Reparations, segregation, and the Sonoma City Houising Element

 

Fred Allebach

2/27/23

 

How has Sonoma and the Sonoma Housing Element addressed historical patterns of segregation?

Aside from retracting an initial erroneous statement that Sonoma had no history of segregation, the recently adopted (but not currently HCD certified) Housing Element left 65% of single family zoned (white) residential areas as-is, without any rezoning or addressing current exclusionary zoning patterns. Do we really think duplexes, ADUs, and cottage housing will be affordable to anyone making less than market rate wages? Do County and the few City Blacks as a whole make market rate wages? No.

The City put all new lower-income RHNA site inventory on three locations on Hwy 12; none in the east side higher opportunity area. How is this AFFH, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing if the most segregated parts of the City, ones that have been shown to have previous restrictive covenants, are left as-is and even protected as “historical”?  

Let’s measure the 6^th cycle City Housing Element against today’s P-D article on the state’s 2020 Reparations Task Force on “how the state might make amends for harms inflicted on Black people in the Golden State… Last June, (the Task Force) published a report detailing ways in which Black people, from slavery on, have been harmed nationally and in the state.”

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/a-push-for-reparations-in-sonoma-county/

“The task force’s 492-page interim report focuses on 12 areas of damage committed against Black Americans that include political power, housing segregation, environmental policies, law enforcement and economic opportunity.”

“Kirstyne Lange and D’mitra Smith of the Santa Rosa-Sonoma County NAACP chapter have been working to highlight for the state group how those same forces have for generations impacted Black residents of Sonoma County.” The Sonoma City Housing Element has ample public comments that went head on into addressing local segregation, but the City and Housing Element consultant lost the comments and they were not considered in Housing Element plans.

 

“If you look at the way (the task force) is parsing this out into different areas such as education, housing, health care, etc., if we look at the ways in which Black people have been denied generational wealth ... we find that throughout all the systems in Sonoma County,” said Smith, second vice president of the NAACP chapter and a former chairperson of the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights.

 

Said Lange, “…the county and the municipal governments within it, the cities and the county structure, they have a moral obligation, in my opinion, to reckon with this data and to work with us to come up with some of those solutions or get behind some of the initiatives we've proposed.”

 

Sonoma has already flubbed making meaningful AFFH changes to address segregation in the state-required 8-year planning process Housing Element. Assuming the Housing Element does get certified and not sent back to the City for AFFH improvements, renewed efforts to address City segregation will now have to take place in the City’s General Plan update process, in the Land Use Element, where issues of exclusionary zoning and denser infill can be addressed. Why has Sonoma land use resulted in such a segregated City? Could it be that the perceived greatest strength, suburban “small town character” is also the greatest weakness?   

 

Bottom line: if the City does not set the planning table to make it easy to build lower-income housing, Blacks and other BIPOC residents will continue to find themselves excluded from the City. This is largely a matter of City will and desire to set the table to address segregation, i.e., reparations. How to find this will? To paraphrase George Clinton, change your mind and your ass will follow. Action is preceded by the will to act. If City decision makers don’t see any problems with segregation or keep up a drum beat to address it, then such issues get submerged, ignored and soft-pedalled, and a City segregated status quo remains as the effect of not caring enough to change it.