Patterson Point started moving people into its studio apartments in April, said Andres Diaz, who manages the facility and got a thankful shoutout from one of the building’s new tenants, all of whom were formerly homeless, during a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday. Three of the residents spoke to the small crowd of elected officials and on-site staffers, talking about the difficulty of making such a big transition to being indoors and how the supportive programs at Patterson help save lives.
“Today is definitely a celebration” of growth and change, said one resident. He recalled how hard it had been to find a job as he worried about the big backpack he’d carried with all his belongings and the difficulty of staying clean. Another young man was simply grateful to see what had been unimaginable, that so many people cared enough to put his new community together.
Located to the right of the Patterson Avenue offramp along northbound 101, Patterson Point contains 23 studio apartments on a half-acre of land. It only took two days to assemble the modular components, said John Polanskey of the Housing Authority of Santa Barbara County, which include community and laundry rooms, and a manager’s apartment. Andres Diaz explained that although there was a parking lot, only a couple of tenants had cars. There were services that took the residents to appointments or errands like grocery shopping.
Polanskey’s group was the lead agency among the many that it took to bring the $23.7 million project to completion. Among them were Red Stone and Monarch equity companies, which negotiated $11 million in state and federal tax credits, $6.7 million in loans from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, $2.4 million from the Banc of California, and $2.6 million from Santa Barbara County and Housing Authority itself.
Toni Navarro, who leads Behavioral Wellness at the County of Santa Barbara, spoke of how important the stability of a home was for mental health. “Housing is healthcare,” she said. It was both treatment and prevention, she said, and that without housing, people need more care.
A number of people mentioned that this was the third event they’d attended recently for the Housing Authority. Hollister Lofts is going up near the Page Youth Center — a conventional framing building — and will hold 29 special needs studios once finished, and the other is San Simeon Oaks, a 106-unit workforce housing project of the Housing Authority and the Santa Barbara Unified School District that broke ground in July.
It takes partnerships and leadership to expand affordable housing in the county, observed Congressmember Salud Carbajal, a former county supervisor, at the Patterson Point event: “When we all work together, we make it happen.”
Correction: The original headline placed the project in Goleta; it is in unincorporated Santa Barbara County, on the edge of the Goleta city line.
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