New apartments, roundabouts, trails and buildings all over Arcata are coming in the following years, said speakers at the Arcata City Council meeting on Wednesday and yesterday’s State of the City Address. 

Several of the most significant include the Sunset Avenue Interchange Project, which will turn three intersections along Sunset Avenue into two roundabouts. City manager Merritt Perry said Arcata received a $15 million RAISE Grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation last week to build it. Construction starts in 2026.

The Annie and Mary Trail, a 3.5 mile path built on an old railroad bed traveling from West End road through downtown Arcata and into the marsh, will begin construction this year and finish in 2026. It’s a project that’s been decades in the making, Perry said, and involved reading original land deeds from the 1800s written in longhand cursive. 

“This is going to be incredible,” Perry said. “To bring the Mad River, and ultimately Blue Lake and Arcata, taking all of their pieces all the way to the extent and beyond city limits, both on the Bay Trail and here.”

The graph the Community Development Department shared at the city council meeting.

Cal Poly Interim President Michael Spagna (left) and VP Michael Fisher (right) address the crowd. By Dezmond Remington.

At Wednesday’s city council meeting, officials from the Community Development Department said that their efforts to build affordable housing were going well, having met their goals for building “very low” and “moderate” income housing and coming five units short of meeting their goal for “low” income housing. However, only 48% of new units for “above moderate” income housing had been built. 

Cal Poly Humboldt’s behemoth Craftsman’s Mall project is also projected to open this fall semester three months ahead of schedule, said associated vice president Michael Fisher. It will house over 900 students. Fisher emphasized their efforts to connect the project to the rest of Arcata and said the Annie and Mary Trail would be a big part of that.

There’s also hope it’ll open up some more single-family homes in Arcata. 

“This is a project that will be exclusively housing students, but as we all know there’s a lot of single-family homes that are tied up in the rental market right now,” said Community Development Department director David Loya at the council meeting. “It’s possible that this project could have an effect on loosening some of that up for single-family ownership.”

The project also being renamed the “Hinarr Hu Moulik” (pronounced hi-NAD HU ma-LEEK), which according to Fisher is the Wiyot name for the project. 

Another new building in the works on campus is the Housing, Dining, and Health project, which will have dining options and freshman-only housing. It has a budget of $180 million, and will open in Fall of 2029. 

Fisher also said that the Campus Apartments dorms are slated to be destroyed this summer. The dorms are famously moldy and unpopular, and their demise has been on the docket for several years. 

“[They’re coming down], I’m happy to report,” Fisher said. “That usually gets a lot more applause on campus. But it’s a big deal for us, making sure that we can replace our older housing stock with more safe, new, and comfortable housing for our campus.”