The Sunnyvale Sun
News
City eyes senior housing project site
By Cody Kraatz
The long-discussed plan to build an affordable senior housing complex next to the new Valley Health Center Fair Oaks in central Sunnyvale is inching toward realization, but some significant hurdles remain.
The biggest one is for the city of Sunnyvale to reach a lease agreement with Santa Clara County, which owns the clinic site at 660 S. Fair Oaks Ave.
The city on April 8 signed a deal with Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition, one of the biggest Bay Area affordable housing developers, to begin working out specific project details.
The board of supervisors would have to approve a lease, and negotiations are ongoing in closed-door sessions. Both the city and the county declined to go into specifics.
For now, preliminary plans call for about 120 rentals for extremely low-income seniors on roughly 1 acre of the county's 2.76-acre parcel. Parking would be located underground, and the apartments would be primarily one bedroom.
Mid-Peninsula has secured 120 hard-to-get Section 8 vouchers through the county's Housing Authority that come with federal subsidies.
"Financially, that's what makes this project work," said Alok Lathi, project manager at MPHC.
Also sweetening the deal is the possibility of including MPHC's adjacent Garland Plaza Apartments at 662 Garland Avenue in the project. Some of the vouchers could be used there, but most will continue to house families because the units are larger.
The senior housing units would accept seniors who earn 30 percent or less of the area median income, which is estimated to be roughly $80,000 per year.
The nearby senior center at 550 E. Remington Drive, a nearby senior nutrition center and Braly Park--if it can be made accessible--are some of the location's other amenities.
Lathi said MPHC will continue to study the feasibility of housing at the site and set up community meetings to hear neighbors' concerns.
The developer has built roughly 1,600 senior units throughout the Bay Area, including a 48-unit complex at 130 Crescent Terrace in Sunnyvale, and Lathi said that demand is high.
Health center
The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center hopes to open the 45,000-square-foot, three-story health center this summer after it's finished in May. It is designed to compete with other local hospitals for the lucrative Medicare, MedicAid and Medi-Cal clients.
The county would then move out of the existing 30-year-old, 16,000-square-foot building, which would be demolished. The parking lot that will then go in its place would have to be torn up if the housing comes through in the future.
It could be a tad complicated to fit it in, but with careful phasing and a new parking structure, the housing could be built with little impact to the clinic, according to a contractor at the site.
For more information, visit www.scvmed.org and click on Valley Health Centers on the left side of the page. Or, visit www.midpen-housing.org.