GILROY
– A South County Housing official is more confident than ever
that a decrepit former downtown cannery will become a mixed-income
apartment complex in three years.
GILROY – A South County Housing official is more confident than ever that a decrepit former downtown cannery will become a mixed-income apartment complex in three years.
“I’m feeling more optimistic all the time,” senior project manager Nancy Wright told the city’s Downtown Specific Plan Task Force Tuesday night.
The main reason for Wright’s optimism, she said, is that she now thinks her agency has partners with the money and expertise to clean up chemical contamination at the former industrial site. The nonprofit California Center for Land Recycling and the California Environmental Redevelopment Fund LLC recently promised to help fund site cleanup, she said.
South County Housing has yet to close the deal with building owner A.J. Patel, but it has hired a designer from Pittsburgh and plans to invite the public to join its design process next month, according to Wright.
The plan is for the cannery at Lewis Street and Railroad Avenue, erected in 1935, to give way to 90 to 150 apartments. About half of these would be reserved for low-income tenants; the other half would have market-rate rental fees.
South County Housing cannot afford the project unless many of the tenants pay market-rate rents, Wright said, but there’s also an ideological reason as well for mixing tenants’ income levels.
It is important to have people with disposable income living downtown, Wright told the task force, to the agreement of several of its members. South County Housing, like the task force, wants to prove that people will live downtown because they want to, not simply because it is affordable.
The obstacle is that there may be no more market-rate housing allotments left until 2013 under Gilroy’s growth-control ordinance. Therefore, South County Housing supports a proposal by the Downtown Specific Plan Task Force to temporarily switch some affordable housing permits to market-rate housing for downtown.
