What Sonoma County urban living could look like in the next few years

Six- to eight-story luxury apartment buildings, downsized “microsuites,” minimal on-site parking, ground-floor child care.

These features of urban living could soon be coming to the North Bay’s largest city, and, according to real estate developers speaking at a business conference Tuesday, downtown Santa Rosa is more welcoming of such housing investments than in years past.

“We’ve seen Santa Rosa walk the walk,” said Pauline Block, head of marketing and development for Petaluma-based Cornerstone Properties, which owns The Press Democrat building on Mendocino Avenue and several other sites in the city. She pointed to the city’s formation of an enterprise district to deal with longstanding challenges, the reunification of Courthouse Square and the completion of the Station Area Specific Plan for Railroad Square.

“So we really feel strongly that there's great opportunity, and this is going to be a really good time the next few years to bring these projects forward in our community,” Block said to the 130 who attended the Building the North Bay Construction Conference, a Business Journal Virtual Event.

Cornerstone owns 30 commercial properties from Petaluma’s Redwood Business Park to the industrial area next to the Sonoma County airport.

Two projects the company has underway now are 556 Ross St., which would have 110 apartments in an eight-story building just north of The Press Democrat editorial offices. Another is 34 Sixth St. in the Railroad Square area of downtown west of Highway 101, where the first phase would have 110 apartments in a six-story building overlooking the existing SMART downtown train depot.

Both projects have gone through design review, and formal applications are set to be submitted soon, Block said.

She was one of three speakers at the construction conference. The other two were Keith Rogal and Larry Florin, CEO of Santa Rosa-based nonprofit developer and manager Burbank Housing Corp.

Rogal is redeveloping the 157-acre Napa Pipe property with a Costco Wholesale store and about 1,000 homes. In Santa Rosa, his group is proposing to build a seven-story building with 120 apartments at 1 Santa Rosa Ave., the southwest corner of Courthouse Square.

“We felt if we were going to be among the first to develop this different type of housing in downtown, it was important to do so in a way that was really prominent…,” Rogal said. “And that it would kind of signal to other developers and investors and bankers that meaningful and high-quality residential developments was right here, right downtown on the square.”

Rogal and Block said that their projects would have no in-building parking, offering space rentals at nearby city garages and on-site bicycle parking.

“We made a significant decision not to build parking in the building to try to really encourage the maximum walking and biking,” Rogal said. “Obviously, people need cars, but there's a city parking garage already paid for long ago, that has on its busiest day more than 300 vacant spaces. And so we have worked to arrange the ability for our residents to rent spaces there, to simply walk across the street. But we hope that to a large degree, they'll also bike they'll use transit.”

Rogal said rents at 1 Santa Rosa Ave. would be premium to class A garden apartments in the market. Such flats rent for $2.25–$2.57 a square foot monthly, according to Scott Gerber, who brokers apartment complex sales for Meridian Commercial. The units in that project range from 483–705 square feet for studios, 499–739 square feet with one bedroom and 853–1,026 square feet with two bedrooms.

Demand for smaller units in taller buildings may return if the work-from-home trend ebbs as expected after coronavirus vaccines circulate. However, right now the opposite is in demand, Gerber said after the conference.

"That idea was conceived in San Francisco and New York, but it doesn’t translate to place like Santa Rosa — yet,“ Gerber said in an email. ”Nobody wants less space if they can have more space. With COVID, that is accentuated. People also are leaving elevator buildings in (San Francisco) to move to garden complexes in the suburbs with private entrances, patios and yards — and parking. I’m not saying that is a permanent trend, but it is a current one.“

Burbank Housing is leading redevelopment of the former Journey’s End mobile home park, where two residents were killed when the Tubbs Fire roared through north Santa Rosa in October 2017. The blaze left standing only 44 of the 162 homes, but infrastructure damage to the 13.5-acre park made the rest uninhabitable.

Burbank’s plan, which is set to be heard before the city Planning Commission on Thursday, calls for building 532 rentals. Burbank would handle the 162 affordable senior units on 2.5 acres, and the organization has been working since the fires to find the park survivors new homes. Los Angeles-based Related California, a for-profit luxury apartment and townhome developer that Florin has worked with while at other organizations, would build 370 market-rate units in three- and four-story buildings on 9.25 acres.

The goal is to start construction in fall 2021, Florin said.

The underwriter for the construction conference was Ghilotti Construction. Major sponsors were George Petersen Insurance Agency, Oles Morrison Rinker Baker and Wright Contracting. Corporate sponsors were Marin Builders Association, Midstate Construction, Nordby Construction and North Coast Builders Exchange.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Before the Business Journal, he wrote for Bay City News Service in San Francisco. He has a degree from Walla Walla University. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.

Correction, Nov. 13, 2020: Cornerstone Properties’s project at 556 Ross St. is not at 1 Santa Rosa Ave.