See also: 
How much Gateway housing, really? 3,500 … 500 … or none?  Over 180 views.
“Dwelling Units per Acre” – Another terrible way of measuring housing   Reading time 3 minutes. Over 700 views.
Density: How many units per acre for apartments around Humboldt   Reading time 5 minutes.

The Gateway Area Plan calls for a build-out of 3,500 apartments. If each building were the size of the block-long Sorrel Place (7th Street, between I & J), this would amount to 70 or 80 Sorrel-Place-sized buildings. (Assuming there’s commercial space in the ground floor, these new Sorrel-Place-sized buildings would be five stories tall.)

It also calls for a build-out of 277,000 square feet of commercial space. This is equivalent to about 21 buildings that are the size of the Arcata Co-op, or the equivalent of about 150 or 200 standard retail, office, or restaurant spaces.

The entire Gateway area is about 70 blocks, and this includes all the existing buildings, apartments, and homes. There is not physical room for 70 or 80 block-long buildings. There’s not room for half that many.

Contents         
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1. 3,500 apartments and 277,000 square feet of commercial space in Gateway?
2. How many “Sorrel Places” is this?
3. How is 3,500 apartments explained.
4. What does 3,500 apartments really look like? Comparisons with other dense cities in America. 
5. How many apartments are realistic for in the Gateway area — and why this figure is important.
6. Could Gateway development possibly be 3,500 units?
7. Images of the density of Isla Vista, California.
8. Policies in the Gateway Area Plan.

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3,500 apartments and 277,000 square feet of commercial space in Gateway?

The Gateway area is 138 acres. This includes the area used by streets and sidewalks, as well as areas that are unbuildable because of environmental considerations. About half of the Gateway area is located in the coastal zone.

The current draft plan proposes an average apartment size of 949 square feet, which we can consider as equivalent to a two-bedroom apartment. (The 44-unit Sorrel Place building, with 1, 2, and 3-bedroom units, has an average size of 824 square feet.) In other words, we’re not looking at 300 square foot studio units, but rather decent-size apartments, where we can reasonably expect a number of people similar to the 2.2 average per apartment number.

The plan also calls for the development of 277,000 square feet of commercial space. To put this in perspective, the expanded Arcata Co-op is 13,500 square feet. The Eureka Co-op building is 28,000 square feet. The Arcata Community Center is 20,000 square feet, with the big main room room at 8,800 square feet. A typical commercial rental space in Arcata is 1,000 to 3,500 square feet. The entire Creamery Building — every space there — is in total is about 50,000 square feet.

So the Gateway plan is calling for the construction of commercial spaces equivalent to 5-1/2 Creamery Buildings, ten Eureka Co-op buildings, fourteen Arcata Community Centers, twenty-one Arcata Co-op buildings, 31 Community Center main room spaces, or between 80 to 280 typical retail, office, or restaurant spaces. Does Arcata need this much retail and commercial space — even over the next 20 or 30 years?
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How many “Sorrel Places” is this?

Sorrel Place, on 7th Street on the block between I and J Streets, is 44 units. It is four stories, with a building footprint of a little under 14,000 square feet. It occupies 0.69 acres, or roughly half of a city block, and has a density of 64 units per acre.

Since the Gateway plan emphasizes taller buildings and mixed-use construction, with commercial uses on the ground floor, let’s imagine Sorrel Place as a 5-story building, with perhaps 8,000 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor. 

For a proposed 500 units in the Gateway area, that would be the equivalent of eleven Sorrel Place buildings.
For a proposed 3,500 units in the Gateway area, that would be 80 Sorrel Place buildings.

There are only about 70 blocks in all of the Gateway area — that includes all the buildings and houses that are already there: Creamery, Portuguese Hall, Holly-Yashi, Northcoast Children’s Center, Tomas, Fed-Ex, Bud’s mini-storage, the Montessori school, the trailer court, about 100 single-family homes, etc etc. There are about 36 blocks — total — of parcels that can reasonably be expected to be redeveloped — and that includes the entire “Barrel District” industrial area along Samoa Boulevard, the current location of Wing Inflatables, the R&L Lumber Mill, and the former SoilScape warehouse that’s now utilized as a parking area and support for homeless persons.

To build 3,500 apartments that are an average of 949 square feet, as the Gateway Plan proposes, would involve a greater area than the 36 total blocks that are available.
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How is 3,500 apartments explained

It’s not explained very well at all. On the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on the City’s website is this:

“To get to 3,500 new units in reality would mean that every vacant and underutilized parcel in the Area is redeveloped to the maximum capacity of units allowed under currently proposed development standards (height, setbacks, residential densities, etc.).”

“This level of redevelopment required to achieve 3,500 new residential units in the Gateway Area is highly unlikely. The buildout figure of 3,500 units represents a decision to zone each parcel in the Gateway Area for maximum housing creation opportunities, understanding that many of these opportunities will be infeasible due to various constraints such as market forces, financial considerations, and individual landowner decisions. Many of the parcels within the Area will not be able to be redeveloped at all — much less to maximum capacity.”

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So — What does 3,500 apartments really look like?
Comparisons with other dense cities in America

Because the Community Development Department has as yet refused to provide examples of “Area Massing Diagrams” — as was promised would be done, at the November 16, 2022, City Council presentation and request for further Gateway funding — we cannot see what this level of build-out would look like.

But we can imagine it, by comparing the density of how many people per square mile it would be.

At 138 acres, the Gateway area is 0.216 square miles. For urban planning purposes, we typically look at people per square mile or, sometimes, units per square mile. The figure of 2.2 persons per housing unit is acceptable when the average square feet per unit is of a reasonable size — in this case, 949 square feet per unit. (As an example of how this figure has been misused, the 2.2 people per unit was used in a false manner for the Westwood Gardens apartment project, where staff claimed a 2.2 person per unit occupancy when the apartments were under 400 square feet.)

Here’s what is proposed for the Gateway area. Size is 138 acres = 0.216 square miles. We will “guesstimate” that there are about 250 houses and apartments there currently, with a population of about 500. This is probably a low estimate.

A:  500 units as proposed over a 20-year period.
~1,100 people + 500 in existing houses and apartments = ~1,600.
3,470 units per square mile. 7,400 people per square mile.

B:  3,500 units as a total potential build-out.
~7,700 people + 500 in existing houses and apartments = ~8,200.
17,300 units per square mile. 37,900 people per square mile.

At the 500-apartment 20-year build-out, this yields a density greater than the average overall densities of Sacramento, Santa Clara or Davis.

At the 3,500-apartment full build-out, this yields a density twice as large as San Francisco, and around the the average overall densities of Brooklyn or the Bronx, New York.

Note: The above chart is a terrible “apples and oranges” statistical misrepresentation. The density of a small space — the Gateway area is 0.21 square miles — should not be compared to the density of a large area, such as San Francisco or Brooklyn. I put this here just to start us thinking about what the density of 3,500 apartments would look l ike.

Comparing Gateway to Isla Vista is more apt. See photos below.

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How many apartments are realistic for in the Gateway area — and why this figure is important

When the Gateway Area Plan was announced in December, 2021, we were told that there would be an approximate maximum of 3,500 new residential units. Many readers of the plan doubted the validity of this number.

In the subsequent draft of the plan, released in October, 2022, this figure was revised to be approximately 500 new residential units in the Gateway Area in the next 20 years — while “recognizing the full buildout potential in the Area is close to 3,500 units.”

Among what we can agree on is, for a variety of known reasons, there is a tremendous demand for housing in Arcata. The Gateway area is just one possible place for new housing in Arcata — however the area contains the major potential for new housing, by far.

If we are to believe that in the entirety of the Gateway area, there would be new construction of just 500 units over a twenty year period — that is, an average of just 25 units per year — then this would be just a drop in the bucket relative to Arcata’s housing needs. 

In the past twelve months or so, we have seen approvals of the Westwood Gardens apartments additions (102 units), the Julian Berg-designed Valley East Lofts (22 units), and the Boughton 11th Street project (22 units) — a total of 146 units.
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Could Gateway development possibly be 3,500 units?

As the Community Development Director puts it, as explained in the City’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page:

“To get to 3,500 new units in reality would mean that every vacant and underutilized parcel in the Area is redeveloped to the maximum capacity of units allowed under currently proposed development standards (height, setbacks, residential densities, etc.).”

“This level of redevelopment required to achieve 3,500 new residential units in the Gateway Area is highly unlikely. The buildout figure of 3,500 units represents a decision to zone each parcel in the Gateway Area for maximum housing creation opportunities, understanding that many of these opportunities will be infeasible due to various constraints such as market forces, financial considerations, and individual landowner decisions. Many of the parcels within the Area will not be able to be redeveloped at all — much less to maximum capacity.”

We are told that this 3,500 figure is “a mathematical possibility” based — perhaps — upon taking the total number of acres of the “opportunity zones” and multiplying that by an expected density of housing, as “units per acre.” This is explained to some extent in Table 4 of the draft Gateway Area Plan. That table come up with “Total collective potential residential units” of “approximately 1,000 to 3,000+” units.

We can note that the units proposed for about half of this 1,000 to 3,000+ figure are located in the coastal zone, and as such requires approval from the Coastal Commission for construction there. Also that about 60% of the “Opportunity Zone E” where up 112 to 311 units are proposed is actually environmentally protected land (this is ignored in the draft plan table) and that hundreds of units are planned for parcels where existing uses exist and where the owners have indicated they are unlikely to redevelop their properties.

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Images of the density of Isla Vista, California — home of UC Santa Barbara

This is what 8,300 people per square mile looks like.

On a persons-per-square-mile basis, the stated full build-out that’s in the Gateway Area Plan is 3,500 apartment units in about one-fifth of a square mile. The total, with existing homes, would be about 8,200 people — or almost 38,000 people per square mile.

Is that possible in Arcata?  A density that is 4-1/2 times what you see in these images? No, it is not possible. Nevertheless, that 3,500 apartments is the number that is written in the Gateway Area Plan.

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Policies in the Gateway Area Plan

The original draft of the Gateway Area Plan came out in the first week of December, 2021 — just about two years ago now. As as a stated Policy in the Housing Chapter, it stated:

GA-3a. New Units. Plan for an approximate maximum of 3,500 new residential units in the Gateway Area.

In the 2nd draft of the Gateway Area Plan, from October 2022, this was changed to be:

GA-3a. New Units. Plan for approximately 500 new residential units in the Gateway Area in the next 20 years, recognizing the full buildout potential in the Area is close to 3,500 units, as shown in Table 5.

The following is from the current version (as of November, 2023) of the Gateway Area Plan, version — v12a2_10272023, dated 10/26/23, 9:31:50 AM. Bold highlights are added.

• Housing Policies: GA‐3a. New Units. Plan for approximately 500 new residential units in the Gateway Area in the next 20 years, recognizing the full buildout potential in the Area is close to 3,500 units, as shown in Table 5.
• Plan for up to 3,500 new residential units with the Gateway Area that are available to a wide range of income levels and that include a balance of renters and owners.
• This Plan allows growth of up to 3,500 new residences in the Gateway Area.
• Table 5: Target Land Use Mixes
  Total 3,500 units of an average unit size of 949 square feet.
  Plus 277,000 square feet of non-residential (commercial) floor area.
• The City aims to accommodate up to 3,500 new residential units in the Gateway Area, provided primarily through high‐density multifamily, townhouses, lofts, work‐live units, quads, small space clustered units, and mixed‐use development. New housing will feature a range of unit sizes, a mix of renter and owner‐occupied units, and housing choices available for students and lower‐income households.
• The Plan Area’s overall infrastructure systems must be sufficient to accommodate the types and amount of planned growth, including up to 3,500 new residential units and new commercial businesses.