New apartments hailed as 'Hope on Garden Street'

By COLBY FRAZIER

With its flashy dome, whitewashed walls and arched entryway, the 42-foot building at 617 Garden St. looks like the future home of a flashy law firm, or a medical plaza.

But come Monday, it won’t be attorneys lugging weighty filing cabinets and new Apple computers through the front doors. The sight will most likely be far more modest when 38 people with mental health disabilities and 13 low-income workers begin settling into their new $27.1 million home, formally known as the Mental Health Association of Santa Barbara County’s Garden Street Apartments.

Congresswoman Lois Capps was one of hundreds who attended a ribbon cutting last night commemorating the completion of the facility. She said the building is a shining symbol of how Santa Barbara treats those in need.

“[The building is] hope on Garden Street,” Capps said. “It is such a statement — a statement of priorities. It is really a bringing together of our community and signifies how much we need each other.”

The 113,000-square-foot building features 51 residential units and will also be home to the Mental Health Association of Santa Barbara County, the local nonprofit that owns the building.

Aside from residential living space, the building will feature an onsite thrift store run by mental heath clients, an arts and crafts studio, and a full kitchen able to serve 100 people on a daily basis.

Mental Health Association Executive Director Annmarie Cameron said the project is eight years in the making.

She said the building is evidence that, “We truly live in one of the greatest communities that cares about the least fortunate.”

The City of Santa Barbara’s Housing Authority will manage the rental units, which range in price from as little as $352 to $755, depending on household income.

Of the $27.1 million cost of the project, the City of Santa Barbara Redevelopment Agency contributed $6.3 million and the County of Santa Barbara pitched in $1 million.

A number of other investors also contributed to the costs, including one for $9.5 million. According to a fact sheet handed out at the ribbon cutting, a condominium sale on the building’s third floor sold for $1.6 million.

Cameron said the new tenants with mental health disabilities were primarily residing in substandard housing in other parts of the city. She said some have no homes at all and are living on other people’s couches.

Ann Detrick, director of Santa Barbara County’s department of drug, alcohol and mental health services, who has come under fire from Cameron and other local nonprofit leaders for deep funding cuts, also praised the completion of the facility.

“It really is exciting,” she said.

The Mental Health Association absorbed significant cuts from the county last year, and Cameron said additional funding cuts could top 40 percent this year.

But at the end of the day, Cameron said she believes the goals of the county and the Mental Health Association are in step with one another.

“We have our ups and downs,” she said. “But through and through we all believe in quality services and want the same things.”

City of Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum admitted she gets excited about cutting ribbons, but this is one she’s been looking forward to taking her oversize pair of scissors to for a while.

“It really is absolutely wonderful,” she said of the building, which still needs some minor landscaping work before it’s finished. “It’s a matter of heart and soul.”

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: 12/5/2008

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Lois Capps : 12/11/2008

She recieved somewhere around 86,000 emails and phone calls stating not to support the bailout of Wall street and she vote for it anyway. Now she is happy to be in the press at a ribbon cutting ceremony for a place that cost 27 million just to build it, 38 people really 27 million? Down town Santa Barbara? Anybody else think is carzy?

Not Happy

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