Notes from the conference for equity in housing
For those interested in a big picture, regional view of why housing is relevant to Sonoma, and why housing is the #1 issue for every Bay Area and California municipality, read on. Take home message: all of Sonoma Valley needs to address housing, health and education inequity in the Springs. Here are notes from the 11/1/18 a lunch conference at the Flamingo resort hotel.
Opening comments by Alegria de La Cruz, Chief Deputy County Counsel
40-50 elected and appointed officials were present, from across the North Bay region, including Mike Thompson, Jared Huffman, Mike McGuire, Chris Coursey, Julie Combs, Lynda Hopkins, and David Rabbitt.
The basic theme: housing and equity are crucial to the rebuild conversation. The object is to not perpetuate pre-existing inequitable conditions and to not leave the Latino, LatinX, immigrant, low-income and under-represented communities behind. Build equity.
Equity is an outcome where the markers of class and race don’t make a difference. What we see with the current recovery, the system is designed to restore property and wealth. Those without property and wealth lose out. Disaster capitalism restores whites, and also restores business as usual or BAU inequity.
Overall, property owners did not receive enough money to rebuild. Yet white property owners received an average of $126,000, while people of color on average lost $37,000. This is race-based income disparity, that also bleeds over into unequal educational and health outcomes. If recovery resources all go to whites who already have the advantage, then this perpetuates an inequitable BAU, and makes everyone worse off in the end bc of higher costs that have to be paid by society as a whole.
“We’re all in this together.”
Affordable units in the county are built primarily in the 1st and 5th Districts. This makes Roseland and the Springs as county centers of concentrated poverty.
The link between wealth inequality and rising natural disasters need to be looked at in a new way.
Veronica Vences, La Luz
The Springs has a large income disparity. The low-income people there are the backbone of the wine industry. Price inflation is correlated with lower health outcomes. 900 families have received $1 million in benefits, or @ $1,100 each. La Luz aspires to a partnership in community building, to bring La Luz’ voice to the community table.
Ana Lugo, Community Action Partnership
Low income clients need help with managing money and early childhood education. The “charge is to end poverty.” The number one issue is housing. Non-profits can’t fix everything, we need systemic equity. We know what inequality looks like, what does equality look like? What is the community’s responsibility? Institutional equity is the goal, looking for criteria.
Beatriz Camacho, North Bay Organizing Project (NBOP)
40% renters in county, 46% in Santa Rosa. Housing prices are a constant conversation. NBOP looks to start a county-wide tenant’s union. “We need to do something now.”
Karissa Kruse, Sonoma County Winegrowers
30% if growers offer housing. “People matter, people are first.” Ag has a goal of social equity for the workers. Farmers have land, need to remove barriers to building housing on that land. “How do we level the playing field?”; “… very committed to find ways to do that.” Ag has paid rent support, made gift cards to replace lost wages; example of new home rented for $700 a month.
Ben Metcalf, Director, California Housing and Community Development, featured speaker
There is a temptation to bring everything post-fire back to the way it was; this can’t be the model for California disaster challenges in the future. We “have to think in a different way.” We have to achieve a triple bottom line in the process. The challenge is to address equality issues of the past and to build in an ecological, fire-responsible way.
He talks about multi-family units, affordable housing overlays, ADUs. Don’t concentrate poverty; connect people to transit, education and services.
Housing in CA is at crisis proportions. Over the last RHNA cycle, which is a measure of the minimal #s for housing needs, only 46% of homes RHNA allocated to meet the need were built. CA built 80,000 instead of the 180,000 needed. The consequence is that 1.7 million low-income families pay more than 50% of their income to housing. The upshot is major costs to society in terms of health, education, environment, housing, and homelessness.
Those who had the good luck to buy into CA real estate in 1970 had a 3 to 1 home value to income ratio. Today that is 8 to 1. 66% of whites own homes, 40% LatinX. The displaced are people of color and millennials, coming in are the highly educated and already wealthy. “California is displacing those that need help and welcoming those who don’t.”
The state has specific post fire disaster money to address the most vulnerable residents. These funds have to address housing, and have to target low-income people. State work is best done in a complimentary fashion. He refers to local regulations as barriers, local areas need to help out. HUD disaster funds have strings, have to use transparent, accessible data that shows needy demographics to inform funding decisions. Object is to “move the needle” to collective equity, find a “shared prosperity”, help people climb the economic ladder.
$3.5 million money will go to Sonoma, out of $212 million disaster money to the whole state. The 3.5 million will go to local municipalities, and city and county electeds will decide how it is spent. Federal money comes to state HCD, then it comes to county Community Development Commission, Margret Van Vliet. Money will be block grants, have to split the pot proportionally across the spectrum of all housing, tied to demographic data, with special attention to the needy.
Use the best data at the time, be 100% transparent, make best policy calls, make course corrections as necessary and hold ourselves accountable.
Post lecture discussion: what are the equity drivers in local policy?
Ana Lugo: How do we stop competing and start working together? What are the criteria fir equity? Ana notes that Sonoma County is seen by others as a notably divisive place.
The 10% price gouging cap on rent increases post fire will expire December 10th.
Mike McGuire: The true need in CA is rental housing. He calls out NIMBYs; “have to allow housing to be built.” Stop calling them “those people” and call them “our neighbors.”
Chris Coursey: We can’t have equity without affordable housing. Need to pass Santa Risa housing bond.
Weigh in on state housing website, comment on plans, get on mailing list
Lisa Carreno, United Way CEO: Housing discussion is “just getting started.” Find “equity in your hearts.” “Lean into having hard conversations” with people you don’t agree with. Tis region should be a model, on healing frim disaster, on the cutting edge for doing something radical.
Fred’s comments
Ana Lugo has it going on. Keep an eye out for her, she’s sharp and articulate.
Karissa Kruse’s ideas about opening up ag land to some housing is similar to the county affordable housing overlay that may be applied to industrial areas.
That Ben Metcalf referenced the sustainability triple bottom line almost right off is significant. This shows state policy is ready to sync with progressive local versions of TBL housing policy, and that indeed, thinking in a different way is called for. Affordable housing is a prime aggregating indicator of other sustainability factors, by focusing on housing and equity, many other TBL issues will be addressed as well.
The obvious conclusion to Metcalf’s and others’ comments is that inequity issues are better addressed up front in a preventative manner, rather than trying to clean up after huge expenses have been uncured. Same idea as the ACA; government has a better idea here.
The whole conference recaps what the local Alliance for a Just Recovery is already framing and talking about. This underlines one thing for higher up policy and decision makers: listen to the grass roots, they are years ahead on what are later called “cutting edge” ideas. Then, thus housing discussion would not just be getting started.
If only 46% of RHNA housing was built in the last RHNA cycle, we can be sure it was mostly market rate, and therefore we have a huge backlog of area median income-level affordable housing debt to pay. Therefore, all new housing in Sonoma, until caught up with the backlog, should be built to be affordable to AMI only. Richard Walker, in his new book Pictures of a Gone City, sees the ABAG/ RHNA process as now turned to essentially BAU forces.
If housing policy is to have what Walker calls “spatial equity”, to not concentrate poverty, and also go for higher density along transit, plus address the RHNA backlog, and navigate obscene core area real estate prices, Sonoma will need some muscle in the General Plan, Development Code and Growth Management Ordinance, to inoculate affordable housing policy from NIMBY and market rate-interest obstructionism. Sonoma might, as Madolyn suggested, simply help pay for Springs high density housing. For housing equity, Sonoma can’t be all benefit and no cost.
If housing disaster money in the Springs has to be allocated by the Board of Supervisors, then this means Sonoma Valley has one vote out of five, to address areas demographically proven to be of need. Get and stay involved in the Community Development Commission to see that Springs affordable housing gets needed resources. The Springs could conceivably get a million for low-income housing purposes.
My sense is that BAU is too strong to stop. The great positive sentiments at this conference were gratifying to hear, but BAU actors will try and foil any equity project, and resist the TBL as a framing over free market framing. This is where hopefully a moral gravity of Sustainable Sonoma can corral BAU actors and bring them in to a TBL frame, where society starts to get its priorities straightened out.
Hopefully all the city, county, state, and federal races will usher in the most progressive candidates, and with the will of those elected, some serious needed changes can be enacted to local and regional housing policy. Without a will, there is no way.
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