[This is April Fools humor, okay?    Click here for more April Fools humor.]

Gateway Housing is here!

Following more than five years of Planning Commission deliberations and a dozen local developers saying it couldn’t be done, Arcata’s all-female combo of City Manager and City Council has achieved the impossible in just six days of “taking care of business.”

“We made it fun,” said City Manager Karing Dreamer. “We brainstormed and laughed, and then brainstormed and laughed some more. We know how to get things done.”

When pressed as to the nature of their success, the Councilmembers were clear. “No back-room deals,” Mayor Hurrah Seefar explained. “It was all done in Karing’s front office in full view, and also at The Pub.”

Vice-Mayor Merriment Usemath chimed in. “We’re vibrant, we’re ageless, we’re fabulous. We make decisions with a smile. Why be so serious? Everything takes forever when it’s a drag. Or… it’s a drag when it takes forever? Well, whatever.”

“And no ‘Good Old Boys’ deals,” Usemath continued. “Sure, we’re good, but not that kind of good. It all pays off in the end.”

It was Karing Dreamer who came up with the idea of simply purchasing upper stories of buildings that had been built too tall — from cities all over the United States. “We got entire blocks for just pennies on the dollar,” she explained. “Sometimes we only got a floor or two. Other times we got a full seven floors, which is perfect for us.”

An especially happy contributor of extra floors was the city of Canton, Ohio. “They were always so happy and grateful when we gave them the statue of President McKinley. Enrollment at the nearby Stark university campus is way down. We did them a favor by taking all their extra dorms and about half of their downtown.”

Helicopters Utilized

After the US Coast Guard helicopters were employed to drop hay to Humboldt cattle stranded in the snow, a giant light bulb went off over Karing Dreamer’s head.

“I switched to energy-efficient LCDs for over-the-top ideas years ago,” she spelled out. “The lower power consumption of LCDs makes for bigger and brighter ideas.” With a couple of phone calls to Army Reserve helicopter crews, she found them all-too willing to help.

The results: 1700 Gateway apartments delivered and installed in under six days.

How on earth did Dreamer get around the recusal of two Councilmembers?

“Oh, Smarty and Lexus weren’t actually at the meetings, and they didn’t actually tell us their opinions,” Dreamer pointed out. “The two — whoops, I didn’t say their names, did I? — Councilmembers dressed up as wait-staff at The Pub. They came to our table and took our orders. Mayor Seefar and Vice-Mayor Usemath and I asked them to tell us what was, um, ‘good on the menu’ – you know,” she said with a wink. “They told us what they thought was good, and that doesn’t violate any Brown, Green, or Blue Act. As far as I know, at least.”

And Councilmember Wittyberry-Ann Bright? Wouldn’t there be a Brown Act quorum violation if she sat in with the Mayor and Vice-Mayor? “I was the one who figured that one out,” Bright disclosed. “We all played Pickleball at Karing’s house. The Brown Act doesn’t apply at non-professional sporting events. Also — unlike at the Council meetings — I won.”

The only immediately obvious glitch in this amazing re-re-re-development of an area that had been described as “the decrepit blighted industrial drag-on-society no-jobs, no-latte, and no-pizza wasteland” was that rent prices for the apartments turned out to be a little higher than anticipated. The US Army Reserve Helicopter unit insisted that the City of Arcata paid for the aviation fuel, and, well, you know how high gas is these days.

Rents start at $6,000 per month for a cot-bed-sized studio (the apartment is the size of a cot) and go to $17,500 for a two-bed two-bath two-kitchen two-front-door one-quarter-parking-space unit.

Dreamer went into detail. “Yes, a monthly rent of $11,000 for a one-bedroom apartment certainly might perhaps possibly be considered, by some people at least, to be on the high side, based on today’s market-rate pricing. But the rent does include green-waste disposal for all Bonsai plant clippings, and half-time wi-fi service,” she said.

At that her face brightened. “There won’t be any trouble filling the new housing, because of a new mutual-assistance program we’ve arranged with the Cal Poly Humboldt admissions office. They give us lists of hundreds of pre-selected parents of eighteen-year-olds — parents who can pay those prices — and we take care of the leases. This works out for everybody.”

So what’s behind the Arcata Police Department getting an Army tank?

And that delivery of an Army tank by helicopter? 

“Oh, yeah. They gave us that,” Dreamer disclosed. “We’ll use it for parking control. Our little battery-powered parking meter cars were no match for Diesel crew-cab pickup four-by-fours. There’s absolutely no parking permissible in the Gateway Zone. We just needed a means of enforcement.”

A US Army Reserves helicopter lifts a studio apartment modular unit to the 7th floor of a Gateway District apartment house. This entire building, minus the “privately-owned public-access” park, was completed in 45 minutes. Tenants will be moving in this afternoon. The required privately-owned public-access community benefit park is contracted to be completed at some point prior to the end of the building’s financially depreciated lifespan of 27.5 years. That is, the park will be open to the public by October, 2050.