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Nov. 30 — Four years of work have gone into making way for a city-owned downtown campus, and a City Council approval vote on new planning standards and signage Wednesday would move the renovation project closer to fruition.
Council approval of the Midtown Master Plan will amend the city’s general plan to reflect new opportunities for the former Santa Fe College campus, plus modify standards and policies that guide infrastructure development and land use incentives in the area.
Planners say the changes will eventually bring the opportunity for affordable housing, visual arts spaces, businesses, sustainable infrastructure and a renovated central city library to the 64-acre downtown site.
“We approached this from the perspective of creating a complete district,” project manager and planning consultant Daniel Hernandez said Tuesday, adding that he hopes the city’s long-term planning will continue with similar practices and policies that prioritize walkable, compact, mixed-use development. and multimodal transport.
Hernandez, of the California firm Proiecto, has been leading urban planning for the downtown site for several years. He expressed confidence that the long and sometimes difficult effort to transform the city center has received the necessary support for major changes to the shops.
“We were trying to create an urban design scale that had a density that was familiar to people, like downtown Santa Fe,” Hernandez said, adding that the guiding question was, “What is familiar and what are the patterns of urban design that are familiar to people?” like? “
However, City Council approval of the midtown planning items would not immediately result in shovels being dropped on the site. Hernandez and Lee Logston, of the city’s planning department, said it could take another year and a half to see development at the site.
The first next step, Hernandez said, will be to issue three initial requests for proposals for developers to redevelop three “legacy buildings” on the former campus: its Visual Arts Center, the Greer Garson Performing Arts Center and Garson Studios. Requests have already been prepared and are awaiting council approval, he said.
A request for proposals for affordable housing development could come as early as 2023, Hernandez said.
The City Planning Commission unanimously voted to approve the measures that are before the Council on Wednesday. That meeting in October was met with opposition from a group of property owners, led by Forrest Thomas of Thomas Properties, who expressed concerns about how adopting the downtown plans could affect the use of their own property. A letter from Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Ilario “Larry” Chavez highlighted similar discomfort with some of the maps and illustrations associated with the plans.
Thomas pointed to examples of illustrations and language in the plans that he believes suggest the city plans to build trails, roads and other infrastructure on his property.
Logston said the concept drawings were not meant to imply the city would take anyone’s private land, but rather to have “aspirational” potential connections to the largely gated downtown site.
“We worked with some of the surrounding property owners who were concerned that the master plan meant we would be building over their property,” Logston said, adding that the planning team changed some “language and imagery” but that “for us, it it was important to preserve our desire and intention to establish such connections”.
He and Hernandez said they don’t expect to see significant opposition to the downtown proposals at Wednesday’s meeting after changes were made to concept maps during the master plan.
But the downtown saga has had its share of surprises since the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, which took over the Santa Fe College site, closed its doors in 2018. A Texas company’s redevelopment proposal that would have boosted the project’s completion in 2021 has been shelved due to concerns about costs and the state of the site’s infrastructure as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the city and the nation.
As the approval process approaches, officials continue to seek support. Signs praising the project — Midtown is moving forward! — started appearing this week.
Hernandez said the public engagement phase of the project benefited from his reliance on existing community groups — such as the Chainbreaker Collective, Littleglobe, Earthcare and others — to connect with populations often overlooked during the land-use planning process.
He pointed to a 2021 event in which the arts-focused organization Littleglobe hosted a block party at the site and created a video showcasing attendees’ memories of the campus as well as hopes for its future.
During the video, revelers can be seen dancing to lively regional folk music, and respondents describe their ideal version of a city centre: “a place where people would be for many different reasons” and “a place to gather”.
“We all need to come together,” says one participant in the video, “and start coming up with solutions for all of us, not just some of us.”
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