You could call Joe Collins’ home on Manor Avenue of the Westside of Santa Cruz “quaint.”
The neighborhood used to be home to the town’s Italian fishing community, and neighbors have told Collins, a non-fiction author, they once saw Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio eat in the dining room decades before he bought it. The one-story house is painted white with a red door, a wooden gate in the driveway and a dark kitchen that’s now—depending on the time of day—often under the increasingly long shadow of a construction site next door.
“There’s nothing I can do about this now,” 68-year-old Collins says of the shadows hanging over his house, “but I think there really are issues that need to be looked at.”
When neighboring landowner Brice de la Menardiere first proposed the project, Collins thought city planners would never green-light the two-story development. A line in the zoning code requires developers who create new structures to “preserve solar access of adjacent properties.”
“When I read that, I said ‘there’s going to be a problem,’” Collins recalls.
Most legal definitions of solar access call it the ability of one’s property to receive sunlight unobstructed. But in a bizarre twist, Santa Cruz city planner Mike Ferry says that, according to the city’s 1990-2005 general plan, “solar access” means solar panels’ access to direct sunlight.
And because this project didn’t block any solar panels, there couldn’t be a problem.
“We can’t Google the definition. We can’t use the Random House definition,” Ferry says of solar access. “If we refer to something, we have to use the general plan or the zoning ordinance. And the zoning ordinance didn’t make any mention of solar access.” Ferry says if people don’t like the city’s definition of “solar access,” they should get involved in the implementation of the city’s 2030 general plan, which passed two years ago.
Some community members definitely believe the wording needs another look. “It certainly needs re-interpretation,” says Alan Goldstein, former owner of Pacific Sun Properties and a friend of Collins. “I know Brice is in the letter of the law, but it’s still tragic for Joe.”
Good Fences?
De la Menardiere did not respond to requests for comment on this story. But at a public hearing for his new home in April 2013, not many people showed opposition. Mayor Lynn Robinson, then vice mayor, lives near the property and had some questions about revisions to the building and shadowing. Neighbor John Phillip Berawall spoke in opposition. Mary Hamilton, another neighbor, wrote a letter outlining her concerns that the scale did not match with the neighborhood. But when Collins spoke, he actually supported the project.
Why did he suddenly change his mind?
The answer goes back to last year. Collins says the two struck a deal last spring, just weeks before the hearing, when the French native proved to his new neighbor that the Collins’ fence was encroaching on the property line to de la Menadiere’s then-vacant lot.
Collins says he’d had no idea, but that de la Menardiere’s developer told him via email it was no big deal—they’d keep the fence in the same spot, and in return, de la Menardiere asked Collins to support the project. He agreed, and, de la Menardiere’s developers put in a new fence along those same unofficial lines.
Then Collins says he got an email on Christmas Eve from de la Menardiere’s developer telling him his future neighbor had changed his mind after the project was approved. He would be moving his fence to the property line. Collins was furious, and considered legal action. Tim Morgan, his lawyer, told him he would probably win in court because their email chain amounted to a contract, but that it might cost $85,000 in legal costs, so he decided against it.
“He’ll be my neighbor for the rest of my life, and I’ll never speak to him,” Collins says.
If there’s a moral, it might be to always get a contract for an agreement like this.
“That’s the big lesson,” Goldstein says. “When I was working on anything in real estate, we got something in writing. And it could have been a simple letter of agreement between the two of them. It’s just so odd. Brice is a grown man. To just do something like that—I just don’t get it myself.”
