SANTA CRUZ — A proposed rental housing development project for the back portion of Peace United Church’s 6-acre Upper Westside property drew out neighbors interested in preliminary details this week.

The church and its development partners Sibley Simon and John Swift have not yet submitted a formal city planning application for their proposed “Peace Village.” However, in an effort to comply with city regulations requiring early community involvement, project representatives shared tentative project details with more than 80 people gathered at its 900 High Street property amidst primarily single-family homes Thursday night.

Jane Heyse, a member of the church’s housing implementation team, said Peace United leaders realized the “beautiful huge campus had always been much too large for our healthy and vibrant congregation,” and began investigating solutions in 2017 to allow the organization to remain and continue the property’s upkeep.

“Our vision is to build a community of rental housing. This would generate income to support us and enable us to stay here at 900 High St,” Heyse said. “Our vision also includes intentionally creating an opportunity for working adults and families to live peacefully and respectfully, surrounded by our church, the preschool, the elementary school, a world-class university. We want to create a safe, wholesome, mixed neighborhood with easy access to the parks, to the other conscientious neighbors and to the faith community.”

In its current iteration, the proposed project would build a three-story apartment building on top of the church’s backmost parking lot. Included in a total 16 units would be 10 units of “co-housing” and six two-bedroom units. The eight-bedroom co-housing units, limited to one occupant per bedroom, would involve shared common spaces.

“When people use the term ‘coliving,’ it sounds new or niche. But there’s thousands of folks in Santa Cruz living in coliving right now, it’s just a house that wasn’t built for that is getting rented and four people or eight people start living there in that house, making their way and trying to figure it out,” Simon said. “Part of our thought and mission is what if we plan for it, design for it, set up the structure so it works well. Can we make something much better than what happens out in our neighborhoods today.”

Farther back on the church’s property, in what is now an open meadow crisscrossed by pedestrian footpaths and backing up to UC Santa Cruz townhomes, the church is considering 12 one- and two-story single family units with three bedrooms each, clustered into four separate attached groupings.

Church leaders intend to retain ownership of its newly developed and subdivided land, leasing it to a new limited liability corporation comprised of the church and developers, and to hire a professional property management company to operate the rentals. A waiting list for rental units already exists, and tenant preference will be for church members, Westlake Elementary School teachers and staff, UCSC faculty, staff and graduate students, Coastal Community Preschool staff and the church minister’s home. City Planner Clara Stanger told the audience that the property was eligible to build anywhere from 7 to 59 dwelling units onsite. The developers’ goal is to rent a quarter of the new units at “affordable” rates for low-income residents, targeting a single person with an annual income of $68,900 or less, or family of four with an income of less than $98,400.

Chief among public concerns voiced Thursday were fears about development density and that the housing project would increase traffic impacts to the neighborhood. In order to provide sufficient parking spaces for the new residents, Peace United Church would cease its traditional practice of renting out 80 parking spaces in its front parking lot to UCSC students and would likely need to reconfigure one-way traffic flow through the property, representatives said. One speaker pressed representatives for details on how project plans would solve traffic concerns.

“We’re not going to solve the traffic problem and we will add traffic to your streets,” Swift said. “There’s no way around that. I don’t think anybody has said we’re not going to do that. It’s a question of how much and how much can we mitigate.”

Swift said a traffic study will be needed for developers to find ways to mitigate the project’s impacts.