Long before irate local business owners began descending on public meetings, before opponents filed four environmental lawsuits warning of snarled traffic and rampant crime, and before a local finance tycoon with a penchant for political controversy decided to fund a ballot measure campaign that would upend everything, city officials in Eureka thought their proposal was a real no-brainer: Turn some city-owned parking lots into affordable housing.

Hugging Humboldt County’s Lost Coast some 280 miles north of San Francisco and 150 miles west of Redding, Eureka is strapped for places to live. The county has more homeless people per capita than anywhere else in the state, with a disproportionate share living on the street — a problem that’s especially conspicuous in downtown Eureka. Like every California city and county, Eureka is also on the hook under state law to scrounge up space for new housing. The downtown economy could use a little goosing too.

The parking lot-to-affordable-housing plan was supposed to tackle all those problems at once. More housing. More foot traffic downtown. A satisfied California Housing and Community Development Department. Yes, the planned developments would leave the area with more people, more cars and fewer spaces to park, but that, city officials have said, is a worthwhile trade-off.

“Truth be told, I would rather deal with a parking shortage than a housing shortage,” said current City Council member G. Mario Fernandez.

Not everyone sees it that way. A group of ticked off locals with concerns that ranged from traffic congestion to business viability to public safety to state overreach launched “Citizens for a Better Eureka.” They did so with the financial backing of magnate Robin P. Arkley II, whose company, Security National, manages property and trades in real estate debt and is one of the city’s largest employers. Shortly thereafter, many of the same activists qualified a local measure for the November ballot to scrap the city’s plan and replace it with one that would require any new housing to preserve all existing parking. Developers and the city say such a costly requirement is tantamount to a development ban. The initiative would also backfill any lost city center housing by rezoning a dilapidated former middle school on the other side of town.

The parking lot wars on California’s Lost Coast are part of a statewide trend of voters taking their gripes with state housing mandates to the ballot. Over the last half decade, state lawmakers have passed dozens of new laws requiring local elected officials to plan for more housing, whether they want to or not.

When these conflicts wind up in court — and they often do — courts have generally sided with state agencies.

But in Eureka, the political stars are aligned a bit differently. This is not a wealthy suburb in which elected officials are vowing to resist what they see as overreaching state bureaucrats. Eureka city officials are on the same page as the state housing department in wanting to see more dense housing downtown, parking be damned. It’s the voters, this November, who will have the opportunity to slam on the brakes.

Whether the ballot initiative, called Measure F, would actually put the city at odds with state law is an unsettled debate, one that’s now playing out as dueling political soundbites as the election approaches.

That makes the local ballot fight more than a mere turf battle over a few lots. In a spat between business and property owners, current and former elected officials, environmentalists, state regulators and a human lightning rod in the form of a local loan mogul, it’s also a story about who has the ultimate say over what a town looks like.

“I think that a lot of this is maybe not about parking lots,” said Tom Wheeler, who runs the Environmental Protection Information Center in nearby Arcata and who supports the city’s housing plan. “Parking lots are a proxy for a larger kind of identity politics issue for what Eureka is.”

Eureka’s big idea

The fate of Eureka’s parking lots hinges on a promise that the city made to the State of California in 2019.

Once every decade, cities and counties are required to lay out plans for new housing to accommodate local population growth. In the case of Eureka, a city with some 26,000 people, officials were tasked with laying the ground for 952 new units, 378 of which have to be affordable for people earning less than $46,200.

To boost the chances of actually meeting those goals, officials opted to lease or sell city-owned land to developers. They went all in on the idea, putting nearly 90% of their state affordable unit quota on 14 public parking lots. Supporters viewed such lots as abundant and dispensable. The Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities, a local environmental nonprofit, estimated that 34% of the “developable land” in Eureka’s downtown is set aside for off-street parking.

Initially, City Manager Miles Slattery said his office didn’t hear much pushback. In 2019, staff held a series of public meetings to find out what locals want future development in the city to look like. Most participants favored the dense, high-rise, pedestrian-centric layout common to the city’s Old Town neighborhood along the waterfront.

“It was very clear that people wanted Eureka to look like what you see in Old Town,” said Slattery. “When that happened, I didn’t see any potential for anything to be a problem.”

The parking lot on 3rd Street between G and H Streets in Eureka on June 17, 2024. The lot is the site of a proposed Humboldt Transit Authority Hub that would include housing. Photo by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

The old Jacobs School site in Eureka on June 17, 2024. Eureka City Schools recently sold the school site. Photos by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

Slattery was wrong. The backlash began as soon as the city started taking solicitations for development and downtown business owners were suddenly facing the prospect of losing parking at specific sites.

The city invited property owners and tenants surrounding the lots to attend a series of initial public meetings. They were, in Slattery’s words, “a shitshow.”

The loss of parking would mean the eradication of local businesses that cater to a car-driving clientele, some said. Eurekans accessing downtown services, employees who work in adjacent Old Town and people with physical disabilities would be inconvenienced. Some said the idea of the “15-minute city” — the urban planning concept that housing, necessary businesses and services should all be reachable by foot within a quarter of an hour — was a poor fit for Humboldt County. Others claimed affordable housing would lead to more crime, a common complaint that lacks evidence.

Some locals also felt caught off guard. In April 2021, the planning commissioner offered his surprise resignation in the middle of a Zoom hearing, saying that he could not abide the city’s “minimized” public outreach efforts which amounted to “tyranny.”

“I think that a lot of this is maybe not just about parking lots”
— Tom Wheeler, Environmental Protection Information Center

A spokesperson for Linc Housing, the affordable developer that stepped up to develop the first round of lots, said it held two community meetings in 2021, conducted a survey and has since held 19 small group information sessions.

“Many, many, many, many meetings happened for this,” said Slattery. “A lot of them were commandeered by a local business owner to get their employees to come and express their concerns.”

That local business owner is Rob Arkley.

Arkley initially agreed to be interviewed for this story, but then bowed out, offering no explanation. He did not respond to further questions. But in both public comments and private conversation with elected officials and developers, Arkley expressed particular concern about the development of one lot that, he has said, more than two dozen of his Security National employees use.

When Citizens for a Better Eureka popped up to push back against the city parking lot plan, it did so with “startup funding” from Security National, according to the group’s website. Describing itself as a coalition of roughly 50 downtown businesses and property owners, the group filed four lawsuits challenging various aspects of the parking lot plan. (A fifth suit challenging a city decision to put the measure up for a vote in the November election rather than on the earlier March ballot was dismissed and the group has appealed). Each suit alleged violations of California’s signature environmental protection law, the California Environmental Quality Act.

In its case challenging the city’s overall general plan, the group, through its lawyer Bradley Johnson, argued that Eureka failed to analyze both “the traffic and transportation impacts associated with eliminating off-street public parking.” But, mirroring Arkley’s public comments, the group also raised safety concerns.

Eliminating the lots used by downtown workers will expose people “to unsafe conditions, including risk of violent crime, associated with traveling longer distances to and from parked vehicles,” the suit claimed.

With the lawsuits still pending in Humboldt County Superior Court or pending appeal, many of the same activists behind Citizens for a Better Eureka went out and gathered nearly 2,000 verified signatures to qualify a measure for the ballot. As of the most recent campaign finance report filed at the end of last year, the committee raised $290,000. All but $500 came from Security National.

A new filing is due at the end of July. Gail Rymer, who works as a spokesperson for the ballot measure campaign, Citizens for a Better Eureka and Security National, said “it’s still the case” that Security National is providing the vast majority of the funding for the Yes on Measure F campaign. “We don’t actively solicit other donations,” she said.

‘Our local Scrooge McDuck’

If you have a conversation with anyone in Eureka about the years-long parking lot kerfuffle, it’s only a matter of time before Arkley’s name pops up.

Arkley is regularly described as Eureka’s “local billionaire.” It’s difficult to verify his exact net worth and Arkley now lives part time in Louisiana. No matter, he still remains keenly interested in the local affairs of his hometown.

His wife, Cherie Arkley is a former City Council member. The two funded a center for the performing arts that towers over downtown and which bears the Arkley name. Arkley money has also funded improvements at the zoo, at Cal Poly Humboldt and along the Eureka waterfront. For a time, he ran his own newspaper to compete with the local Times-Standard. A wealthy benefactor in a post-industrial town where patrons are in short supply, he is, in the words of the Environmental Protection Information Center’s Wheeler, “our local Scrooge McDuck.”

Critics of the ballot measure campaign are quick to dismiss the entire effort as an Arkley front-group.

“I do think that none of this would have gotten as out of control as it has if it weren’t for basically a guy with a huge amount of money throwing a massive temper tantrum,” said Colin Fiske, director of Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities.

Supporters of the ballot measure say their coalition is made up of a broad array of downtown business owners. But there’s also nothing unseemly, they argue, about a civically-minded businessman taking an interest in a matter of critical local importance.

“If the Arkleys wouldn’t have come in here and pumped the money into the community like they did, I don’t know what it would look like, but it wouldn’t look as good as it does now,” said Mike Munson, co-chair of the November ballot measure campaign, speaking of Arkley’s financial footprint in the area. “A lot of people don’t like it. I don’t know why.”

The answer is, mostly, politics.

“None of this would have gotten as out of control as it has if it weren’t for basically a guy with a huge amount of money throwing a massive temper tantrum.”
— Colin Fiske, director, Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities

A GOP donor of some national importance who has hobnobbed with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Arkley is a poor fit for Eureka’s current political scene. “Everybody’s a Democrat in Humboldt County,” said Slattery, the city manager. “It’s just a matter of how far granola you lean.”

Arkley’s past interventions in local land use policy haven’t always endeared him to the left-leaning public, either. After Arkley purchased a defunct, overgrown railyard at the edge of downtown, Security National convinced the City Council in 2010 to put a zoning change necessary for its redevelopment on the ballot . Voters signed off on the change. A decade-and-a-half later the 43-acre “balloon track” remains a defunct, overgrown railyard.

In 2015, Eureka’s City Council passed a resolution to cede Tuluwat Island, the site of one of the most infamous massacres of native people by white Californians in state history, back to the Wiyot Tribe. Arkley publicly protested giving the public land back “to the natives” and vowed to buy it from the city first. The city went through with the land transfer to the tribe.

Finally, when the city said it planned to repurpose the downtown parking lots, including one where Security National employees regularly park, Arkley was irate. The local press reported on a profanity-laced meeting with city officials.

The Arkley Center for the Performing Arts in Eureka on June 17, 2024. Photo by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

More than two years before proponents began circulating the initiative petition, Arkley was publicly considering the idea of floating a ballot measure to stop the city’s lot-to-housing conversion plans and to relocate housing to an old school site.

“Low-income housing brings crime, period, end of discussion,” he told local talk radio host Brian Papstein in 2021. “Why don’t we pick an area of one of the schools that’s been closed? They’d have better services, they’d have shopping, the land is there.”

Researchers who have looked into the question have consistently found no evidence that affordable housing development leads to more local crime and in some cases have found the opposite.

When the city began moving forward with the plan over Arkley’s objections, Security National purchased a lot right next to city hall where city employees regularly park. He then offered to swap that lot in exchange for the one closer to Security National headquarters. The city refused. The lot now sits empty, closed to any would-be parkers by concrete barriers.

Humboldt County Supervisor Natalie Arroyo, who sat on the City Council when the parking plan was approved, said she took a meeting with a mad-as-hell Arkley in the months after the vote.

“He just wanted to let me know that I’m going to buy the parking lot next to city hall and so and so at the city is going to be sorry,” she said. “I got the sense it was more of an emotional argument and about resistance to change.”

The counter proposal

November’s ballot initiative wouldn’t ban housing on the parking lots outright. Instead, it would require any developments at any of 21 city-owned lots to preserve whatever parking is already on site and then provide additional parking for incoming residents.

For some proponents of the city’s plan, requiring so much additional parking and banning the proposed housing is a distinction without a difference. Adding a structured parking lot can add an additional $44,865 per unit to a project (in inflation-adjusted terms), according to a UC Berkeley Terner Center study from 2020.

California’s Housing and Community Development Department signed off on Eureka’s housing plan in the fall of 2022. If voters ultimately approve the ballot measure, they would be rewriting that contract.

That would require state approval. If the city doesn’t get it, Eureka would lose state funding, open itself up to litigation from the attorney general’s office and lose the ability to apply its own zoning restrictions through a legal quirk known as the “builder’s remedy.” The city would also likely lose the “prohousing” designation it received from the state earlier this year, which gives it first dibs on some state funding.

Measure F supporters say such warnings amount to scare tactics, not only because the initiative doesn’t prohibit downtown development, but because it would also rezone an abandoned middle school for possible housing development. City officials counter that striking the downtown parcels from the city’s new housing plan would still leave Eureka short of the number of designated affordable units required under state law.

“If I just submitted this as written I don’t think (the California Housing and Community Development Department) would certify it,” said Cristin Kenyon, Eureka’s Director of Development Services.

State housing regulators have so far refused to say how they would react should the measure pass.

Competing visions

Susan Seaman, Eureka’s former mayor, said she remembers Old Town 30 years ago: “That place was scary.”

There are still the old, scruffy dive bars and vacant lots around Old Town. There are still a proliferation of “For Lease” signs and a glut of under-trafficked cannabis stores. There are still plenty of people living in tents, under closed shop awnings and in dinged up RVs. These are the visual reminders of how Eureka has long played the role of economic also-ran to its upmarket northern neighbor, Arcata.

But things have changed in the last decade or two. Boutiques and cafes have sprouted up beside the old Victorian hotels barnacled in historic designation plaques. Expanding businesses consider Eureka in a way they just wouldn’t in years past, said Seaman, who now works as program director with the Arcata Economic Development Corporation.

Local politics have changed too. She describes an early “good old boy” culture that pervaded city hall in decades past, back when Eureka was “governed by nostalgia” for an early time when timber and fishing were enough to sustain the proudly out-of-the-way working class town.

A project at the corner of 3rd and G Streets in Eureka on June 17, 2024. The project is slated for mixed commercial and residential use. Photo by Mark McKenna for CalMatters

So, no, Seaman wasn’t especially surprised when the city’s plan to turn parking lots into affordable housing sparked a backlash. This was, in her view, more of the same old local divide. Last decade, Eureka pushed through plans to replace car lanes with those reserved for bikes and to build bulbed-out sidewalks at certain intersections to keep cars from quickly cutting around corners.

“The same people who are behind this initiative hate the bike lanes, hate the bulb-outs, hate anything that slows down traffic,” she said. They hate it because it makes driving more inconvenient, she said, but also because they represent unwelcome imports of ideas common in California’s bigger cities.

“Everybody wants things to be different, but nobody wants things to change,” she said.

“People don’t live in Humboldt County to live in an urban area.”
— Mike Munson, co-chair, Measure F campaign

Just a few blocks away from Seaman’s office near city hall, Munson, co-chair of the ballot measure campaign, works out of a glass-walled office overlooking the harbor in Old Town. A wealth manager who moonlights as a local restaurateur, Munson has been a Eurekan since his mom moved to town when he was a teenager. That, he said, still makes him a newcomer by the standards of some third- or fourth-generation locals.

Munson came to the politics of local land use by way of those early fights about bike lanes, which he opposed. The parking lot battle has been a continuation of a theme.

“I wouldn’t say the main thing is the parking,” he said of the current ballot battle. “I think it’s more about the whole vitality and the vision of ‘what is Eureka going to be 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now?’”

One version of that vision — Munson’s — is to treat Old Town as an area that prioritizes local businesses and tourists. He has a fantasy about the waterfront. A plaza facing the harbor for farmer’s markets and live music. Mooring for cruise ships that channel into a phalanx of fancy shops. A development to welcome the outside world into Eureka. Old Town already has as much housing as the neighborhood can comfortably accommodate. New housing ought to be built, he said, but in the same places and in the same way that housing has been built in Eureka for the last 80 years: away from the city center.

“I can tell you that people don’t live in Humboldt County to live in an urban area,” he said.

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