In Seaside, actual housing is actually being built.

In Seaside, actual housing is actually being built.

Good afternoon. 

Sara Rubin here, thinking about the tale of the slow-boiling frog in the pot of water. It applies to so many issues that reach crisis mode and become seemingly impossible to dig our way out of. The climate crisis is one example (that is, quite literally, a slow temperature increase that we don’t feel the consequences of until it’s too late). Covid-19 tragically became one, until we grew accustomed to a still-increasing death toll as we go about our lives. Monterey County’s housing crisis feels like one too—a totally predictable housing crunch, repeat obstacles to developing more housing supply, and a fallback to the same talking points about why it’s so hard to solve the housing crisis. 

Enter the city of Seaside, where there is actual housing actually being built. There is the Ascent project, a block from the Post Office on Broadway, where work has already begun during shelter-in-place on demolition, and new construction will begin this year on 12 apartment buildings with 106 units. A program to promote accessory-dwelling units, called ADUs for short, is moving forward.

There’s also the Campus Town project, for which developer KB Bakewell is expected to drop off engineering plans at City Hall on Feb. 19, and which promises to create a total of 1,485 housing units, more than 200 of them affordable. 

And ground has finally broken—after a decade-plus-long delay—on a 125-home development at Bayonet & Black Horse Golf Course with a new builder, Shea Homes, behind it. (That project, called The Enclave, doesn’t have affordable housing and what’s under construction looks like luxury homes at luxury prices—the website says “pricing coming soon.”)

Besides those projects already in motion, there’s a concept that might take hold in Seaside that could help propel more and faster creation of housing. 

When Seaside City Council meets tonight at 5pm for a goal-setting study session, a lot of the bullet points City Manager Craig Malin will present have to do with housing. (You can watch tonights’s meeting live on YouTube.) 

The overarching goal is “build more affordable housing.” One bullet point within it is “establish action-oriented nonprofit,” and Malin will pitch the council on the idea of creating a free-standing nonprofit that can be more nimble and act more swiftly than the city when it comes to getting affordable housing built. It could launch with $5 million that’s already in the city’s affordable housing fund.

“Let's bring an independent but aligned nonprofit, overseen by community members that delivers on more affordable housing,” Malin says. “The beauty of a nonprofit is it can do certain things faster than cities can.” 

Malin’s report also lists some potential obstacles next to each of the city’s prospective goals. Next to the housing nonprofit are a few: “timidity, clamoring for ‘control,’ standard cast of forces supporting status quo.”

It’s a bold idea that could help get the slow-boiling frog out of the pot of water.

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com