Healdsburg wrestling with affordable housing

Healdsburg, the priciest real estate market in Sonoma County, is searching for ways to create more affordable housing, a daunting proposition in a community considered highly desirable to live in but with a stringent growth control policy.

The City Council is putting affordable housing - or the lack of it - in the spotlight with a series of workshops designed to come up with solutions.

Rents and home prices have steadily escalated in many Bay Area communities, not so bad for property owners, but squeezing out tenants and first-time home buyers.

The problem is particularly acute in Healdsburg.

“It’s like a fantasy economy. People making tons of money can spare no expense to build a house, whereas folks around here who don’t make that kind of money have to abide by normal economic forces,” Mayor Shaun McCaffery said.

Last year, the median sales price for a home in Healdsburg was $664,000, the highest of all Sonoma County communities, according to The Press Democrat’s monthly housing report compiled by Pacific Union International Vice President Rick Laws.

The Sonoma County coastal area was second behind Healdsburg, at $649,500.

In contrast, the median sales price in Sonoma County was $485,000.

The lack of affordability in Healdsburg is forcing young families, seniors and “backbone employees, the workforce of the community” to live elsewhere, a consultant said.

Multi-family housing - apartments, townhomes, work/live units - are seen as one way of creating more affordable dwellings, as opposed to homes on single-family lots that define much of Healdsburg.

“Most everyone agrees they want to see more (housing) diversity. The challenge is, no one knows how we get there,” said Jim Heid, the consultant who is leading a series of workshops for the city to address the issue.

McCaffery agreed with one architect’s view that there is “a San Francisco economy encroaching into Healdsburg.”

The mayor said one of the larger reasons for holding the workshops is to educate people and get them thinking about an issue that “will have a large effect on the future and make-up of the city.”

At a meeting last week, about 75 people - including the Healdsburg City Council and Planning Commission - turned out to hear a panel of housing experts for the second of three scheduled workshops designed to help the council develop and implement a strategy to increase the availability of housing choices.

Some of the data presented underscored the housing imbalance. Of the 44 units sold in Healdsburg in the past three years, only a half-dozen government-defined affordable units have been sold - in the Sonata subdivision.

Slightly more than two-thirds of the 344 homes sold in Healdsburg over the past two years went for more than $575,000, according to real estate data cited by Heid. Those homes essentially are affordable only to households with $115,000 or more in annual income, or 140 percent of the median income in Sonoma County.

About 20 percent of homes sold in Healdsburg in the same period went for a $1 million or more.

To achieve more affordable housing, the City Council has embraced a stated action plan to support in-fill housing projects and mixed-use development; to contract with the Housing Land Trust of Sonoma County to administer affordable housing programs; and encourage multi-generational housing projects.

But one of the constraints to achieving those goals is an existing Healdsburg voter-approved growth management ordinance that limits new market-rate units to an average of 30 per year, making it difficult for developers to finance and build more affordable multi-family units.

The growth control measure was approved by voters in 2000, in response to concern over larger housing projects like Parkland Farms built on the city’s periphery.

At the housing panel discussion last week, the voter-measure was described as a well-intentioned initiative that put the brakes on growth. But it was criticized for its unintended consequences.

“It’s anti-diversity,” said Healdsburg architect Jon Worden. “It favors single-family development and visitor-serving development.”

He said the rigidly written measure needs to be amended to allow more units in the urban core, such as at the Nu Forest Products lumberyard, seen as ripe for redevelopment, potentially with denser housing projects.

He said the measure works against itself, threatening “ the very thing we love and want to preserve,” i.e. the elderly, young families and children.

More than 90 percent of Healdsburg’s existing 4,900 housing units are single-family homes, and the growth management ordinance makes it difficult to break that mold, according to housing analysts.

Building permit caps or quotas indirectly encourage builders to construct large houses, since they aren’t guaranteed to get permission to build the volume of attached housing necessary to attain a desired profit, according to a Brookings Institute study cited at the recent workshop.

Jim Winston, the author of the growth management ordinance, said he was taken aback by what he viewed as an unfair attack on the measure, which remains in effect in perpetuity, unless voters alter it.

“They loaded the panel with all pro-growth people and only had one opinion,” he said in an interview, vowing to resist any significant changes to the growth ordinance, which he anticipates will be on the ballot in 2016.

“It seems they want to gut the existing (ordinance) and I’m not going to let that happen,” he said.

Winston noted that the growth ordinance exempts government-defined affordable housing and second units, typically, referred to as granny units.

“In my opinion they can do everything they want to do. They just need to do it more slowly and orderly over time,” he said.

But Heid said the less-costly housing units officials and stakeholders envision are not exempted by the growth measure, because they don’t qualify under the government definition of “affordable,” which typically requires large public subsidies and restrictions in perpetuity to occupants with 30 to 120 percent of median income.

Healdsburg, like other cities and counties has been affected by the state’s dissolving redevelopment programs that provided funds to subsidize affordable housing projects.

But Heid said there are a number of market-driven approaches that can create workforce housing that don’t require deed restrictions or public money.

Those can be units that are smaller, employ more efficient construction techniques, have one-car garages, or are clustered around shared amenities.

Councilwoman Brigette Mansell said she was excited by the workshop and suggestions that the city consider revamping its policies or building code to create more affordability.

“I like the idea we can start fresh,” she said. “I want to revisit the rules and look at how we can change rules so that things work.”

The final community housing workshop is set for March 25.

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter@clarkmas.