Cottage Health Plans to Build 204 Homes for Employee Housing

Projects Expected to Take Three Years to Complete

A rendering of the proposed Cottage workforce housing at 2415 De La Vina Street. | Credit: Cottage Health

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Santa Barbara’s Cottage Health will bolster its workforce housing in the coming years. On September 26, it announced plans to provide 204 homes for its workers to purchase for below-market rate.

Forty-four new homes, each with parking, are slated for 2415 De la Vina Street, a few blocks from Cottage’s main hospital building and at the site of its current rehabilitation hospital. The rehabilitation hospital will move to its new, larger location at Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital.

Cottage has also agreed to buy 160 homes from the Caird Family’s proposed development. The Caird Family’s three sites were reviewed by the County’s Board of Supervisors in May. The three sites proposed 650 units on South Patterson Avenue. The county’s planning commission had recommended the sites to the board.

Cottage Health CEO Ron Werft called providing housing for Cottage’s employees “mission critical,” saying, “For those of us in very-high-cost-of-living areas, finding solutions that provide options for employees to enjoy the benefits of home ownership really connects them to the organization and the community for their whole careers,” he said.

The workforce housing projects are in early stages, and the health company’s board has approved the projects, but they will have to go through the permit processes of Santa Barbara city and county. Werft said that he expects this to take about three years.

Additionally, Werft said Cottage doesn’t have the information it will use to set the units’ prices, such as quotes from contractors. But, he said, the company plans to provide options for its employees across the pay scale.

Werft said the workforce housing, Bella Riviera, that Cottage has already provided its employees has informed its current plans. Bella Riviera, located on the site of the former St. Francis Hospital, offers 81 condominiums to Cottage employees, as well as 31 market-rate condos. At the time of their 2012 sale, the workforce housing units ranged in price, with a one-bedroom unit set at $187,000 and a three-bedroom going for $475,000.

Cottage Health’s Bella Riviera condominiums, 81 of which are below market-rate homes for Cottage employees. | Credit: Cottage Health

After all the units at Bella Riviera were sold, the project still cost Cottage about $15 million. By providing this workforce housing, however, the health company has been able to keep workers long-term.

“Over the last 11 or 12 years, we’ve had 145 employees own those homes, and there’s no question that there are nurses, therapists, and staff at Cottage who would not be here in our community if they hadn’t been able to purchase homes in the community.”

The homes have predetermined resale values, and once a person is no longer employed by the healthcare organization, they must sell within six months of ending employment.

Cottage acquired the land for Bella Riviera in 2003; it took about a decade for affordable homes to be ready for sale. But, Werft said that attitudes toward workforce housing, including the attitude from elected officials, have shifted.

“My sense is that there’s a lot more support for workforce housing now than there was when we were going through this in the early 2000s to the mid-2000s,” Werft said, but the cities will do their “due diligence” in studying the development impacts on the surrounding communities.

All told, Cottage plans to have the first homes available in 2029.