Healdsburg residents demand relief from rising rents

An overflow crowd of approximately 150 people packed a Healdsburg City Council meeting Monday night to ask for relief from soaring rents, passionately urging the city to do something about an affordability “crisis” that is displacing longtime working residents and families.

At times tearful and angry, the speakers described a community in danger of losing its backbone, if not its soul, a victim of its own success, in which tourism has overtaken the needs of everyday residents and helped put housing out of reach.

A number of speakers urged the council to immediately impose rent control, although city staff noted the city only has limited ability to control rents and council members did not support the idea.

“This is not simple. This is very complicated,” said Councilman Tom Chambers. “We need diversity in this town. We all agree there is not enough housing in this town.”

Speakers noted that housing affordability is a problem in many other communities, but in Healdsburg - which has the highest real estate prices in the county - the problem is especially acute.

There have been growing complaints of families forced into the street due to skyrocketing rents. And longtime renters fear they will be next, priced out of a town where they can’t afford to buy a home.

Alfredo Sanchez of Santa Rosa compared Healdsburg to Napa, St. Helena and Calistoga, and said city leaders are making it “a cute little town only affordable to rich people.”

“You are surrounded by grapes. If it weren’t for the people who pick grapes, you wouldn’t even be on the map,” he said to strong applause.

But Mayor Shaun McCaffery struck an optimistic tone at the end of the 3 1/2 hour meeting.

“I think we can really make a difference. If we all work together, we can solve this,” he said. “With the energy here tonight, I see a positive outcome.”

Gail Jonas, an attorney who has lived in Healdsburg for 49 years, said the housing issue - especially providing workforce housing for farm workers - “has been bubbling since I’ve been here. It’s reached critical mass.”

She said the city has promoted tourism, but overlooked “the needs of the backbone of the community.”

“It’s like throwing grease on a fire,” one woman said of Monday’s hot agenda topic “Landlord/Tenant Relations.”

“Housing is not a privilege. It’s a right,” said one man who only identified himself as being from Rohnert Park.

Councilman Eric Ziedrich bristled at the suggestion that the council isn’t sympathetic to the plight of those affected by rising housing costs.

“We are members of this community too. We are not sitting on the dais looking down,” he said.

Bruce Abramson, who is on a newly formed city housing committee, said the situation “is causing tremendous anxiety and uncertainty among renters ... The 60-70-80 percent increases are causing bedlam in this community.”

He said the city should take the high ground with its “moral authority” and devise a rent advisory to be sent to every landlord in town - more than 1,850 units - that all rent increases be “reasonable, fair and moderate in nature.”

Georgia Berlant, a Healdsburg resident who heads up the Sonoma County Task Force on the Homeless, said she fears the warm, charming town she moved to decades ago may be disappearing.

“I’m not leaving this town. Maybe my town is leaving me,” she said.

City Manager David Mickaelian said the need for more workforce housing coupled with the shortage of rental housing is widening the economic divide in the community.

While the city continues to make “substantive progress” at the housing policy level, he noted that the recent mass eviction of the 21 tenants of the Prentice Apartments and the steep rent increases on five dwellings on Fitch Street have served as a catalyst for discussion of rent control.

Mickaelian said some landlords are raising rents now out of fear the city is going to impose some type of rent control.

Over the last five years, there has been little or no construction activity to add to the city’s 4,380 occupied housing units, of which 42 percent are owner-occupied.

Since 2010, there were 58 housing units built, mostly single-family homes, and only a handful of multi-family units in the form of a couple of duplexes.

As a general law city - as opposed to a charter city - Healdsburg could impose rent control on apartment buildings occupied prior to February 1995. But it is prohibited from regulating rents for single-family homes and condominiums.

Some have cautioned against placing the blame on “greedy” landlords for the price increases.

“The Healdsburg market is actually no different than pretty much all of Sonoma County,” said Pam Tauffer, a Healdsburg property manager.

“It’s definitely a statewide issue. Housing rents have remained flat for a lot of years and it’s been in the last three or four where profit-taking is finally starting to happen. It doesn’t make anyone good or bad. It’s just what’s going on,” she said.

City Council members say the challenge of creating government-subsidized housing has been made even tougher with the state’s dissolution of redevelopment agency programs, a traditional source of funds.

“We need to develop better public-private partnerships,” said City Councilman Gary Plass, who said the city owns some plots of land that can be used for affordable housing and could be attractive enough “to catch the eye of some developer that will work with us in public-private sponsorship.”

Council members are also looking at asking voters to relax the city’s growth control ordinance which limits the average number of new dwellings to 30 per year, something planners say creates an impediment to building less-expensive housing.

“It’s choked off the supply of building rental units,” said Mayor McCaffery. “A mansion of 6,000 square feet is treated the same as a market-rate, 600-square-foot apartment.”

A new community housing committee, which includes two city councilmembers, two planning commissioners and five other citizens, is meeting at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall. The top issue on the agenda involves coming up with proposed language for a ballot measure to change the city’s Growth Management Ordinance to encourage less-costly market-rate housing.

But there could be resistance from the newly formed Healdsburg Citizens for Responsible Growth, headed by Jim Winston, who wants to make sure the growth ordinance he authored 15 years ago isn’t relaxed too much.

“We’re going to fight hard to make sure the existing GMO doesn’t get gutted,” Winston said in a recent interview. “We’re willing to make concessions and find common ground, but not at the expense of losing small-town character and quality of life because we’re growing too fast.”

The community housing committee is also expected to recommend measures such as reduced fees or streamlined building procedures to provide for housing diversification through infill development and construction of workforce housing.