Can the people of Santa Cruz own the Catalyst? That’s what two local entrepreneurs think and they’ve started a campaign to see if people are interested.
On May 6th, Jay Brown and Jeremy Stone posted a video heard around the Bay Area when they called for the community to collectively buy the Catalyst. The building at 1011 Pacific Avenue that currently houses the historic music venue recently sold to GSH Ventures for $4.5 million and is slated to be destroyed and rebuilt as a mixed-use building to house 64 new apartments.
The crowdfunding idea came to the two longtime friends after watching the news about the shutdown of Spirit Airlines and the subsequent GoFundMe campaign to save the aviation company.
“I love to do meaningful things,” Brown says. “So what would it look like to take this model and do something that would inspire people? And that led me to the Catalyst.”
“Jay and I have the premise of meeting the moment,” says Stone, who also owns Sonivore recording studio, sits on the Santa Cruz Arts Council and the Board of Trustees at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center.
“What’s something that arises that feels meaningful to you and that has a lot of potential behind it but is also a bold thing to do?” he continues. “How do you take action and not just talk about it? So we dived into it with the best of intentions.”
They launched SCBuysTheCatalyst.com, a website that currently has 2,239 people pledging $1.14 million for the campaign.
However, don’t start booking concerts just yet.
At the moment, the campaign is only taking pledges from people to see what could be raised. No actual money has been donated or accepted as of this publishing.
“The pledges represent intention,” Stone says. “It’s also an avenue of transparency. We’re keeping the people and the city up to date in real time of how things are evolving. We don’t want people to think we’re taking money prematurely or acting in a way that is out of sync with the intended stated goal.
In the Instagram video–that currently has 16,100 likes, 1,279 comments, 7,622 shares and 2,102 reports– Brown says, “Santa Cruz is legitimately about to lose the heart and soul of this city-The Catalyst.” He goes on to explain that he and Stone came up with the idea to have 50,000 people donate a minimum of $45 dollars to raise $2.25 million. The other half of the money would come from wealthy benefactors and organizations.
One thought to raise the additional $2.25 million is to partner with UC Santa Cruz and have the university system contribute. Brown says there is a common local misconception that there’s a fracture between the university and the town. Often, locals see the school as only taking resources and housing from locals, but this is one way for the university to publicly give back.
“They’ve already been doing that for years but nobody knows it,” Brown says. “So the long-standing story is that UCSC is just extracting from the community.”
Yet there is another–and rather glaring–obstacle in their way: neither the Catalyst nor the building are up for sale.
Most Santa Cruzans even remotely paid attention to the issue have been aware about the Catalyst’s building controversy. The building at 1011 Pacific Avenue and the Catalyst business were once both owned and operated by the beloved, rainbow-suspender-wearing eccentric philanthropist Randall Kane, who died in 2009. While the business is now owned by Joel Nelson, the building remained in the Kane family. It has been for sale in the past–most notably 2011–but did not sell until this last year when GSH Ventures, a development company based in Mountain View, bought it for $4.5 million.
In February, representatives from both the Catalyst and GSH–along with moderator Rina Zhou, Senior Planner for the City of Santa Cruz–hosted a virtual town hall where they discussed plans for the future of the building and business. However, most of the virtual event was taken over by concerned or angry locals worried about everything from the preservation of Santa Cruz’s history and music scene to the impact the building would have on other local businesses, such as the Tea House Spa, which sits adjacent to where the construction would occur. Others argued against the need for another seven-story high-rise apartment complex, while multiple others are being built around the city and many of the apartments remain empty.
Yet during the online town hall, it was Catalyst General Manager, Igor Gravic who noted representatives of the venue are in current talks with GSH about how to include a new, redesigned music hall in the future building. He told attendees that the current building–built in 1938–is “long in the tooth” and even before the building was sold, the Catalyst business owners were already exploring what their options were once the lease is up in 2028.
“This can be viewed as just a really good opportunity that the community can have for another 50 years,” he explained at the online meeting.
The Catalyst declined to comment for this article.
Recently, a group calling themselves Save The Catalyst Coalition were unsuccessful in gathering 5,000 physical signatures in order to put a measure on the ballot that would allow voters to decide whether or not to classify the current Catalyst building as a historic building.
So, where does that leave SC Buys The Catalyst?
It’s a question that raises more questions than answers.
Escrow recently closed on the deal by GSH and the development company now fully owns the building and as far as the public knows, they have no plans to sell it. On that note, the Catalyst as a business and a brand is also not for sale at the time of this publishing.
But if–and this is a big if–the crowdfunding idea were to happen, it could possibly obtain 501(c)(3) status, often used for non-profits like 924 Gilman in Berkeley or the Green Bay Packers football team. Since it’s a for-profit business, there are ways for a non-proftit to set up a for-profit subsidiary but it requires a lot of legalities to navigate which means more time, more money and lots of lawyers. [1]
There is also a third option of opening up a new venue in a different space altogether.
“Anything is possible,” Brown says. “We’re keeping our eyes and ears open and asking ourselves, ‘Ok, what does the moment want from us?’”
However, that raises the issue of not only zoning but also parking. By County ordinance, “places of public assembly” such as a music venue must accommodate one parking space for every three people in attendance. So, a venue the size of the Catalyst in another location would require roughly 300 parking spaces. It works in the current location downtown because of the various parking garages and limited parking lots already established.
One thing is clear, looking at the comments on Brown and Stone’s posts it’s clear their idea has at least sparked the imagination and hope of the community. For now, the two idealists say they want to “be allies to the Catalyst” in whatever may happen moving forward.
“The Catalyst is an edifice,” Stone says. “It holds all these memories for people and–in a certain sense–it’s one of the last remaining vestiges of an image of a bygone Santa Cruz.”
[1]how’s this?
