Benicia seeks to rebuild senior center with affordable housing

BENICIA – The Benicia City Council on Tuesday moved forward with plans to build affordable housing on two city-owned land parcels, including the Benicia Senior Center, which the city is seeking to rebuild with low-income senior housing. 

The council unanimously agreed during its meeting Tuesday to find a developer to build affordable senior homes at the vacant Scout Property at the corner of E. Fourth and E. L streets and the senior center at 187 E. L St. 

Assistant City Manager Suzanne Thorsen told the council that the two sites were identified within the 2023-2031 Housing Element – a state-mandated plan for the city to keep up with its housing needs – as the best options for new affordable housing, due to their proximity to other city resources. 

Benicia’s Housing Element notes that in Solano County, 34% of households were overpaying for housing in 2019 and average rental costs have increased by 44% in the past six years, disproportionately impacting lower-income and fixed-income households. 

At a time when land is at a premium and housing is more expensive than ever to build, Benicia’s only option to increase its number of affordable homes may be to use city-owned land, Mayor Steve Young said during Tuesday’s meeting.

The two sites city leaders reviewed Tuesday seem ideal for this goal, Thorsen said. For example, the senior center is near the Benicia Public Library on L Street and the police station, and within walking distance of nearby grocery and drug stores. The rebuilt senior center would retain some senior programs and the city anticipates the building would have about 21 affordable housing units. The center often hosts community events such as forums, and Thorsen told Vallejo Sun that some programs will continue to be offered at other facilities such as the Benicia Community Center. 

The vacant Scout Property, nearly half an acre near the community center, offers the chance to yield about 17 new homes, with about 10 planned as affordable to low-income households, Thorsen said. 

The process to select one or two developers who will build on these sites could take about five months, starting in January. Thorsen requested that a councilmember sit in on interviews of developers to pick the best candidate, likely during the spring. She reminded the council that through the last Housing Element revision process, staff have been very concerned about finding land which can properly meet the state’s requirements for building affordable housing. 

Councilmember Terry Scott said he’d like to join the panel, noting how, since 2022, the city has worked to keep options for affordable housing as flexible as possible within the Housing Element. 

“We wanted to find ways to see how creative some of these developers could be on small parcels of land and larger parcels of land,” Scott said. “We should keep this open-ended so we can see some of the creativity out there.”

Young said that it’s worth committing both city-owned sites to affordable housing to prioritize meeting the state’s mandates. He added that if for some reason, the city and a developer decided to use either site for market-rate housing or another purpose, they would still have to find sites where the planned housing could get built, which could be very difficult in the future.

“It seems obvious that we’re not going to see affordable housing built without significant public subsidy,” Young said. “The only thing we have is land. If we don’t require this relatively lower-end affordability, we will never be able to meet that requirement of the state.”

Councilmember Kari Birdseye, while supporting the plan for the two sites, said that the city ought to keep an open mind toward creative uses of land working with other organizations that might want to build affordable housing options in the future. 

“Yes we’re very limited, but there are nonprofit organizations and other businesses where this is what they do,” Birdseye said. “They’re philanthropic in nature and want to see more affordable housing. That might be a possibility in our future down the road – but for right now, this is the right thing to do with our properties.” 

The city may also require representatives from the Benicia Housing Authority, Benicia Community Action Council, Carquinez Village and the Community Services Commission to sit on the interview panel to select a developer for the sites.

There were few public comments on the matter Tuesday night. Chris Paloma, identifying himself as a member of a local construction workers union, asked the city to consider working with developers who offer prevailing wage and good employment standards on affordable housing projects. “Affordable housing should be affordable not only for the people, but for the workers who build it,” he said. 

The mayor said that consideration of developers’ standards and practices must come at a later date.