Council majority will support additional apartments in crowded Napa neighborhood | Local News
Is the cost of 16 new apartments too high for its Napa neighbors? City Council members found themselves divided in their answers on Tuesday, but scraped together just enough votes to keep alive a rental housing building planned for the edge of Old Town.
Two months after the Planning Commission rejected the Bridgeview Apartments, a split council revived the project on a 3-2 vote despite concerns it would worsen parking and traffic on the narrow streets around Riverside Drive.
The vote sets up a final decision by the council on approving the apartments, a move that will require finalizing an agreement with its developer to set aside three units for families earning less than the local median income and guarantee that other tenants can continue using federally funded Section 8 vouchers to pay their rent.
Architect Stephen Cuddy, who is representing the landowner, Peter Dwares, predicted final approval could come to a vote May 2.
Bridgeview would occupy the same 1.4-acre property where a 41-unit development was built in the 1970s and 1980s. But the prospect of adding housing to Napa’s overstretched supply clashed with neighbors’ worries for the safety of surrounding streets – and for a large building overshadowing modestly sized houses. (Under state law, the inclusion of lower-rent units triggers “density bonuses” that entitle the builder to create fewer on-site parking spaces than at full-rent apartments.)
“I’m all for affordable housing; I have two sons who live at home because they can’t afford to rent anything in this town,” Lynn Wood, whose home neighbors the apartments, told the council at City Hall. “But I wouldn’t want them to have to accept lower standards that would put them at risk.”
In the face of neighbors’ skepticism, planners first delayed a decision in October and then voted against the apartment plan in February. Dwares and Cuddy returned to Napa officials with revisions that lowered the two-story building’s height more than a foot to 31 feet 2 inches, added landscaping and trees for privacy, and increased its spacing from the nearest home from 10 to 17 feet.
Such changes made the apartment plan more palatable for some Napa officials, but not all.
While Councilman Peter Mott complimented Dwares for continuing to offer housing to those on Section 8 assistance, he joined Juliana Inman in voting against the expansion. He declared that zoning laws should not be bent too far to let more apartments into a neighborhood whose residents may never have anticipated denser development down the street.
“I have a hard time with approving a General Plan change,” Mott said, suggesting any radical rewriting of zoning laws should wait for Napa to create a new master plan in the next few years. “To me, the General Plan is the City Council’s promise to everyone in the community about what can happen next door to you.”
Although developers will add a sidewalk, curb and gutter to the stretch of Riverside Drive in front of the apartment building, Inman countered that other nearby streets remain ill-equipped for the heavier vehicle loads to come.
“This will exacerbate the parking problem; this is not really improving the neighborhood. It’s still very much a deficient infrastructure,” she said, adding that two dead ends and its nearness to the Napa River create further risks in the event of an emergency or flood conditions.
However, other council members declared the housing shortage – with rents boosted by a vacancy rate of 2 percent or less – so extreme that solving it must override other considerations.
Complaints about parking difficulty “are the tail that’s wagging the dog,” replied Scott Sedgley, who joined Doris Gentry and Mayor Jill Techel to vote in favor of Bridgeview. “If someday there’s no more parking, maybe fewer people will drive their cars. … Three low-income units may not sound significant, but it’s significant to those three very low-income families that will live there.”
Still to be worked out, before a final vote of approval, are the terms that will ensure the availability of Bridgeview apartments to those needing assistance.
Although 22 of the 41 existing dwellings are open to those on Section 8 support, Bridgeview’s existing agreement with the city only requires 11, and council members want to fix the higher number in place. The three units for low-income households will remain earmarked for 55 years.
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