Town with an artists’ district is planned for Fort Ord

Eight hundred acres of the former Fort Ord, an Army base about 100 miles south of San Francisco, are about to be developed into a mixed-use community featuring live-work lofts for artists and a large complement of permanently affordable housing. Two development companies — Woodman Development and Urban Community Partners — established an organization called East Garrison Partners, which teamed up with the Monterey County Redevelopment Agency to plan the new community. It will have 1,400 dwellings and 36,000 square feet of neighborhood-serving commercial space on bluffs overlooking the Salinas Valley. Since the base was decommissioned in 1994, most of its 28,000 acres have been preserved as open space by the federal Bureau of Land Management and will remain off limits to development. However, the county wanted a new community to be built on a small portion of the base — the former East Garrison. The housing being envisioned there will offer 280 households relief from the extraordinary real estate costs of Monterey County, where the median house price reached $575,000 this June — three times the national median of $191,000. The East Garrison project is “required to provide that 20 percent of the units be permanently affordable to very low- and moderate-income households,” according to Monterey County Supervisor Edith Johnsen. The affordable housing will be both rental and for-sale units and will be spread throughout the development. Homes will be deed-restricted in perpetuity to control their selling prices and rental rates. The overall development will include detached houses, townhouses, lofts, live-work units, and apartments as well as parks, trails, and a town center containing a public square. There will be a park within a quarter mile of every home. An Arts District containing 450 housing units will be developed in part by converting old buildings — such as concrete warehouse and mess hall structures erected by the Works Progress Administration more than 60 years ago — into studios, galleries, art organization offices, and other arts-related uses. For decades a substantial artists’ colony has existed in Monterey and Carmel, but now demand for second homes is pricing artists out of those towns. A nonprofit organization, Arts Habitat, is spearheading the planning of East Garrison’s 100,000 square feet of newly built live-work space, which will accommodate 65 artists and their families. ArtSpace Projects, a nonprofit Minneapolis-based developer of real estate for the arts, analyzed the potential of the Arts District, which it is hoped will include galleries, cafes, art supply stores, and coffee shops. Construction is slated to begin in 2005, with the first houses completed in mid to late 2006. Much of the planning for East Garrison took place in a charrette two years ago involving Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, which has drawn up a pattern book to guide house design. Participants in the charrette included two American Indian organizations — the plan calls for an Intertribal Society of Native Americans cultural camp. u