Santa Rosa wants to build 7,000 apartments. This luxury project could make or break the plan

San Francisco Chronicle​

30-06-2025

The new Felix apartment building is unlike anything downtown Santa Rosa has seen before.
At eight stories and 168 units, the L-shaped mid-rise at 420 Mendocino Ave. is both the tallest and densest building in the city's downtown. And it's definitely the fanciest: There is a double height co-working space with a sleek fireplace and office pods, a wellness center with cedar wood sauna and private steam shower rooms, a rooftop 'sky lounge' with firepit, demonstration kitchen and views of downtown and the Sonoma Mountains.
The luxury comes with a cost. Studios start at $2,400, one-bedroom apartments at $2,995 and two-bedrooms at $3,745. Rent prices in Santa Rosa average about $2,000 for a one-bedroom and $3,000 for a two-bedroom, according to Zillow.
If the building seems like a slightly more laid-back version of the sort of plush, four-star residential buildings in cities like San Francisco and New York — project architect David Baker calls it 'the hotelization of apartments' — it's because the developer, Related California, has long built some of the most deluxe towers on both coasts.
For Related, the shift from major urban centers to smaller cities like Santa Rosa is part of a conscious move to cater to a post-pandemic landscape in which remote work allows for more geographic flexibility. In Santa Rosa they saw a downtown with great bones — a SMART train station, central green space in Courthouse Square, historic buildings, lively 4th Street restaurant row — that would attract people who want to be in a city but close to the wineries and hiking trails and rustic towns that make Sonoma County enchanting.
'We recognized that our customer was moving here and we recognized that the quality of product they were looking for did not exist in this market,' said Matthew Keipper, senior vice president with Related. 'We really view this as an exciting opportunity to follow our customer.'
While it's too soon to say how fast the building will fill up — it opened in late May and Related declined to say how many units have been leased — downtown Santa Rosa boosters say it will be closely watched as a barometer of whether the market can support the level of investment needed to realize the city's downtown plan, which calls for 7,000 new housing units to be built in the 720-acre neighborhood by 2040.
Currently there are 2,445 housing units in the downtown area, predominantly older duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in established residential neighborhoods. In recent decades the city has grown largely through sprawl, a trend that came under scrutiny after the 2017 Tubbs Fire wiped out 2,800 homes in the city.
'It's definitely a test case,' said Jen Klose, executive director of the North Bay advocacy group Generation Housing. 'Our downtown needs an infusion of activity and we also just need housing here for all levels, including our young professionals and folks who might be attracted to a place like the Felix.'
One group that will be paying close attention to how the Felix performs is Cornerstone, a North Bay real estate investment firm that has a pipeline with six downtown Santa Rose projects totalling 2,000 units. Two of those projects were fully entitled in 2020: an eight-story, 118-unit building on a parking lot at 556 Ross St.; and a six-story, 114-unit complex on a former railroad yard at 34 6th St.
Both projects have been stalled due to the usual mix of lofty construction costs and high interest rates, but they could break ground in the next 12 months if the Related project does well, according to Pauline Block, director of marketing and development for Cornerstone.
'We are really excited about Felix,' said Block. 'It's right downtown, next to our projects, and it's of the quality we are aiming for. We are definitely interested to see the demographics that move into that building and how quick they lease up.'
Cornerstone is working on lining up construction financing for the first two buildings, and the Felix will help make that case to lenders.
'In a market like ours it can be challenging when you say you are going to build a building of that size and quality and there is nothing similar nearby you can point to,' she said.
While the North Bay has a well-earned reputation for being anti-development, there seems to be little opposition to adding density in downtown Santa Rosa. The city recently cut impact fees and Related only had to pay fees on the first three stories of the eight-story building. Felix won approval in just 75 days, and Baker described the community meetings on the project as a 'lovefest.'
'Santa Rosa has a shockingly laid-back culture,' Baker said. 'I was surprised we didn't get people screaming at us trying to stop it. People we like, 'You want to build this downtown? That would be great.''
Part of the acceptance of downtown density may be a result of lessons learned from the 2017 wildfires, which destroyed about 5% of the city's housing stock. Damages in the city topped $1.2 billion and exposed the risks of concentrating development in wildlands-urban interface zones rather than downtown.
'It makes a lot of sense to put density downtown because of the fire situation on the outskirts,' said Baker.
But it's also a question of Santa Rosa coming to terms with the reality that it's a midsized city, not a small town, according to Klose. Santa Rosa grew from about 168,000 people in 2010 to 176,000 in 2023, and is projected to grow to 204,000 by 2030, according to the Association of Bay Area Governments. It's the largest city between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oregon border.
Santa Rosa isn't much smaller, in population, than cities like Providence, R.I., or Fort Lauderdale, Fla. And it is about the same size as Eugene, Ore. and Shreveport, La.
'All these cities that are our size or slightly bigger, they have real skylines,' Klose said. 'Santa Rosa has been a little stuck in the past, but it's kind of time for us to grow up.'
Santa Rosa Metro Chamber CEO Ananda Sweet said there is county-wide support for growing downtown Santa Rosa, but that it's been hard to attract capital in a post-pandemic world with high interest rates and rising construction costs. The chamber has established a housing trust fund that helps groups with pre-development costs that conventional lenders don't typically cover.
The fund is focused on low- and moderate-income housing, and has already provided a loan to Phoenix Development, which is converting two under-utilized bank buildings on B Street to 72 workforce units.
Sweet said downtown Santa Rosa 'has so much potential that we are on the cusp of capitalizing on.'
'Even our members who don't do business in Santa Rosa really care about a thriving downtown,' Sweet said. 'Seeing Felix generate so much interest really helps tell the story for other developers and employers of what is possible downtown.'
For Baker, who also designed the pioneering Hotel Healdsburg in that city's downtown, Felix is the culmination of a decade of work. He was initially hired by previous property owners on earlier iterations of the project that stalled out several times. He said downtown Santa Rosa 'has always been on the verge of happening but never quite does.'
Maybe that is changing, he said. To celebrate the Felix he also made a ceramic sculpture for the lobby, a seven-foot totem of giant stacked seed pods.
'Thinking about the fertile Sonoma area, we wanted to reflect ideas around seeds — optimistic, vergevital, burgeoning, putting down roots and supporting new growth,' he said.