to a warehouse and say, ‘Well, we’re going to let them come in and take over your community,’” she said. “But now what community is that going to be? Because they’re taking people out, and soon who’s going to go to the school? Who’s going to live here?”
Agents associated with Howard Industrial Partners approached Raquel Diaz several years ago about selling her home in a Bloomington neighborhood a mile south of the 10 Freeway with an offer that wouldn’t go through until the county approved the project.
She and her family had purchased their home in 2012 for $140,000. It was the first home for her family of five, she said, and they were “super excited.” But the three-bedroom house on Locust Avenue quickly became a nightmare.
The house flooded whenever it rained. It reeked of moisture, and she and her husband worried about raising young kids amid mold.
Their street had no sidewalks, but that didn’t stop people from speeding by in their cars. Accidents were alarmingly common, she said. Her kids were forbidden from checking the street-side mailbox or taking out the trash.
“We ended up with a lemon of a house,” she said. “We were happy to be in Bloomington, and it just didn’t end up working out for us.”
By the time the county approved the warehouse development, home prices across Southern California had skyrocketed. Diaz said the developer encouraged them to find a home they wanted to buy — even if it cost above the price they had originally negotiated — and to make sure it was on a hill. The company would cover the cost.
Unincorporated Bloomington is transforming, as developers look to raze neighborhoods near the 10 Freeway to create a logistics corridor dedicated to online shopping needs.
They selected a five-bedroom, five-bathroom home in Highland, a nearby suburb at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains, and closed on the property in January 2023 for $1.05 million. The 3,800-square-foot home has a pool and views. It’s on a sewer system, and while their residential street doesn’t have sidewalks, the nearby roads have sidewalks and bike lanes.
“It still feels unreal where we ended up,” she said. “It’s beautiful. I completely love where I live.”
Diaz has heard other residents say that homeowners were harassed and pressured to sell. She is adamant that’s not the case.
“No one is forcing me out,” she said. “It was a blessing to get the opportunity to be able to have a new start.”
Carolina Rios also saw the developer’s offer as an opportunity.
Rios and her family paid $225,000 for their Bloomington home and lived there about 13 years. She has fond memories of the three-bedroom house on Laurel Avenue: She threw her daughter’s quinceañera there, and she and her husband were married in the yard.
But the house was old, and instead of storm drains, the homes on her street had pipes under the driveways that flowed into ditches. The street flooded every time it rained. They had to walk atop pallets and bricks to cross the yard.
“Across the street, their ditch was 24/7, 365 days a year full of water and mosquitoes and raccoons and snakes and all sorts of fun wildlife to go to the zoo and look at,” she said. “But not in my house, around my kids.”
She agreed to sell in 2016; she said the developer adjusted the purchase price in 2023 — to $1.4 million — after the county approved the project, in recognition of rising home prices. In late December, she closed on a new house in Riverside with an extra bedroom, a swimming pool and an enclosed patio. She paid $1.2 million in cash.
She knows some people are opposed to warehouse development, but she says the industry is bringing good jobs. Her oldest children, ages 27 and 24, both work at a FedEx warehouse in Bloomington, where they have flexible hours and get frequent raises, she said.
Jessie Ortiz practices roping skills in the backyard of his family’s Bloomington home.
While some homeowners seized on the opportunity to move out of Bloomington, Felipe and Blanca Ortiz felt blindsided when their landlord agreed to sell the ranch home they were renting.
The Ortizes and their four children have lived on the two-acre property for more than a decade. They’ve maintained their family traditions from the Mexican state of Morelos, raising horses, goats and chickens on their small property.
They loved riding their horses through the hills behind their home, and regularly traveled to other cities to ride their horses in parades, decked out in traditional Mexican cowboy and cowgirl attire. They organized 100-horse processions as fundraisers for neighbors in need.
“It’s their entire lives,” Felipe Ortiz said, as he shared TikTok videos of his kids performing on horseback.
Felipe Ortiz and his family are being evicted from the ranch home they have rented for more than a decade.
In February, the family got a notice informing them their rental agreement would end in 60 days. It came from a company connected to Timothy Howard of Howard Industrial Partners — the only indication the family had that their rental home had been sold.
That same day, footage from the Ortiz family’s security camera shows an excavator knocking down the chain link gate in front of the ranch. The two youngest Ortiz kids, ages 6 and 12, were home at the time. The family viewed it as an act of intimidation.
Tunney, with Howard Industrial Partners, said it was “regrettable” that the previous owner didn’t disclose the sale to the Ortiz family.
“Additionally, it was not disclosed to us that there were occupants on the property,” Tunney said. “The incident with the excavator was inadvertent as the operator was scheduled to work at a nearby site and confused the addresses.”
Several months later, the family is still living in the home, waiting out the eviction process. Ortiz says he is struggling to find another property that will accommodate the family of six and their eight horses. As their search wears on, he said, his kids are traumatized. His youngest returns from school each day wondering if their home has been knocked down.
“Every day, the machines pass by here to knock down homes behind us,” Ortiz said. “And you’re left with the fear that they are coming to knock down our house.”
As homes are demolished in rural Bloomington to make way for a warehousing project, the neighbors who remain look out at rubble.
As the demolitions proceed, a coalition of environmental groups has sued San Bernardino County and Howard Industrial Partners, trying to halt the project. The lawsuit, alleging violations of state environmental and fair housing laws, seeks to vacate the county’s approval and require a more “meaningful” review.
Adrian Martinez is deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice, the group representing the plaintiffs. He called their effort a key moment in “the fight against the freight industry and its disregard for public health.”
“There are people who don’t want these warehouses in their communities and they just want to be left with peace,” Martinez said. “I think the inflection point is this kind of misguided notion that to give a community resources, you have to stuff thousands of trucks in the community and air pollution. And there’s no place in the country that this story is more robust than the Inland Empire and Bloomington in particular.”
A hearing is scheduled for later this month in San Bernardino County Superior Court.
“Everyday, the machines pass by here to knock down homes behind us,” Felipe Ortiz says of his family’s plight. “And you’re left with the fear that they are coming to knock down our house.”
Meanwhile, just a couple miles away, residents in southeastern Bloomington are starting to hear from developers interested in building more warehouses in the area.
Daniela Vargas, 24, said her parents bought their house there more than two decades ago. For her parents, both Mexican immigrants, it’s a deep source of pride to own a home they could pass down to their four children.
Vargas’ family raises chickens on their land, but the surrounding area is pockmarked with industry. Just a short drive from the family’s home is another warehouse complex, a railroad and the 10 Freeway.
Recently, they’ve received phone calls and “strange-looking mail” from developers interested in buying their home, Vargas said: “It looks like a check that says, ‘Here’s X amount of money, call us to make it real.’”
She said her family doesn’t want to leave, but it feels inevitable that their neighborhood will be the next to transform.
“Anyone that moves out of Bloomington, it’s all valid reasoning,” Vargas said. “My family is really prideful. But if the decision comes that warehouses are going to be developed here and everybody is leaving, we can’t remain with so much pollution around us, with so much traffic and with no real neighbors or neighborhood amenities.”
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative,funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to addressCalifornia’s economic divide.
Amazon has received zoning approval to construct a new data center campus near two nuclear power plants in Luzerne County. The campus would be for Amazon Web Services, the subsidiary that leads the world in providing cloud computing services to a wide range of organizations.
The multibillion dollar project is planned for land near the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station reactors in Salem Township – about 130 miles north of Philadelphia. In March, Amazon purchased an existing, nuclear-powered data center at the site from Talen Energy and sought to have about 1,600 acres rezoned to build another 15 data center buildings.
On Tuesday, Salem Township approved the creation of an industrial district that will enable Amazon to complete the project over the coming decade, the Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice reported.
Amazon anticipates the project will create up to 600 jobs. The company’s primary data center for Amazon Web Services is in Virginia.
Amazon officials said the choice of the land was partly motivated by its proximity to the nuclear reactors and a nearby natural gas power plant. The two nuclear reactors are slated to be decommissioned in 2042 and 2044, although they could have their licenses extended.
As part of the redevelopment, the township’s board of supervisors previously agreed to give Amazon a 10-year tax break on the project at a 70% discount. Once the incentive expires, the township anticipates the project will generate roughly $7 million in local tax revenue.
In 2018, Amazon had included Philadelphia and Pittsburgh among 20 finalist cities for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. The company touted the possibility of 50,000 jobs and a $5 billion investment, but ultimately selected a pair of sites in Arlington, Virginia and New York City. Amazon later canceled its plans in New York City amid backlash over tax breaks for the project. The company has only completed the first phase of its project in Arlington. Construction of the second phase — an ambitious building called the Helix — was paused last year amid a company evaluation of its hybrid work policies. Work also was paused on office projects in Nashville, Tennessee, and Bellevue, Washington — not far from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.
When Philadelphia fell short in its bid for HQ2, some experts suggested the project might have created affordability issues in the city and crowded out other companies concerned about long-term competition for workers.
At the public hearing in Salem Township, some residents reportedly shared concerns that shifting from agricultural to industrial zoning would devalue their land. Some said Amazon had approached them with offers to purchase their land to expand the area of the campus.
Amazon Web Services accounts for about one-third of the global market share for cloud computing, followed by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud among the biggest providers. This week, Amazon Web Services appointed longtime sales and marketing executive Matt Garman as its new CEO and revealed the company is in talks to invest billions of dollars in Italy to expand its growing presence in Europe.
From where crane operator Anthony Villalobos sits high above the city most days, he can see Denverites going about their business. People set up tents next to the South Platte River. Joggers push strollers, and endless cars pass.
Villalobos notices hundreds of people each day, but they rarely look up, much less see him. They’re too busy staring into their phones. So he meets them there, on TikTok, where he shares popular tidbits about crane mechanics, keeping loads stable in high winds and sometimes just taking in the view.
“If I do a skyline video, I try to throw something motivational — a voiceover or something — on there,” he explained. “I feel like I’ve got a lot to say.”
Crane operator and TikTok phenom Anthony Villalobos on his rig over a Sun Valley construction site. May 24, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
If you’ve ever wondered why so many cranes sport American flags (they’re DIY wind monitors), how cranes stay upright in high winds (they’re buried deep in the ground), or where crane operators actually are (often on a platform at the top of the crane), Villalobos has an answer.
The most common question he gets: Where do you relieve yourself when you’re on top of a crane? The answer: In a bottle.
Sometimes he’s poignant. Sometimes he’s funny. Sometimes he’s technical. He’s always giving Denverites a perspective on our city few others have.
Before operating cranes, Villalobos, who goes by Colorado Crane Guy online, served as a trainer in the Army for 12 years.
Afterwards, he worked in the oil fields for roughly a decade, running heavy equipment and moving coil tubing. He trained to be a crane operator and used his new-found skill to move drilling rigs. The work paid well, and there was never a shortage of hours.
“The hours were just insane,” he said. “There’s a week I got paid for every hour in the week, because I couldn’t leave the location. I didn’t have to stay awake for all those hours, but they needed somebody on site.”
During the pandemic, work in the oil fields came to a halt, and Villalobos moved back home to Colorado Springs.
Crane operator and TikTok phenom Anthony Villalobos and the rig he’s currently working in Sun Valley. May 24, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
There, he contacted a construction superintendent he knew, who said his company needed crane operators. So he went to San Antonio, Texas and trained with the National Crane Certification and Inspection Co.
To receive his license, Villalobos had to complete a test with dozens of questions. Then came his practical skills test, including a challenging Z-pattern maneuver with the crane that sent many aspiring crane operators packing.
He passed his tests and then got a job with Stafford, who helped him transition from mobile cranes to tower cranes, the sort that are built on a job site and stay fixed in place until construction has been completed.
Crane operator and TikTok phenom Anthony Villalobos on his rig over a Sun Valley construction site. May 24, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Villalobos’ first Denver project was with Shaw Construction, working on two buildings on either side of 6th Ave. and Lipan St.
“Those buildings are mine in a sense,” he said. “I got most of that project done before they needed me to move over to the Opus job at California and Colfax.”
Now, he’s working on a job at I-25 and Colfax, across the street from Mile High Stadium, for Mortenson Construction. He likes the spot because it’s somewhat removed from Downtown. The site gives him better views of the city’s skyline.
Crane operator and TikTok phenom Anthony Villalobos climbs down from his rig over a Sun Valley construction site. May 24, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Villalobos spends all day in the sky. He makes videos. He eats a lunch of lean protein and veggies to lose weight ahead of his wedding. He reads books and listens to true crime and politics podcasts. And he works on his faith, looking out over the city.
“I like it at night when Meow Wolf has got their lights on and the Downtown skyline’s lit up,” he said.
Villalobos is slated to finish operating the crane at the current site in late summer, early fall, and he’s unsure where his next project will be.
Every morning it takes Villalobos an hour to drive from Colorado Springs to Denver, and his commute home can take twice that. He sometimes thinks of moving up to Denver, to be closer to the developments, but he prefers staying in Colorado Springs, where his father lives and his fiance has a freshman in high school.
He’d love to get a job in the Denver Tech Center, much closer to his home.
Crane operator and TikTok phenom Anthony Villalobos’s rig over a Sun Valley construction site. May 24, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Better yet, he hopes that Colorado Springs will be moving forward with a controversial high-rise tower that would transform its downtown skyline. He’d love to be the operator of that crane — if the community doesn’t block the building.
“Colorado Springs is huge,” he said. “And El Paso County is going to probably reach a million people if it hasn’t already. So no, it’s not Denver, but you can’t keep spreading out in my opinion. You kind of have to start going up to some degree.”
The job pays well, even if it comes with some risks — more to other people than himself.
“You get guys on the ground complaining about the crane operators making a lot of money,” he said. “But I tried to tell them, basically, that I don’t get paid a lot because my job is hard. I get paid a lot because, if I make a mistake, I could kill you.”
Happily, he’s never had an accident in his career, though he studies them as they occur around the world to learn from the mistakes and accidents of others.
“The wind is the biggest concern,” he explained. “We pick up walls all the time. And even if it’s three or 4,000 pounds, it will act like a kite. It will start to spin up first. And if the wind is really bad, it will actually start to lift up to where you’re losing control of the load. And once it’s horizontal, it’s very difficult to regain control.”
But wind isn’t the only danger. Lightning can cause havoc, too.
The crane serves as a massive lightning rod, and it’s the people on the ground, near the crane, who face the gravest danger.
His crane’s been struck by lightning before when he was on the platform, but because it was buried in 35 feet of concrete, it was well grounded.
“I didn’t even feel it,” he said. “It was really loud. We had lightning all around us. But afterwards, I didn’t feel it. It struck the top very most light, the aviation light at the top. And I heard the lightning and I seen little pieces of the light falling down.”
Crane operator and TikTok phenom Anthony Villalobos climbs down from his rig over a Sun Valley construction site. May 24, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
The guys on the ground called him on the radio.
“Tony, Tony are you okay?” they said.
“Yeah.”
“You just got struck by lightning.”
“Oh, that’s what that was?”
The risks, from climbing the crane tower every morning to braving the weather, are worth the pride Villalobos feels running the tower crane and creating new buildings.
“We change the skyline,” he says.
The bigger the building, the bigger the mark. He’s gone up to 370 feet, or roughly 14 stories, but he’d like to go far higher.
When he looks at a building he’s helping build, he sees his legacy.
“This building will be here long after I’m dead,” he said. “My grandkids will say, ‘Grandpa put that building up.’”
Crane operator and TikTok phenom Anthony Villalobos on his rig over a Sun Valley construction site. May 24, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
From the perspective of a Downtown Cleveland optimist, the area spells promise for the near future as far as development is concerned.
A new Rock & Hall of Fame extension is coming. Bedrock just broke ground on its $2 billion riverfront neighborhood. And Mayor Justin Bibb’s Lakefront Plan’s likelihood got a boost after his Shore-to-Core-to-Shore tax-increment financing plan was passed earlier this year by City Council.
But, a group of students at Cleveland State’s College of Urban Affairs asked recently: What is to be done with Downtown’s prime piece of transit potentially linking—key word being potentially—all of the area’s newest points of interest?
That is to say, how do we ensure the Waterfront Line, the RTA’s two-mile line of track that hasn’t been in daily service since 2021, doesn’t miss out on Cleveland’s trajectory forward and serves as a reliable connector?
Such speculation was at the heart of the study released this week by a team of 16 graduate students, a plan detailing, in a highly-comprehensive 125 pages how the city, the county and the RTA could efficiently makeover the line and idling land around it. A plan that cried with a resounding voice: build housing, build housing, build housing.
“Right now, there are a lot of great opportunities, but there’s not a residential density that supports the Waterfront Line,” John Miesle, 29, a graduate student and member of 17th Street Studios, the moniker the CSU team gave to their cohort project, told Scene. “There’s not a commercial density that could support it. That could support 24-hour rail service.”
John Miesle, a graduate student in CSU’s College of Urban Affairs, helped, with 15 others, create a capstone class’ massive makeover plan for RTA’s flailing Waterfront Line.
Miesle’s lament, common amongst transit advocates, revolves around the cry to reopen the Waterfront Line to how it used to function before it went out of commission following the need for necessary repairs in the fall of 2021.
Although the RTA teased its comeback by running the line during Browns Sunday home games last season, the result—and ridership—was somewhat disappointing. Only 2,300 Clevelanders and Browns fans rode the line on average each football Sunday; twenty-two years ago, in 2002, the entire light rail system (including the Green and Blue lines) clocked about 259,000 riders per month.
Hence 17th Street Studios’ central thesis. The team believes that, like found in light rail systems in Denver and Minneapolis, the Waterfront Line could see a whopping comeback if large amounts of shops and apartments were built nearby it, primarily on the vacant parking lots built decades ago to meet a perceived demand for cars.
Like the actual feat of reviving the lingering waterfront in general, the students’ ideas are quite massive in both scale and financial heft.
Along with trails and bike paths up and down West 3rd and East 9th, the students suggest a new connection—with a line of townhomes—linking East 18th St. to the easternmost South Harbor Station. (Near where Noble Beast Brewing is.) Over in the Flats East Bank, redoing West 10th with a tree line and erecting a brand new Settlers Garage to consolidated parking demand left by new housing a few blocks north.
And, of course, the plan’s pièce de résistance: linking the South Harbor Station and the Tri-C Station with an on-street track line running down East 17th, a line that would link Historic Chinatown, Playhouse Square and Cleveland State with, for the first time ever, an actual route.
Part of the study suggested better connectors to Waterfront Line stations, like a bike lane linking West 3rd pedestrians to its station near Cleveland Browns Stadium.
The master recommendation from CSU’s year-long study: suggestions for housing in orange, and new or improved green space in green.
In urbanist parlance, that’s transit-oriented development, homes erected as close to transit stations as city permits will allow. Which should in theory lead to, the students believe, “increasing density, getting parking right, providing safe connections, fostering vibrant public spaces, and prioritizing affordable housing.”
“As the area becomes more livable, walkable, and connected, this will attract more residents and visitors and increase demand for regular light rail service,” it added. “This, in turn, will make the Waterfront Line an even more convenient and attractive option for getting around, thereby creating a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone.”
The key word being everyone. Though Downtown’s population has grown 41% in the past decade or so, the growth has been mostly composed of white people in their mid-to-late twenties and thirties. RTA’s average rider, which it has long catered to, is a carless Black woman in her twenties making less than $25,000 a year.
17th Street’s study, which echoes Bibb’s calls for equity on the lakefront, makes an attempt to bridge the gaps left by demographics and pure economics. (And those who can afford a car in the first place.)
Either near the Settlers Landing Station or the Muni Lots hugging the North Coast Station on East 9th, the students suggest, based on housing data, that there’s “unmet demand” for some 1,840 apartment units. And units of varying rent levels. In one analysis of the Historic Flats, the students found that 400 units clocking $456/month would be worthwhile to build—just as some 500 units charging renters $1,902/month.
But, as 17th Street’s shiny renderings give off, anything is better than barren concrete lots. In the Muni Lot West, they imagine a shipping container park and mid-rises. In “The Pit,” the gargantuan lot south of the Browns Stadium, some 70,000 square feet of day cares, pet goods stores, apartments and restaurants.
Both the demand and promise for defeating RTA’s, and transit in general, oldest stigma as lesser than car trips comes straight from 17th Street’s survey of hundreds of Clevelanders, about half of which claimed they would ride the Waterfront Line even if they didn’t own a car. A little more than half called the line “not convenient”; two-fifths found the train cars took “too long”; twenty percent couldn’t find the RTA sufficiently safe.
“The Flats have lost their color,” another stakeholder wrote. “Everything is gray.”
“Public transit has a stigma,” another said.
Thomas Hilde, a professor who co-teaches, with James Kastelic, the “Planning Studio” graduate course that produced the study over the past two semesters, told Scene that his students came to the typical conclusion that planners have long arrived at: defeating RTA’s “unsafe” perception and increasing its riders are parallel goals.
“I think that’s the biggest challenge, just getting more people” on the line, Hilde said. “Like Jane Jacobs said in the 1960s—eyes on the street, just having people present. That’s the best way of changing that perception.”
But could the city actually build all of this? Will developers, often skeptical observing rising construction costs and steep lending rates, see the vision promulgated by a series of optimistic planners in their mid-to-late twenties?
Hilde thinks so, to some extent.
“Many of these planning studio projects have influenced real outcomes in the city,” he told Scene. He cited “Balancing Broadway,” 2022’s study of Lorain’s Main Street. “They’ve taken off! I mean, not as they’re written, but they’re influential. And they contribute to the conversation.
The Arcade could become the host to the Cleveland Cultural Center, a conglomeration of ethnic museums and restaurants.
There’s the Hungarian Museum in Erieview. There’s the Italian American Museum in Little Italy. And the mostly obfuscated and private museum over Emperor’s Palace restaurant in Historic Chinatown.
A recent plan asks the question: What if we assembled all of these cultural collections into one place.
And have that place be none other than the Downtown Arcade.
It’s the dream of a conceptual plan drafted up lately by Sandvick Architects, the firm that spearheaded the Arcade’s $60 million renovation in 1999, and former head of the Gateway District Neighborhood Corporation Tom Yablonsky. The team’s nearly-completed pitch to Arcade owners Skyline Investments is a two-birds-one-stone deal: fill the nearly 60% empty building with a cosmopolitan spin.
That is, as recent plans show, a so-called Cleveland Cultural Center. Occupying the currently vacant 18 spaces on the Euclid and Superior levels would be an opportunity for a specific ethnic group to rep its traditions—via a bite-size museum, walls of video, through lectures and music, or selling wares.
Or food. Five of the empty kitchen stalls would be occupied by culinary legs of these cultural groups.
Yablonsky, currently a consultant for a number of downtown development projects, believes that clustering dozens of different culturally focused outposts in a building that—architecturally speaking—is already a cultural melange could boost the Arcade’s vibrancy beyond weekend weddings, lunchtime loungers and hotel guests at the upstairs Hyatt Regency. (Sandvick and Skyline Investments did not respond to calls for comment in time.)
And take influence from arguably the Arcade’s best pasttime: hosting thousands during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in March. “Imagine experiencing a Kenyan Mombasa carnival,” the plans read, “or Chinese New Year in the splendor of the Arcade!”
That vibrancy “could be greater if we created an atmosphere,” Yablonsky told Scene. “And a vibrancy that you don’t feel in the inside right now. It’s intuitive.”
“But it’ll give us so much atmosphere that you’ll be able to quantify over time,” he added, “that the hotel’s operational side and sense of place and purpose would be grandly improved.”
Since the 1990s, when the Arcade’s previous owners, along with the city and the county, bankrolled that eight-figure investment into the building’s revival, the Arcade has always suffered a certain beauty paradox: How can a space of such a resounding aesthetic, with its Romanesque facades and 300-foot-long skylight, be so empty most of the time?
The Arcade has struggled in the past decade to lock down a full house of retail tenants.
Apparently, Indianapolis had a similar conundrum. As Yablonsky and Sandvick cite in their plans, the city was brainstorming ideas of how to revamp their recession-struck Lafayette Square. That cosmopolitan notion hit: the square would be renamed the International Marketplace.
But there’s a clear difference here. Indianapolis’ Marketplace is a 2.5-square-mile area, pockmarked with some 900 ethnic businesses, including, a recent brochure suggests, “over 50” markets and 115 restaurants. According to the Sandvick idea, the Arcade would essentially be an indoor version of Cleveland’s Cultural Gardens. Not a massive ethnic food hall.
“I think it might be good for families,” said Bradley Spirakus, 36, drinking coffee with his coworkers at a table on the Arcade’s second floor. “But for thirty-year-olds, there’s nothing in here for any of us. Maybe make it more hip and meaningful—maybe a lounge-type thing. And make it more family-oriented.”
“Nobody’s coming in here from the ‘burbs,” his coworker Michael Dimarino, 40, said. “I mean, half of the restaurants are closed. What’s the point?”
Others pointed at the Arcade’s prime revenue source (along with the Hyatt guests) in the past decade.
“That’s my biggest question: Where will all the weddings go?” Taylor Baker said, eating lunch nearby. “I suppose you just keep them on the weekends?”
“Maybe you keep weddings on the weekends, and do the cultural thing on the weekdays,” her friend McKenna Donahue added.
Baker closed her Styrofoam container of finished noodles from Zen Cuisine, a rare food stall still operating. “And what’s gonna happen to my favorite lunch spot? Really!”
Yablonsky said that he and Julie Dornback, the lead architect on the Cultural Center plans, will be presenting a final version of the concept to Skyline in June, and ideally begin the implementation—and seek confirmed tenants—by the end of the year.
As for any doubts, Yablonsky turned to his years convincing doubtful investors that the Warehouse District could be reshaped into Downtown’s most populated neighborhood. He sees the same for the Arcade: a space ready to host a concept not yet tried in Cleveland’s limits.
“It’s a glass half full, half empty discussion,” he said. “You have to have a vision, you have to feel positive while you’re trying to implement. You got to believe in it. You could quickly find reasons not to go forward, and then you won’t ever do the right thing.”
Officials behind a new city proposed for Solano County shared new renderings of what the community would look like, including residential options and the public transit system.The images, provided exclusively to KCRA 3 by California Forever, show row houses with private backyards. Residents could decide to have a garage and an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard, or they could opt for more open space. In an exclusive interview with KCRA 3’s Orko Manna, California Forever Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf said the idea is to provide residents with several choices.“It’s up to each homeowner what they want to do. Do they want a private garden? Do they want to have it be grass? They all face onto an alley in the back, and in the alley, you can of course park your car, but it can also be where you put an accessory dwelling unit, so it can be an office, it can be where your mother lives, or you can just have a bigger backyard. So, what we’re showing here is that range of options of very private intimate quiet backyards but also opening up onto an alley where all kinds of different things are going on,” Metcalf said.Metcalf added that the unnamed city, with an estimated residential population of 400,000 people, would have a wide variety of options when it comes to types of housing, including starter homes.“We really are focused on enabling first-time homeownership. We think there’s a really big need for that, it’s a very big market for us to try to serve. The Bay Area has gotten so expensive. We think if we can find a way to provide homeownership at a more affordable price point, it’s going to be really popular,” Metcalf said.Another new rendering given exclusively to KCRA 3 shows the bus rapid transit system that would be available for people to get around the city. Metcalf said the buses would function more like trains.“They have their own right of way in the middle of the street, they have boarding islands and they’re never stuck in traffic,” Metcalf said. “This is going to be a quality of public transit service that people have not seen before in this part of California.”Metcalf said another main goal of the proposed city is to have each resident only about a 5-to-10-minute walk away from schools, parks and shopping streets. Metcalf also said that people would still be able to drive, adding that there would be ample parking throughout the city including communal parking structures for each neighborhood.“What’s different from most of America is in this community, you have a choice. You can drive when you need to drive, but you don’t have to drive for everything. You can also get to things other ways, so this is going to be quite eye-opening for some people to experience that kind of freedom of choice on how they get around,” Metcalf said.But not everyone supports the proposal. In order for the new city to be built, the roughly 17,500 acres of land north of Highway 12 in between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista would need approval for urban development. Currently, the land is zoned for agriculture. Solano County Farm Bureau President William Brazelton said the bureau wants to keep it that way.“There’s a long, long history of agriculture in this county,” Brazelton said. “We’re not opposed to new housing. There’s a lot of, there’s actually quite a bit of space inside the city limits around the county, and that’s what we will advocate be built out before there’s sprawl, not just planting a brand-new 400,000-member community in the middle of ag land.”The Solano County Farm Bureau is part of a recently formed group called the Solano Together Coalition, which has concerns about what they call “California Forever’s sprawl development plans.”Suisun Mayor Pro Tem Princess Washington is also part of the coalition. She wants more details about the proposal, which she said she has not received from California Forever.“There is opposition to the overall plan, but I think that’s coupled with the lack of transparency when questions are asked. No answer is given. For example, the question of what would be the price point for housing. There has been no direct answer,” Washington said.Washington also said she wants people to understand that while the ideas for the proposed city may look good in renderings, the implementation of the plan would entail going against longstanding agriculture practices that have served Solano County well for years.“Everyone wants a good paying job, everyone wants affordable housing, but I think it’s very dangerous to use that as a carrot to change a policy,” Washington said.In response to the criticism, Metcalf said opponents should trust the process and understand that the new city could be a game-changer in helping solve the region’s housing crisis.“I think we have to look at the state of housing honestly in the Bay Area and in Northern California. What we’re doing right now is not working. Saying ‘no’ is not working. We need to create a place where we can say ‘yes,’” Metcalf said. “I am very hopeful and very cautiously optimistic that as people learn more about how this new community could work, that people are going to be really excited about it.”KCRA 3 confirmed with the Solano County Registrar of Voters office that California Forever has submitted a petition with more than 20,000 signatures, in an effort to allow urban development on the land where they want to build the new city. Election officials are in the process of verifying the signatures to make sure they are from valid Solano County voters. They said they expect to have a final determination by mid-June on if it can be put on the ballot in November.Even if the land-use change gets on the ballot and voters approve it, Solano County officials said a development agreement would need to be reached between the county and California Forever before any construction could begin.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app.
SOLANO COUNTY, Calif. —
Officials behind a new city proposed for Solano County shared new renderings of what the community would look like, including residential options and the public transit system.
East Solano Plan
Exclusive new rendering of examples of residential backyards for the proposed new city in Solano County.
The images, provided exclusively to KCRA 3 by California Forever, show row houses with private backyards. Residents could decide to have a garage and an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard, or they could opt for more open space.
In an exclusive interview with KCRA 3’s Orko Manna, California Forever Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf said the idea is to provide residents with several choices.
“It’s up to each homeowner what they want to do. Do they want a private garden? Do they want to have it be grass? They all face onto an alley in the back, and in the alley, you can of course park your car, but it can also be where you put an accessory dwelling unit, so it can be an office, it can be where your mother lives, or you can just have a bigger backyard. So, what we’re showing here is that range of options of very private intimate quiet backyards but also opening up onto an alley where all kinds of different things are going on,” Metcalf said.
Metcalf added that the unnamed city, with an estimated residential population of 400,000 people, would have a wide variety of options when it comes to types of housing, including starter homes.
“We really are focused on enabling first-time homeownership. We think there’s a really big need for that, it’s a very big market for us to try to serve. The Bay Area has gotten so expensive. We think if we can find a way to provide homeownership at a more affordable price point, it’s going to be really popular,” Metcalf said.
East Solano Plan
Exclusive new rendering of bus rapid transit system for the proposed new city in Solano County.
Another new rendering given exclusively to KCRA 3 shows the bus rapid transit system that would be available for people to get around the city. Metcalf said the buses would function more like trains.
“They have their own right of way in the middle of the street, they have boarding islands and they’re never stuck in traffic,” Metcalf said. “This is going to be a quality of public transit service that people have not seen before in this part of California.”
East Solano Plan
Exclusive new rendering of a business plaza for the proposed new city in Solano County.
Metcalf said another main goal of the proposed city is to have each resident only about a 5-to-10-minute walk away from schools, parks and shopping streets. Metcalf also said that people would still be able to drive, adding that there would be ample parking throughout the city including communal parking structures for each neighborhood.
“What’s different from most of America is in this community, you have a choice. You can drive when you need to drive, but you don’t have to drive for everything. You can also get to things other ways, so this is going to be quite eye-opening for some people to experience that kind of freedom of choice on how they get around,” Metcalf said.
But not everyone supports the proposal. In order for the new city to be built, the roughly 17,500 acres of land north of Highway 12 in between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista would need approval for urban development. Currently, the land is zoned for agriculture. Solano County Farm Bureau President William Brazelton said the bureau wants to keep it that way.
“There’s a long, long history of agriculture in this county,” Brazelton said. “We’re not opposed to new housing. There’s a lot of, there’s actually quite a bit of space inside the city limits around the county, and that’s what we will advocate be built out before there’s sprawl, not just planting a brand-new 400,000-member community in the middle of ag land.”
The Solano County Farm Bureau is part of a recently formed group called the Solano Together Coalition, which has concerns about what they call “California Forever’s sprawl development plans.”
Suisun Mayor Pro Tem Princess Washington is also part of the coalition. She wants more details about the proposal, which she said she has not received from California Forever.
“There is opposition to the overall plan, but I think that’s coupled with the lack of transparency when questions are asked. No answer is given. For example, the question of what would be the price point for housing. There has been no direct answer,” Washington said.
Washington also said she wants people to understand that while the ideas for the proposed city may look good in renderings, the implementation of the plan would entail going against longstanding agriculture practices that have served Solano County well for years.
“Everyone wants a good paying job, everyone wants affordable housing, but I think it’s very dangerous to use that as a carrot to change a policy,” Washington said.
In response to the criticism, Metcalf said opponents should trust the process and understand that the new city could be a game-changer in helping solve the region’s housing crisis.
“I think we have to look at the state of housing honestly in the Bay Area and in Northern California. What we’re doing right now is not working. Saying ‘no’ is not working. We need to create a place where we can say ‘yes,’” Metcalf said. “I am very hopeful and very cautiously optimistic that as people learn more about how this new community could work, that people are going to be really excited about it.”
KCRA 3 confirmed with the Solano County Registrar of Voters office that California Forever has submitted a petition with more than 20,000 signatures, in an effort to allow urban development on the land where they want to build the new city. Election officials are in the process of verifying the signatures to make sure they are from valid Solano County voters. They said they expect to have a final determination by mid-June on if it can be put on the ballot in November.
Even if the land-use change gets on the ballot and voters approve it, Solano County officials said a development agreement would need to be reached between the county and California Forever before any construction could begin.
Today’s rising developments were born from yesterday’s plans, policies and investments.
“It takes some years to get from visioning to implementation to developers getting all of their funding stacks together,” explained Deirdre Oss, who oversees large development reviews with Community Planning and Development, the city’s planning department.
Investors and developers were bullish on Denver’s growth during most of Mayor Michael Hancock’s first two terms. But some developers’ optimism has since dried up.
In just under two years, starting under Hancock’s last term and leading into current Mayor Mike Johnston’s first term, developers have submitted fewer plans for new multi-family residential buildings in Denver.
Some in the real estate industry caution that fewer proposals means that in five to ten years, there may no longer be massive cranes scattered across the skyline. Denver could see far fewer apartments and condos under construction. With fewer homes being built, home prices and rent would likely surge again.
How radical has the drop in new proposals been?
“In the City and County of Denver, there are currently 18,700 units under construction,” Scott Rathbun, head of Apartment Appraisers and Consultants, said. “They’ve broken ground. And once you break ground on a deal, you’re gonna finish the deal.”
Most of those units will be delivered by 2027.
“We’re gonna see a lot of cranes in the skyline in the City and County of Denver for the next three years,” he said.
Another 29,000 market-rate units and 2,900 subsidized units are going through the permitting pipeline, according to Rathbun.
All but 6,000 of those were proposed before the Expanding Housing Affordability rules went into effect on June 30, 2022. Those policies require that developers build more affordable housing every time they create a market-rate multifamily property. After they were in place, new proposals for market-rate housing plummeted in the city.
A construction crane over development in Sun Valley. May 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
“We’ve had some macroeconomic impacts that have made it more difficult to develop apartments, to make deals pencil, to make deals feasible,” Rathbun said. “But the same story, the same significant difference between the pre-June 30, 2022 and the post-June 30, 2022, does not exist in any of the other six counties in the metro area.”
Some suburbs, he explained, have larger development pipelines from June 30, 2022, to now than they did before.
The one big difference between Denver and those counties was the passing of the Expanding Housing Affordability rules — a law intended to create more housing stock where people could actually afford to live.
But if the law slows down the creation of housing, it could backfire, suggests Rathbun.
“When we see the reduction of cranes in the next five years, we’re also going to start to see rents skyrocket,” Rathbun said.
Why have proposals slowed down?
Demand for commercial real estate tanked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, interest rates have risen mightily. So have construction costs.
Companies building in the city have also been signaling they might move to places with fewer taxes and regulations.
Andrew Feinstein, one of the most active local developers in RiNo, says new development won’t happen if things don’t change.
“Cranes will become an extinct species if interest rates stay high, costs stay high, carrying costs stay high… and the regulatory environment remains challenging,” he wrote to Denverite.
Carrying costs include high property taxes and expensive insurance. The regulatory environment includes zoning restrictions, the time it takes the planning department to issue permits, and the Expanding Housing Affordability rules.
Apartments in North Capitol Hill. May 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Drew Hamrick, the Senior Vice President of Government Affairs for the Apartment Association of Metro Denver, believes high interest rates and overregulation of market-rate developments will also make investors wary of funding local projects.
“If interest rates were to drop significantly, projects that don’t currently make sense become more attractive,” he said.
Developers are dependent on institutional investors to fund their properties, and for years, Colorado has been “a fairly attractive place to do that based on the demand for housing and the environment for building,” Hamrick said. “That environment is getting significantly worse.”
Policies like Expanding Housing Affordability, make it too expensive to develop market-rate housing, he said. To him, that explains the slowdown in new development proposals Community Planning and Development has seen since the policy began on June 30, 2023.
“The fact that nobody’s applying for permits in Denver is a pretty good indication that in three years, the cranes that you’re seeing today are going to be gone,” Hamrick said. “But that’s not very indicative of what’s going to happen in five years or 10 years because ultimately, the price of market-rate rental housing goes up when there’s not enough of it.”
Despite skepticism from the private sector, city planners say the day of the crane is far from over.
Oss, of Community Planning and Development, is optimistic that more development is coming. Even as the big projects underway wrap up, new transformative projects are already in the works. She doesn’t see that changing over the next decade.
In part, this is because many massive projects could take a decade or more to complete, and these are slated to bring thousands of units of new housing to the city.
Massive central Denver mixed-use projects like the River Mile, the Ball Arena parking lot redevelopment and Burnham Yards will effectively expand the reach of Downtown Denver, more than doubling the city center in size.
Downtown Denver on a sunny day. May 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Despite high interest rates and construction costs, there’s no sign that those projects are dead, though their rollout will be affected by sweeping economic conditions.
Cherry Creek West, Fox Park at the site of the old Denver Post printing press building, Denargo Market, and the expansion of the former site of the Gates Rubber Plant are also in the works
And Northeast Denver is also likely to experience an ongoing boom in construction.
Mayor Mike Johnston has committed to speeding up permitting times by 30% by the end of 2024. The hope: Make development easier and keep those cranes rising.
“I think it’s probably going to be a pretty consistent part of our skyline,” Oss said. “I think the locations where those pop up will change.”
A rendering of the Upton, a condo building under construction at the old Shelby’s Bar & Grill site.
Courtesy of Amacon
Construction is underway at the old Shelby’s Bar and Grill site, at 18th and Glenarm streets, where Canadian developer Amacon is building a two-tower building with 461 for-sale units.
The homes, a mix of studios, one-, two- and three-bedrooms, start in the low-$400,000s, well below the median price of a home in the metro. But there will also be penthouses for those who can afford them.
The building will rise 400 feet tall.
A rendering of the Upton Residencies tower at the old Shelby’s Bar & Grill site. Courtesy of Amacon
“While downtown Denver has no shortage of rental units, Upton Residences is opening up new doors for homeownership in the heart of the city,” said Stephanie Babineau, VP of marketing and sales for Amacon, in a statement. “Upton will transform the Upper Downtown neighborhood into a vibrant hub, bridging Downtown Denver and the Uptown neighborhood. With the unique mix of residences, retail, and hotel-styled amenities spaces, we believe the development will bring new energy to the area and enrich the neighborhood.”
Units in the towers will start in the low $400,000s. There will be a mix of typical apartments and penthouses with floor-to-cieling windows offering a mix of city and mountain views.
“Upton will be a game-changing landmark that will redefine the Denver skyline,” said Steve Featherston, Vice President of Development and Construction at Amacon, in a statement. “It will stand as a tribute to the city and set a new standard for luxury living. This visual focal point is spotlighting how to effectively bring together residential, retail, and hospitality, for residents and the community to enjoy.”
The building broke ground in spring of 2022, and it’s slated to open in mid-2025.
Longtime Denverites will be stunned to see the towers rise where Shelby’s dished out drinks and food to neighbors.
When Megan Watson, who runs development in Los Angeles for Grubb Properties, started planning an apartment project in Santa Monica, she prepared for a challenging road ahead. The city had a history of giving developers a hard time.
Grubb first applied for a 60-unit building at 700 Santa Monica Boulevard in August 2022 and resubmitted its application for 99 units in July, after the city of Santa Monica signaled that it was making changes — it wanted to start taking developers’ concerns and zoning issues seriously and get more housing built.
In eight months, Grubb got the green light to build an eight-story building with 89 market-rate apartments and 10 affordable units.
“This was probably our fastest entitlement that we experienced in the state,” Watson said. Eight months would have been a speedy timeframe for any California city, she added. Approvals sometimes take up to two years if there are appeals involved.
But it wasn’t just the city’s speed that impressed Watson — it was how Santa Monica was now talking about building housing. She sat in on a number of City Council meetings, where planners and council members “recognized that the best way” to meet state housing goals was to allow for density.
What Watson experienced turned out to be a wholesale shift in how Santa Monica approaches new development. In February, a month before Grubb scored its approval, Gov. Gavin Newsom designated Santa Monica a “pro-housing community,” citing the city’s efforts and progress made through an affordable housing program.
Grubb’s approval appeared to indicate that the designation meant something real, an important change at a time when politicians and developers around the country are aching for opportunities to build and wondering how to change local hearts and minds around new projects.
This may be a surprise to anyone who has been trying to build in the city of Santa Monica over the last few decades, as shown by baffled reactions to the pro-housing designation on social media.
In 2016, for instance, voters were presented with a ballot measure that would have required citywide votes to construct buildings taller than two stories. A sizable minority — 44 percent — of voters were in support, though the measure failed to pass.
“Santa Monica has been well-known as a place that is not friendly to housing development or really any kind of new development,” said Adam Deermount, a West Coast-based portfolio manager at lender Nikols Mortgage Fund. “It tends to be very NIMBY-dominated.”
“If you were to ask a group of 100 developers familiar with development in Southern California to name three development-friendly cities in Southern California, I don’t think any of them would mention Santa Monica,” he added.
The shift to encouraging housing development did not come out of nowhere.
“If you were to ask a group of 100 developers familiar with development in Southern California to name three development-friendly cities in Southern California, I don’t think any of them would mention Santa Monica.” Adam Deermount, Nikols Mortgage Fund
The city had to learn the hard way: After failing to get a state-approved housing plan together by October 2022, it faced a deluge of builder’s remedy projects, which threatened to add more than 4,000 units to the city’s housing stock. Builder’s remedy serves essentially as a penalty for cities that do not get state-mandated housing plans in order by a certain deadline.
“It scared a lot of people into realizing that this wasn’t a game with no consequences,” Santa Monica City Council member Jesse Zwick said of the builder’s remedy projects. ”If the city continued to sort of thumb its nose at the state, there would be a real loss of local control over our zoning code.”
Santa Monica has been making gradual progress, city data shows, though actual development has been uneven. Out of around 9,300 housing units proposed since 2010, about 3,000 have been approved.
The number of units built in Santa Monica shrank last year, though the proportion of affordable housing increased.
In 2023, 331 units were completed, including 148 affordable units, compared to 539 total units a year before with 92 affordable units, according to city housing data.
And developers want to make their mark on the oceanfront city — for example, Tishman Speyer, the New York-based development giant, filed plans to build 620 units across three acres in Downtown Santa Monica in early 2022. Tweaking city code may make it easier for these players to do so.
Moment of reckoning
In 2021, the state tasked Santa Monica, like every other California city, with planning for new homes. For Santa Monica, that meant adding roughly 1,000 units a year by 2029 — which Zwick called “ambitious.”
With Santa Monica’s “reputation of being hostile to business interests in general, and perhaps those seeking to create more homes in particular,” this would be tough, Zwick said.
There were also real penalties for cities that didn’t make adequate plans, Zwick added.
Santa Monica failed to get its housing plan approved by the state by October 2022, leaving it open to builder’s remedy projects. By May 2023, 16 had been filed.
The city reacted fast. By streamlining certain housing approvals and incentivizing building housing on parking lots in residential zones, it got its housing plan approved by the state, closing the window for builder’s remedy projects. The City Council approved a more comprehensive rezoning that allowed taller mixed-use buildings along its commercial corridors. The approval process was no longer discretionary, but by right as long as the zoning allowed for it.
“There’s no discretionary process whereby people like me can either say yes or no, based on their own personal lives — and that provides a lot of certainty to [developers] hoping to operate and invest in Santa Monica,” Zwick said. “As a council member, I don’t want to be voting yes or no on individual projects.”
It wasn’t just the builder’s remedy and state pressure fueling the City Council’s appetite for reform. A slump in tourism and the growth of e-commerce and working from home have all had a negative impact on Santa Monica’s budget, according to Zwick.
For the city, it’s become more important to win over businesses and investors and “make it easier on people seeking to put their money in Santa Monica,” he added.
Rewarding intent
Housing advocates describe the pro-housing designation Santa Monica received as part of a high-level, forward-looking reward system for the cities complying with the state’s housing law.
The program, which first appeared in California’s 2019 budget, allowed the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development to label cities as “pro-housing” starting in July 2021, according to a report from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alex Ramiller, who co-wrote the report, described the program as “a proverbial carrot — the state’s way of encouraging local jurisdictions to go out on their own and to do things that are good in terms of promoting housing production.”
“It scared a lot of people into realizing that this wasn’t a game with no consequences.”
Santa Monica City Councilman Jesse Zwick on builder’s remedy
But because the program is so new, Ramiller and other Berkeley researchers found it difficult to quantify the impact of the pro-housing designation. Did the label actually mean the city had added more housing?
“The pro-housing designation program is more about intention and future housing production rather than about past or present production,” Ramiller said. “So it’s not intended to necessarily be a backwards-looking measure.”
While the designation does open doors to funding, for Santa Monica, the stamp of approval seems to be more about reputation. The city has only applied for $1 million in emergency rental assistance through the prohousing program, but is “continuing to monitor other available potential funding opportunities,” according to the city spokesperson.
“I’m encouraged by it,” said Sonja Trauss, who founded nonprofit Yes In My Backyard, which advocates for housing development. “Like any government program, it’s not perfect, but I think there’s a lot of potential there.”
Final hurdles
Santa Monica still has obstacles when it comes to proving it’s truly interested in building more housing.
In November 2022, Santa Monica’s residents — notably not the City Council — voted for Measure GS, which provided for a 5 percent transfer tax on property sales of $8 million or more, with funds going to homelessness prevention, affordable housing and schools.
The real estate industry argued that the tax has crippled sales and new development, in similar fashion to Measure ULA in the city of Los Angeles.
“The mansion tax was not Santa Monica’s finest moment, from a housing production standpoint,” said Dave Rand, a land use attorney and partner at Rand Paster Nelson, who has worked on about 50 cases involving projects in the city. “But they have built a number of other things that are significant in the way of moving housing forward.”
Within city government itself, “you have decision-makers who are very pro-housing,” Rand said.
Still, the city has more perceptions to change, Zwick said.
“I’ve talked to people from small contractors to big developers who tell me, ‘Oh, I did a project in Santa Monica once and I’ll never do one again,’” Zwick said. “I think that is changing in terms of the climate we’re creating. But there is still a matter of getting that message out.”
Fogel Real Estate, run by Steven Fogel, is planning to build a 36-unit apartment building, spanning 36,700 square feet, in Venice, according to a filing with the Los Angeles Planning Commission on April 16.
The plans for 825 South Hampton Drive include a 3,400-square-foot, ground-floor retail section with a cafe and three levels of below-ground parking with 60 spaces.
The limited liability company, SJF Venice, which filed the plans, lists Steven and Kelly Fogel as managers, according to state business records.
Steven Fogel is the co-founder and chairman of Westwood Financial, a Los Angeles-based firm that owns and operates 127 shopping centers across the U.S, according to a company website.
His daughter Kelly Fogel, a Los Angeles-based photographer, declined to comment on the plans.
The firm bought the roughly half-acre site for $15 million in 2022, according to property records filed with L.A. County. The land sits on the intersection of Hampton Drive and Abbot Kinney Boulevard, a popular shopping strip in Venice.
The purchase came after an entity tied to Fogel Real Estate defaulted on a loan from Columbia Pacific Advisors tied to the property next door, 812 South Main Street, records show. Columbia Pacific foreclosed on that 30,000-square-foot piece of land for $2.3 million in 2021.
Fogel Real Estate’s plans rework earlier designs for the site that included eight live-work condos, three levels of subterranean parking and 9,000 square feet of commercial space on the ground level, TRD reported in 2017. Fogel previously leased the property, before it bought the site, records show. It’s unclear why Fogel pulled the 2017 plans and has refiled.
Venice continues to be a desirable neighborhood, despite a “continuing decline in occupancy” and “subdued” renter demand, according to recent data compiled by Mathews Real Estate Investment Services.
Rents in Venice Beach dropped 0.8 percent between March 2023 and last month, according to the report, but is still “one of the three most expensive” neighborhoods in Los Angeles for renters, with asking rents averaging $3,290 a month. Other developers that have filed plans in Venice over the last couple of years include Amadora Heights and Wiseman Residential.
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that developers and home builders in California may challenge the fees commonly imposed by cities and counties to pay for new roads, schools, sewers and other public improvements.
The justices said these “impact fees” may be unconstitutional if builders and developers are forced to pay an unfair share of the cost of public projects.
Developers have contended that limiting California’s high fees would lead to the construction of more affordable new housing.
California state courts had blocked claims arising from “a development impact fee imposed pursuant to a legislatively authorized fee program” for new development in a city or county.
But the 9-0 Supreme Court decision opened the door for such challenges. The justices revived a constitutional claim brought by an El Dorado County man who put a manufactured home on a small lot and was told he would have to pay a “traffic mitigation fee” of $23,420.
The decision could have wide impact in California, since local governments have increasingly relied on impact fees rather than property taxes to pay for new projects.
But the justices did not spell out when such fees become unfair and unconstitutional.
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they joined the majority opinion in Sheetz vs. El Dorado County because it merely allows such challenges.
In a separate opinion, conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said he saw merit to the “common government practice of imposing permit conditions, such as impact fees, on new development through reasonable formulas or schedules that assess the impact of classes of development rather than the impact of specific parcels of property.”
State and county attorneys had made just that argument. They said it was fairer to impose a development fee on all the lots in an area.
But the justices nonetheless ruled that homeowners and developers may sue to challenge these fees as an unconstitutional taking of their private property. The case will now go back to the California courts.
The Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento hailed the ruling as a significant victory for property rights.
“Holding building permits hostage in exchange for excessive development fees is obviously extortion,” said attorney Paul Beard, who represented the El Dorado County homeowner. “We are thrilled that the court agreed and put a stop to a blatant attempt to skirt the 5th Amendment’s prohibition against taking private property without just compensation.”
Beard said El Dorado County “failed to show — and cannot show — that the fee is sufficiently related and proportionate to the traffic impacts” of his client’s “modest home.”
The debate over development fees is especially relevant in California, where local governments have increasingly relied on the charges to finance parks, streets, schools and other infrastructure and services since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 limited property tax revenues.
The fees have come under scrutiny in other cases as developers and others have blamed them for driving up the cost of housing and for a wide disparity in cities’ fees.
For decades, the Supreme Court has cast a skeptical eye at California’s regulation of private property. In a pair of decisions, it limited the power of government officials to demand concessions from a property owner in exchange for a building permit.
In 1987, justices ruled for the owner of a beach bungalow in Ventura who was told he could not obtain a permit to expand his home unless he agreed to allow the public access to the beachfront. The conservative majority at the time described this demand as akin to “extortion” and said it violated the 5th Amendment’s clause that forbids the taking of “private property … for public use without just compensation.”
In a follow-up decision involving a store owner who was forced to allow a bike path on her property, the court said the government may not impose such special conditions on property owners unless it can show an owner’s new development would cause direct harm to the community.
But since then, it has been unclear whether this property right applies to development fees or in situations where fees are set by legislation rather than imposed on a single owner seeking a permit.
Writing for the court in Friday’s ruling, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that “there is no basis for affording property rights less protection in the hands of legislators than administrators. The Takings Clause applies equally to both — which means that it prohibits legislatures and agencies alike from imposing unconstitutional conditions on land-use permits.”
The case arose when property owner George Sheetz sought a permit to put a manufactured home on a lot he owned in Placerville, outside Sacramento. El Dorado County required him to pay a “traffic impact mitigation” fee to obtain the permit. Some of the money was to go toward upgrades to Highway 50, which runs through the area, but most was to go toward new or expanded roads in the county.
Sheetz paid the fee and obtained his permit, then sued to challenge the fee as unconstitutional. He argued that the taxpayers of the county, not the new owner of a small home, should be required to pay for road building.
The justices agreed to hear his appeal after he lost in the California courts.
State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who has supported legislation to rein in developer fees, said he didn’t expect Friday’s decision by itself to have a significant effect on the debate in Sacramento because it only called out one extreme situation.
“Ultimately, the solution is the same today as it was yesterday,” Wiener said. “The California Legislature needs to put in place an actual structure for impact fees. Right now, it’s all over the map.”
Wiener said he sympathizes with local governments that turn to the fees because it’s easier than raising revenue through broad-based taxes — but he said some cities use sky-high fees to block housing development.
“There is something a little odd about effectively taxing new housing to pay for societal needs that should be paid generally by taxpayers — by the entire community,” he said.
Graham Knaus, executive director of the California State Assn. of Counties, said in a statement Friday that the organization was still reviewing the ruling to understand its implications.
But he said that “limiting the ability to legislatively enact fees will negatively impact the ability of our 58 counties to protect the health and welfare of their communities and drastically limit the building of vital local infrastructure.”
“In many cases,” Knaus said, “these fees are the only tool available to pay for new infrastructure around certain development projects.”
Times staff writer Liam Dillon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Adult-use dispensaries have yet to pop up in Ohio. This week, a handful of rules for how they should operate were sent to a state board for review.
Even Gov. Mike DeWine called the whole contradiction “goofy“: Ohioans can now, since Issue 2 went into effect in early December, grow and smoke a relatively small amount of marijuana legally.
Yet, there’s literally nowhere for them to buy it. (Again, legally.)
After passing with 57 percent of the vote last summer, Ohio became the 24th state to legalize weed for adult use. Though the Ohio Senate scrambled soon after Ohioans began, presumably, lighting up, a persistent legislative gap has led to a slew of unanswered questions as dispensaries new and old prepare to open up doors to regular, bud-seeking citizens.
On Wednesday, following this four-month legal gap, about a dozen proposed rules for how the state regulates the soon-to-be adult-use dispensaries were sent through DeWine’s Common Sense Initiative, a board that scrutinizes statewide laws and regulations impacting businesses.
As stated in a draft form of the rule sheet, the newly-formed Division of Cannabis Control, the ivory tower for all legal weed transactions, will oversee 13 areas of regulation that, the document suggests, are copied from or influenced by other legal states.
“Other state cannabis markets and regulations were studied,” it reads, “and identified best practices were used to help develop these rules.”
With the DCC allocating a portion of legal sales into a fund benefiting persons that have long dealt with the brunt of the justice system, big questions abound regarding how fairness in a juicy, nascent market in Ohio will fare with free-market capitalism. And, of course, how the state and local law enforcement will balance preventing potential harm—to minors, per se—and allowing green Ohioans their joie de vivre after years of fearing legal repercussions. And jail time.
In New York last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul called the state’s sluggish legal weed rollout a “disaster,” following a slew of lawsuits from hundreds of dispensary prospectors claiming New York’s Office of Cannabis Management awarded its flimsy 109 licenses, out of 7,000 total applications, with bias.
And just on Monday, Germany became the next country in the European Union to legalize weed, despite criticism that limiting access to “not-for-profit clubs” was too stifling. Ironically, as in Ohio, it’s still illegal to buy and sell.
At a weed conference at the I-X Center last year. Ohio may be bound for some of the rollout issues other states are seeing, like in New York, where lawsuits claiming bias in the licensing system abound.
In Ohio, the 13 rules proposed are comprehensive in their security precautions and their tracking of kindbud throughout every single step of the sales process. (And even its disposal out back.) Here are some highlights:
All dispensaries must be 500 feet away from any library, park, playground, school or church. And they can only stay open until 11 p.m.
No dispensary owner can “own, control, or have financial interest in” more than one weed processor, one cultivator or more than eight separate dispensaries.
The Division of Cannabis Control must get an accountability chart of every dispensary employee, along with records their connections to any prior employment in the marijuana industry. (Even if you’ve worked at a Starbuds in Denver.)
No dispensary can change their name, or choose their name, without approval from the DCC.
All dispensaries, new and old, must deposit $50,000 in an escrow account before operating legally. All testing labs, $75,000. High-level growers? $750,000.
Every Ohioan entering an adult-use dispensary must show ID, be 21 or over, and will be “escorted and monitored by an assigned registered employee at all times.” Want to go to any other part of the store? You’ll need to sign a visitor log with your name, date, time, escort name and “purpose of the facility visit.” (To “get geeked”?)
All dispensaries have to keep tight watch on any weed thrown out. That bad bud must be weighed, recorded and measured, and must be kept away from sellable stuff. And everything—the “stalks, stems, fan leaves, or roots”—has to be ground up with non-cannabis waste to be tossed out properly.
Dispensaries must be camera-heavy: at all points of entrance and exit, in the shop’s retail area and limited-access area (for employees), overlooking trash bins and all cash registers. (All of which the DCC can monitor in real-time, 24/7.) Also, there must be access alarms at every entry point, along with motion detectors and silent alarms that ping security guards if they’ve been breached.
A design illustration of the expansion of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business.
UNC System
RALEIGH
The campuses of several UNC System schools will be changing over the next few years, with several new academic buildings taking shape or being renovated.
The majority of the projects are paid for by the State Capital Infrastructure Fund, which is funding from the state budget written each year by the General Assembly.
Lawmakers return to Raleigh for a new legislative session on April 24, but some committees are meeting now, and one of them got a project update Wednesday from the UNC System Office.
Here’s the status of the projects already under construction and those in the works.
UNC-Chapel Hill
▪ UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School is getting an addition. The project will allow UNC to increase the number of students and is already underway. Costing $194 million, it is paid for half by the state budget and half from UNC. It is expected to be finished in 2025.
▪ Another project is a new Nursing Education Building that will replace the west wing of Carrington Hall. Already under construction, the project will allow the program to increase the number of students and will cost nearly $98 million, most of which is paid from the legislature’s State Capital Infrastructure Fund.
ECU
▪ The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in Greenville will be under construction by early next year, according to the UNC System.
The medical education building will be nearly 200,000 square feet and have space for 120 students in classes each year. The budget is $265 million and entirely funded by the legislature’s State Capital Infrastructure Fund. The project should take about two years to complete once construction starts in February.
Design illustration of the East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine that will be constructed starting in early 2025. It is funded by the state budget. UNC System Office
NC State
▪ A major project already underway on the NC State University campus in Raleigh is the Integrative Sciences Building, a new STEM building for teaching and research. It is already under construction and has a livestream of the work.
It will cost $187 million, with about half each funded by the state and the university.
The Integrative Sciences Building, now under construction at N.C. State University in Raleigh. UNC System
▪ Renovations are set to begin this summer on Dabney Hall at NC State. The renovations will cost $140 million and are funded by the State Capital Infrastructure Fund as well as the university. The work will be done in phases, floor by floor, and include upgrades to the chemistry lab, according to the UNC System.
Dabney Hall at N.C. State University in Raleigh, which will be renovated starting in the summer of 2024. UNC System
UNC-Greensboro
▪ The Jackson Library and Tower will both be renovated at UNC-Greensboro. The renovations are aimed at making the buildings up-to-date and more accessible. With a cost of about $98 million, it is still in development.
UNC-Pembroke
▪ A new Health Sciences Center is planned for UNC-Pembroke. Still in the planning phase, the new building will house the university’s Advanced Practice of Optometry, Occupational-Physical Therapy, Anatomy, Behavioral Health and Nutrition programs. It is estimated to cost $91 million and is entirely funded by the State Capital Infrastructure Fund.
UNC School of the Arts
▪ At UNC School of the Arts, the Stevens Performing Arts Center will be renovated at a cost of nearly $81 million. Renovations include replacing the windows and renovating the lobby and basement, according to the UNC System.
What’s next
This year’s legislative session will be used to pass a budget adjustment bill, making changes to the two-year spending plan that was passed last year. UNC System officials told lawmakers on Wednesday that they will ask for increases in capital project funds because of inflation, as well as more funding for campus safety upgrades and infrastructure upgrades at multiple HBCU campuses.
Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan is the Capitol Bureau Chief for The News & Observer, leading coverage of the legislative and executive branches in North Carolina with a focus on the governor, General Assembly leadership and state budget. She has received the McClatchy President’s Award, N.C. Open Government Coalition Sunshine Award and several North Carolina Press Association awards, including for politics and investigative reporting.
Proponents of the development say it would bring much-needed affordable housing that would enable workers to live closer to their jobs.
Opponents say the developers have not sufficiently weighed the project’s effects and that it would erase an important piece of history.
The Sportsmen’s Lodge hotel permanently closed when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Now, the only active part of the property is the neighboring Shops at Sportsmen’s Lodge, which opened in 2021 with retailers including grocery chain Erewhon and the sustainable clothing and shoe store Allbirds. The lodge’s event center was demolished to make room for the shops.
Developers have long had designs on the nearly nine-acre property at Ventura Boulevard and Coldwater Canyon Avenue. Best Buy eyed it for a superstore in the ’90s. Richard Weintraub, who owned the land at the time, had plans to revamp the lodge in 2009 and reopen it as “Sportsmen’s Landing,” with a boutique shopping center and modern restaurants. Legal issues with the hotel lease prevented that project from coming to fruition.
In addition to the 520 apartment units, 78 of which would be set aside for low-income tenants, the project would include 46,000 square feet of commercial space. The design would also include a bike and pedestrian path along the L.A. River.
Erewhon, the Studio City Residents Assn. and Unite Here Local 11, which represents hotel workers, filed appeals with the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee to stop the project, which had been approved by the city Planning Commission in July.
At a meeting earlier this month, the committee denied the appeals, sending the proposal to the full City Council for Wednesday’s vote.
“This will bring one of the most important and catalytic developments to this part of the San Fernando Valley,” Dave Rand, a lawyer representing the developer, Midwood Investment & Development, said at the meeting. “For years, Ventura Boulevard has been a largely ignored, yet hugely important corridor in the Valley. With this city’s unbelievably ambitious housing goals and obligations, the corner of Coldwater and Ventura Boulevard at this site is the perfect location to bring housing, mixed use and river-appropriate fronted development.”
The property, which became popular for its trout fishing and bait-and-tackle shop in the 1930s, was first owned by actors Noah and Wallace Beery.
Dancers Peta Siddall and Josie Neglia demonstrate salsa moves before a crowd in the Sportsmen’s Lodge in 2001.
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
In 1946, the event center and restaurant opened, followed by the 190-room hotel in 1962. In its heyday, Sportsmen’s Lodge was a movie studio hangout, and many local residents knew it as a popular venue for weddings, bar mitzvahs, New Year’s parties and more.
In recent years, most hotel guests were tourists visiting nearby Universal Studios, but that dried up in the pandemic, and the hotel has been shuttered since then. In 2020, the hotel was a Project Roomkey site, housing people experiencing homelessness to reduce the spread of the virus.
In 1964, the lodge became the first hotel to unionize in the San Fernando Valley and was one of the first union hotels in Los Angeles. The organizing drive was led by Bill Robertson, a leader in the Los Angeles labor movement.
“We continue to believe that … the historic hotel is an important remaining link to that history, and therefore should be preserved,” Unite Here Local 11 co-President Kurt Petersen said in a written statement.
An Erewhon representative did not respond to a request for comment.
Midwood Investment & Development, which bought the property in 2017, sued Erewhon in 2022, accusing it of failing to pay rent and overusing the retail center’s parking lot for its employees.
Erewhon countersued, alleging that Midwood wrongly prohibited Erewhon employees from using the parking lot and that Midwood “induced” Erewhon to lease a space in the proposed shopping center.
Amy Minteer, an attorney for the Studio City Residents Assn., said the association doesn’t want to kill the Sportsmen’s Lodge project but to reduce its height and lessen the construction effects.
The cumulative effects of both projects are a big concern, Minteer said — not only air quality and construction noise but also the loss of mature trees.
“The Residents Association doesn’t want there to not be a project,” Minteer said. “They just want this project revised, to mitigate the impacts to the community and to come into closer alignment with existing standards for the neighborhood.”
The residential building will be 97 feet tall, while the tallest building in the area is 56 feet.
“It’s just way out of proportion with everything else in the area,” Minteer said.
Rand, the attorney for the developer, said the project received a density bonus to raise the height beyond the usual 30 feet, which can only be denied if there is a “quantifiable and identifiable health and human safety risk.”
Crispin Carrasco, who lives near the proposed project and is a member of the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters, said the council supports the development because Midwood has said it will work with contractors who will hire local carpenters.
Stella Stahl, communications director for Councilmember Nithya Raman’s office, said Raman has not yet taken an official position on the project.
At the committee meeting, Mashel Majid, Raman’s deputy chief of staff, said that the development will not significantly affect the area and that Raman’s office is “committed to supporting housing projects.” But Majid expressed disappointment that the historic hotel would be demolished.
“Because this project is on private property and dictated by state laws that protect the ability for this site to build housing, the city, unfortunately, cannot require that the hotel remain,” she said.
A developer is proposing up to 660 homes and at least 10,000 square feet of commercial space on 52 wooded acres along Alcove Road at Lake Norman in Mooresville.
MOORESVILLE PLANNING DEPARTMENT
A Lake Norman developer that faced a public outcry over its planned 660-home community at the lake last year has shrunk the number of homes in hopes of getting the development approved Monday night.
Proposed by Mooresville-based Southwest 33 Associates LLC, the community would cover 52 largely wooded acres in the 400 block of the narrow, two-lane Alcove Road. The developer now proposes 180 fewer homes in its revised rezoning request, according to documents filed with the Mooresville Planning Board.
Alcove Road runs along Interstate 77 between Langtree Road and Williamson Road in Mooresville to the north, connecting the interstate’s exits 31 and 33. Exit 33 leads to the national headquarters of home improvement retailer Lowe’s Cos. Inc. and Lake Norman Regional Medical Center.
Neighbors and town commissioners decried the developer’s original plan last year, citing concerns over traffic, fire response and a lack of retail-commercial space.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a project come in with such a lack of support,” commissioner Tommy DeWeese said at a town board meeting in November. “I think it’s almost a tragedy that we’re calling it mixed-use commercial.”
Fairview ‘flyover’ road
Commissioners are scheduled to vote on the rezoning request at their regular meeting at 6 p.m. Monday.
In its rezoning application, the developer said its project will enhance the tax base, provide more housing for seniors and others and offer more retail to Mooresville.
The developer also said it has worked closely with the N.C. Department of Transportation on a planned state road over I-77 known as the Fairview Flyover. The road is so named because it would connect Alcove Road on one side of I-77 with Fairview Road on the other side of the interstate.
Construction of the Flyover is scheduled to begin in 2025.
“The start of our development will closely coincide with the approved Flyover, allowing us to partner closely with NCDOT on site work and other construction opportunities,” the developer said in its rezoning application.
Dog park, open recreational space
The revised plan for the development, called Alcove Road, includes as many as 280 apartments in two multi-family buildings and 200 town homes, according to the developer’s application reviewed by The Charlotte Observer.
The developer will provide 27,000 square feet of public recreational space on the west side of the project and a 2-acre commercial parcel on the east side.
A dog park and multiple open-space park areas are planned, along with a club house, swimming pool and walking trails.
The developer promises a 30-foot vegetative buffer along Alcove Road and a pedestrian connection across a realigned Fairview Road.
A traffic impact analysis is under way by a consultant for the developer, according to town documents.
The development’s landscaping will make the road “far more friendly to the eye than what otherwise would be displayed should (the Flyover) be built on its own,” according to the developer’s rezoning application.
Related stories from Charlotte Observer
Joe Marusak has been a reporter for The Charlotte Observer since 1989 covering the people, municipalities and major news events of the region, and was a news bureau editor for the paper. He currently reports on breaking news. Support my work with a digital subscription
Cathy Kentner solicits signatures for her petition to oppose development at Lakewood’s Belmar Park, outside of the Belmar Library. March 21, 2024.
Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
On Thursday morning, Lakewood resident andformer mayoral candidate Cathy Kentner stood outside the Belmar Library collecting signatures for a petition to change the city’s rules and force developers to create open space and parks whenever new, multifamily projects are created.
Lakewood has become a “concrete jungle” over the past decade, she said, pointing to new developments at Belmar and on West Colfax.
The proposed change to the law would likely slow down growth in the city, a goal of Kentner and others who argue that development is compromising the environment, disrupting the community and upending what made Lakewood a desirable community to live in to begin with: lots of green space.
Cathy Kentner watches as Josh Molyneux signs her petition opposing development at Lakewood’s Belmar Park, outside of the Belmar Library. March 21, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
The Lakewood law currently states: “All residential developers shall provide a minimum of 5.5 acres of park area per 1,000 anticipated population or cash in lieu thereof.”
Kentner wants voters to strike the cash buyout that she argues gives developers an affordable way to shirk their responsibility to keep Lakewood green.
The signature drive has launched as the city weighs approving Texas-developer Kairoi Residential’s 412-unit apartment complex, on the site of an old office building, near Belmar Park.
A group, Save Belmark Park, has been trying to stop the development, arguing it would disrupt unprotected habitat for 230 species of birds.
Kentner says that if the developer was required to create open space or pocket parks instead of buying out of that responsibility, 69 nearby mature trees could be saved.
“People can see that this is unhealthy, not sustainable, unaffordable, and destroying the quality of life that we all move to Lakewood to enjoy,” Kentner said.
Kairoi Residential, a $9.7 billion company, has not immediately responded to Denverite’s requests for comment on this story, but we will update it if we hear back.
Managing growth and a housing affordability crisis has become a statewide issue.
Democratic lawmakers have been trying to address a housing affordability crisis and create mechanisms for new residential development, including passing policies targeting what they call local “anti-growth” policies. In response to state laws, Lakewood reversed its own “strategic growth” policy last year.
Cathy Kentner speaks to Robert Smith as she solicits signatures for her petition to oppose development at Lakewood’s Belmar Park, outside of the Belmar Library. March 21, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Chris Miller, a member of the housing activist group YIMBY Denver, says that while his group champions preserving open space and protecting the metro area’s tree canopy, he thinks there are better ways to increase density than opposing individual developments. His group’s fighting to eliminate government-mandated parking minums that require developers to add parking to their projects and also pushing to build more density near transit to reduce car dependency.
The advocacy organization Up for Growth published a recent report stating that Colorado is behind more than 100,000 units of needed housing in order for the market to stabalize. The Denver Housing Authority’s former director told Denverite the city is behind 60,000 units of income-restricted housing alone.
Building apartments allows developers to concentrate more housing in a smaller amount of space, cutting back on sprawl.
“One of the major reasons we support more infill is that so that fewer trees have to be cut down,” Miller said. “But we also need housing.”
An old office building that may be slated for redevelopment in Lakewood’s Belmar Park. March 21, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Kentner doesn’t buy that the state needs more housing, in general. Instead, she wants to see more income-restricted and naturally affordable housing.
Increasing supply of market-rate housing alone, as she sees it, won’t provide that.
“That is a wonderful theory of trickle-down housing that has never played out in reality,” she said.
Kentner would support dense housing that came with an increase in protected open space. But without that, she’s concerned new development with threaten the health of children and other residents.
“People can see that this is unhealthy, not sustainable, unaffordable, and destroying the quality of life that we all move to Lakewood to enjoy,” she said.
Correction: The City of Lakewood is still considering approving the development.
Lakeview Terrace, one of the oldest public housing projects in the country, has long been a site struggling with air pollution.
Cleveland will be one of 25 U.S. cities in the sights of Michael Bloomberg’s years-long fight against climate change.
The city is set to receive part of a $200 million pot, an announcement Tuesday proclaimed, from Bloomberg’s American Sustainable Cities initiative to “pursue transformative solutions in the buildings and transportation sectors.”
Those dollars, a release from the city said, will also fund a Cleveland-based team of three that will evaluate how handle the city’s climate worries through a marriage of data analysis and a concern for social equity.
Cleveland was one of four Ohio cities—including Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton— to join the initiative. From Mayor Justin Bibb’s perspective, it will allow the city to hone in on the more impoverished, majority Black neighborhoods that could use that dollar lift the most.
Bloomberg’s grant “will support equitable and more rapid implementation of historical funding at the neighborhood level, enhancing resources in our historically disadvantaged communities and reducing the racial wealth gap,” Bibb said in a release. “Through this collaborative effort, we will continue to work with residents and key stakeholders to achieve a more equitable and environmentally resilient city for all Clevelanders.”
Millions of dollars should provide a major lift to Cleveland’s Public Works and transportation sectors to help actualize a myriad of projects in the pipeline, the grant language suggests. Theoretically, ongoing concepts and in-progress builds with climate perks—like Ohio City’s Irishtown Bend Park, Canal Basin Park, or the dozens of streets downtown that NOACA believes could use bike lanes—could receive funding.
As for the other areas of climate concern, the potential for this cash to help is a lot more vague. Regional problems with air quality, flooding and a disappearing tree canopy continue.
Nationally-speaking, Cleveland is a lot less of a thorn in the side of climate activists than other industrial cities, like those in Pennsylvania and California. Cleveland didn’t even touch the top 25 of the American Lung Association’s “most polluted cities” in its 2023 State of the Air report. (It ranked as one of its Cleanest Cities, minding ozone and particle pollution.)
As for Michael Bloomberg himself, this initiative represents the former New York mayor’s long-running battle to bring down the fossil fuel industry, while injecting money into climate-focused cities worldwide with billions of dollars since 2013. A recent report from the Sierra Club stated that Bloomberg’s $500 million of climate activism in recent years “helped retire” 370 coal and gas plants nationwide.
He’s now, according to a New York Times article from last September, going after petrochemical plants, while propping up cities that want bike lanes and healthier air.
“If there’s something that can destroy the Earth and kill all living people, then it’s hard to argue you shouldn’t focus on that,” Bloomberg told the NYT. “I want my kids, your kids, to be able to have a life.”
Bloomberg’s initiative team chose Cleveland, a release said, “based on its leadership and ambition to build resilient, equitable communities.”
Governor Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 1, a mental health bond measure that would provide $2 billion to build housing that was presented to voters on the California ballot last week, is leading by a whisker.
Newsom had trumpeted the measure as a way to get “people off the streets, out of tents and into treatment.”
Prop. 1 would direct $4.4 billion to fund 10,000 mental health beds and $2 billion for homeless housing projects, half of which would be reserved for veterans with mental illness or issues with drugs and alcohol.
The measure would also require the state’s 58 counties to spend 30 percent of Mental Health Services Act tax dollars on housing. Last year, the mental health revenue was $1 billion.
It would require the state’s counties to spend half of that money on the chronically homeless or people living in tents.
The governor said the initiative would create 11,000 new homes through new housing construction or by converting hotels, motels and other buildings into homes.
The Yes on Prop 1 campaign raised nearly $21 million, and included backing by the National Alliance on Mental Illness California, California Teachers Association and California Chamber of Commerce.
In comparison, the “No on Prop. 1” campaign raised very little, and was led by mental health advocates such as Disability Rights California, who fear that changing funding priorities for the Mental Health Services Act will result in service cuts. They also fear new treatment beds will compel people into involuntary treatment.
Last October, the Los Angeles City Planning Department ditched some of the region’s most ambitious actions to tackle racial and economic segregation and confront the ongoing affordability crisis. Two housing initiatives — an Affordable Housing Overlay and expansions to the Transit Oriented Communities program — would have made it possible to build affordable and mixed-income housing in areas traditionally off-limits to multifamily homes.
But core components of these proposals have been withdrawn to shield single-family neighborhoods from development. This move puts L.A. at risk of running afoul of California’s fair housing law, falling short on housing production goals, and increasing displacement in its most vulnerable communities. Revised proposals are expected to be made public this winter or spring, with public outreach to follow. City leadership can and should reverse this harmful decision.
The original proposals were a response to state mandates meant to accelerate housing construction to meet demand. Under these mandates, Los Angeles has made plans to add more than 450,000 new housing units through 2029, including amending its zoning rules by February 2025 to accommodate about 250,000 more homes.
California law requires that development programs “affirmatively further fair housing,” meaning that they should “overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities” and “address significant disparities in housing needs and access to opportunity.” In certifying L.A.’s housing plan, the state made clear that “rezoning for multifamily housing in higher opportunity and low-density neighborhoods” was crucial.
The initial Transit Oriented Communities expansion and Affordable Housing Overlay did just that. In their original form, the two initiatives combined could have added almost 200,000 new units citywide, with a focus on higher-income, transit-accessible neighborhoods. Many of these communities are dominated by single-family detached houses, including Rancho Park, Westwood and Encino, among others.
The change is significant, and unjust. Our review of the city’s data shows that L.A.’s current capacity for development — places where denser housing is already allowed, ignoring the rezoning proposals — is disproportionately concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color. The data indicate that half of this capacity is in the poorest quarter of Los Angeles, while the wealthiest 10% of the city furnishes less than 1%.
We also found that the change to exclude single-family neighborhoods from rezoning slashes the two programs’ capacity by up to 82%, with the greatest reversals in the city’s wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods. Among the census tracts where the proposed zoning changes were cut by 75% or more, the median household income is $111,000. In neighborhoods where the original proposals are still being considered, it is $67,500. The racial and ethnic disparities are also stark, with tracts in the former group having more than twice the share of white residents as those in the latter (57% to 23%, respectively).
From a fair housing perspective, the Transit Oriented Communities expansion and Affordable Housing Overlay in single-family neighborhoods were L.A.’s strongest proposals. None of the alternatives come close to their potential to produce new mixed-income housing in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, where exclusionary policies have limited opportunities for lower- and middle-income households and people of color.
With less capacity to build in higher-income neighborhoods where developers most want to invest, it’s likely that fewer apartments and condos will be constructed citywide in the years to come. As the housing supply falls further behind growing demand, affordability will decline. Meanwhile, more homes will be built in lower-income, renter-dominated neighborhoods, where residents are at greater risk of displacement as older apartments make way for larger multifamily buildings.
Angelenos, and Californians, shouldn’t accept the decision to exempt L.A.’s richest neighborhoods from helping to solve our housing crisis, insulating them from changes the city needs. The outcry of a vocal minority is no excuse to renege on the city’s commitments to fair housing.
The proposed changes are disheartening, but Los Angeles still has time to adopt a progressive housing affordability strategy, adding homes where they’re needed most. The city can start by restoring the rezoning plan to its original form, or by implementing similar strategies that direct most of the city’s new housing to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. Until L.A. takes those steps, very little about this housing plan can be called fair.
Aaron Barrall is a housing data analyst for the UCLA Lewis Center Housing Initiative, which Shane Phillips manages.
