On October 25, Pep Housing celebrated the completion and grand opening of Linda Tunis Senior Apartments, an affordable housing development in Rincon Valley. The City of Santa Rosa is proud to have partnered with PEP housing on the project as part of a regional effort to increase affordable housing opportunities for seniors in Sonoma County.
Located at 600 Acacia Lane, the new apartment complex will provide 26 affordable housing units for seniors, including many seniors who lost their homes during the 2017 Tubbs Fire. The new complex is named in memory of Linda Tunis, a resident of the Journey’s End mobile home park who perished during the fire.
“This project marks the great strides the City and community have taken to rebuild after the 2017 Tubbs fire,” said Diane Test, Santa Rosa Housing Authority Board Chair. “The destruction of over 5,000 homes in our community in 2017, including those at Journey’s End, left many low-income seniors homeless and exacerbated the already urgent need for affordable senior housing. With the opening of the Linda Tunis complex we can help meet that need now and well into the future.”
The Santa Rosa Housing Authority has committed nearly $2.9 million to the development of the project, including $690,000 in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds approved in 2020 for the acquisition and conversion of the project site, and $2.19 million in Community Development Block Grant- Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds approved in 2021 for construction related costs. Additionally, and importantly, the Housing Authority will provide 13 Project Based Vouchers to ensure long-term affordability of the project and help low-income seniors by reducing their rent to as low as 30% of their income. The Project Based Voucher units are being filled with eligible applicants pulled from the Section 8 waitlist and leasing of the units is expected to occur next month.
The Linda Tunis Senior Apartments project is the first completed project in the state of California which utilized funding from the CDBG-DR Multifamily Housing Program, leading the way for the state’s large-scale rebuild of areas impacted by disasters. The affordability component of the project must remain in place for 55 years under CDBG-DR requirements.
Watch the video of the Linda Tunis Senior Apartments grand opening: WATCH VIDEO