Gas station operator John Price and a business partner want to build a 35-unit, four-story rental apartment project on Haley Street in Santa Barbara.

The proposal calls for the demolition of seven structures with eight residential units inside to build the mixed-use development at 219 E. Haley.

Proposed are 14 two-bedroom units, 16 one-bedroom units, and five studios, ranging in size from 412 to 1,011 square feet. The project also calls for two commercial spaces that would front Haley Street.

The development would include 36 covered parking spaces for the residential units and four covered parking spaces for the commercial area.

"There's limited areas to provide workforce housing," said Edward deVicente, the architect for the project. "We're trying to maximize the opportunities of what the AUD provides."

The Santa Barbara Planning Commission will listen to a concept review on the project at 1 p.m. on Thursday.

On five separate occasions, the project has been before the city's Architectural Board of Review, where members expressed concern about the size of the project and felt that it may not be appropriate for the surrounding neighborhood.

The project is proposed under the city's average unit-sized density incentive program, which allows developers to construct additional units if they build rental apartments.

Developers in the city went 50 years without building rentals until the program was approved in 2013.

Proponents of the program say that Santa Barbara desperately needs housing for the working middle class. Nearly 20,000 people commute from outside of the county daily into Santa Barbara because they work in the city, but cannot afford to live here.

However, critics of the program say that developers are demolishing rental housing for the community's poorest residents and replacing it with housing units far beyond the reach of those individuals, essentially, gentrifying neighborhoods.

This latest project would mark a drastic change for the lower blocks of Haley Street, which currently are surrounded by mostly one-story commercial buildings.

"The property is perfectly positioned for redevelopment on the Haley Street corridor and is adjacent to a recently completed mixed-use project of a similar proposed scale at 513 Garden St.," deVicente said in a project letter to the city "The neighborhood is well suited for redevelopment."

— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) . Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.