On Congress Street west of the Santa Cruz River you’ll find a crossroads.
It’s where business-friendly meets business-like.
Business-friendly is how the Tucson City Council has treated the Gadsden Co. for years: extending deadlines, accommodating plan changes and even facilitating a property flip to help the company develop 14 barren acres.
Business-like is how the City Council finally seems ready to act, now that Gadsden has lost a competition for low-income housing tax-credits.
The June 30 decision means Gadsden doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to build West End Station, 160 units of “workforce housing” on West Congress. It also means the city must decide whether to “call,” or take, $1.2 million in performance bonds Gadsden has put up as a means of ensuring progress on its developments.
After years of accommodation, the council is finally ready to act business-like and call the bonds, or at least make Gadsden pay for not meeting its deadlines. Even Council Member Regina Romero, who has been Gadsden’s biggest fan on the council, has lost patience.
“We’re constantly accused of not being business friendly or developer friendly,” Romero told me Tuesday. “I think I have worked in good faith to try and work with a local developer who wants to do good.”
“Now we have to move forward,” she said. “I want to see some movement in terms of developing the west side.”
Those are remarkable words coming from someone who has defended Gadsden repeatedly over the years — and also remarkable considering that Gadsden’s partners were among those hosting a May 29 fundraiser for Romero’s re-election campaign.
Partner Jerry Dixon is still holding out hope that the city will extend another deadline and give him a year to try to win the low-income housing tax credits next year. He said the company lost by just one point in the scoring competition and could make up the difference next time.
“The city has to make the decision,” he said. “I fully expect they’re tired of extending the thing. We’re tired of extending the thing.”
But, he added, if the city calls the bonds, it will likely mean that Gadsden will sell the parcel to someone who will put in market-rate housing, not housing that helps the working poor.
At this stage, with empty dirt still covering acres along West Congress, that wouldn’t be so bad.
Steve Greenbaum, president of Senior Housing Group, the company that developed the Sentinel project at Congress and the river, told me he wants the project not to be isolated anymore, no matter who develops it.
I agree the choice of developer for that parcel is not sacred. We need one who gets things done. But Dixon is committed to low-income homes.
“To not do workforce housing because of the bond would be shortsighted in my view,” he told me at his office near El Charro downtown.
Dixon’s view, by the way, is wonderful. Not the view out his door, but the views within his office — the magnificent plans of apartment buildings, row houses, performance spaces, even a temporary facility using modified shipping containers, all in a Southwestern new urbanist style.
Those plans and the part of them that has become reality — the Mercado San Agustín, the Mercado District of Menlo Park and Sentinel Senior Housing — are the opposite of the downtown architecture I complained about in my June 27 column. They’re regional, they’re human in scale and they’re beautiful to look at. No wonder the council got intoxicated.
Now all signs are, they’re sobering up. Mayor Jonathan Rothschild told me he wants the city to disentangle itself financially from the Gadsden development, either by calling the bonds or by some other arrangement.
Steve Kozachik, the council member who has long opposed accommodating Gadsden, is ready to bring down the hammer, too.
“We’ve never held them accountable for any of the deadlines,” he said. “They continue to say, ‘We’re close, we’re close’ ”
But it would be counterproductive to be punitive. Rothschild proposed not calling the bonds, which could harm Gadsden’s credit-worthiness, and instead having the property that would be workforce housing revert to the city. Romero mentioned a possibility whereby Gadsden would pay the city the bond amount with a separate check and the city wouldn’t call the bonds.
That’s important because the parcel where the workforce housing was to go is still just a small piece of the broader area, which Gadsden still owns and is trying to develop.
Making them pay now for their inability to perform on parts of their project makes sense. But so does allowing them the ability to move forward on other parts of their project.
That approach would be refreshingly business-like.
