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.
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