The tenants of the Battistone Foundation have waited on a knife’s edge since hearing in January that their homes are up for sale. Many of the nearly 200 low-income seniors have called the Edgerly and Palm Tree Apartments home for 20 or 30 years: Would a new buyer allow them to stay in their apartments or kick them out? How much would their rent increase if they stayed or left?
The majority of them live on the block anchored by the historic building once called the Edgerly Apartment Hotel. It’s a prime location of downtown Santa Barbara, bordered by the city’s main bus line along Chapala, grocery stores large and small a few streets away, while State Street, a single block over, holds retail and coffee shops, thrift stores, movie theaters, restaurants, the art museum, and the public library.
They recognize that all those attributes are equally attractive to a hotel or apartment developer, who could take the block and renovate it into a multi-story cash cow. Santa Barbara’s production of expensive, market-rate apartments has always outstripped the low-income and affordable. Hotel projects are springing up like weeds.
But the Turner Foundation is interested. “We love seniors!” said Dean Wilson, CEO of the nonprofit. Turner has housed more than 100 families, seniors, and young people out of foster care at five apartment buildings and homes on the Westside since 2005. Originally founded in Riverside, Turner’s property there, the Rose Garden Village, was for seniors, Wilson recalled, whose residents even formed a musical band called the Rosettes.
Wilson said he was talking with his “tax credit guy” to work out the financing of the state and federal credit system that underpins affordable housing development. And he’s rolling up his sleeves to raise a considerable amount from the community to meet the asking price of $80 million.
But gaining funds through tax credit programs is no simple task. Set up in the federal Tax Reform Act of 1986 to fund affordable housing, the competition for the funds has grown alongside the costs of construction in recent years.
In 2024, the California Treasurer’s Office had $1.2 billion in federal and state credits to distribute. It received 91 applications and was able to award only 38 of them. Amid the severe federal cuts ongoing, this program should remain intact: “The housing credit program has strong bipartisan support in Congress,” a spokesperson for the Treasurer’s Office wrote, “and we remain optimistic that they will remain part of the federal budget/tax bills. In fact, there are currently efforts to expand the program.”
