Work is progressing on a pair of construction sites in Scotts Valley that, by the end of 2013, will give the city 95 new homes.
Though at differing stages in their construction, the Woodside development and Town Center Homes project are both becoming a visible reality.
Town Center Homes
According to Phil Kerr, the vice president of development for San Francisco-based developer City Ventures Residences, all site preparation for the Town Center Homes project has been completed. Work on the first 20 townhouses will begin this month.
The development, next to the Cavallero Transit Center on Blue Bonnet Lane, will include six homes designated as affordable housing.
“We’re going vertical this month,” he said. “We’re pouring foundations and dropping lumber.”
The construction, Kerr said, is planned to take place in two phases, with 20 of the three-story, four-bedroom townhouses completed before January 2013 — including one or two of the six subsidized homes planned for the development.
Work on the remaining 26 homes would begin shortly thereafter, Kerr said, and is scheduled for completion by mid-2013.
Woodside
Though the foundations have yet to be poured, motorists on Scotts Valley Drive can see the dirt fly on the former site of RVs of Merritt, as construction crews prepare the property for the 49 townhouses and three commercial buildings planned for the area.
According to Steve Garrett, project manager and partner of San Ramon-based construction firm Castle Cos., the project is progressing nicely.
“It’s going well,” he said. “We’re doing the preliminary grading, and we’ll be following that with site improvements.”
After the land is leveled, Garrett said, the next job is site improvements, which entail construction of infrastructure, such as sewer and water connections.
As part of the grading work, a series of retaining walls will be built, because the property is on a hillside against the site of a former quarry.
“We’ve retained a top-flight soils engineer that specializes in hillside work,” Garrett said. “We’ll be building a retaining wall as to their recommendations.”
Garrett said that once construction begins on the single-family townhouses — the first foundations are scheduled to be set around the beginning of 2013 — the homes would be built in four or five phases, with 10 homes in each one.
Seven of the homes will be designated as affordable housing, he said.
Three 16,500-square-foot commercial spaces are also planned alongside the townhouses. One is scheduled to go up with the first phase of construction.
“We’ll be building the first one as we’re building the homes,” Garrett said.
But, cramming people onto Scotts Valley Drive is not a bad thing. The traffic at the North end of town is not bad at all -- and the businesses on that side of town are certainly happy that more people are moving in.
They made KFC take down the bucket sign, now we have to look at that stupid truck on a stick?