Golis: Housing crisis requires more than talk

Healdsburg is the trendiest town around - the best small city in California, according to one recent survey. One of the best small towns in America, according to another.

So when the mayor of Healdsburg says he is jealous of neighboring Windsor, you know something’s happening.

What’s happening, of course, is that the people who work in modish Healdsburg often can’t afford to live there. Fewer than half the city government’s employees reside in the town, according to a new city study. Only 20 percent of the hospital’s employees and only 42 percent of the school district’s employees live in Healdsburg.

Less-glamorous Windsor has managed to support housing that working people can afford. Healdsburg? Not so much.

Staff Writer Clark Mason filed the story on the first of a series of city workshops focused on the lack of rental and entry-level housing. During the discussion, Mayor Shaun McCaffery admitted, “Windsor seems to be way ahead on housing.”

In Healdsburg and in Santa Rosa, too, the public conversation last week centered on the lack of housing for people who don’t make a lot of money.

If cities needed a wake-up call, there was the news that Sonoma County ranked among the nation’s top 10 markets for rent hikes in 2014. This is what happens when apartment rents jump 30 percent in three years.

The re-remergence of housing as a political issue follows a period in which community leaders didn’t pay much attention to the cost of housing. When the Great Recession came along, home prices declined, and policymakers moved on to other issues.

Homeowners didn’t seem to notice that Sonoma County was facing an acute shortage of rental housing. One study found that only 70 new market- rate rental units were built in Sonoma County in a three-year period.

Meanwhile, as the economy began to recover, thousands of moderate-income jobs - service industry jobs - were being created. The number of renters was increasing (and the number of homeowners was declining), but no one was thinking about the stock of rental housing.

Today, home prices in California are lower than they were in 2006, but rents are higher. When a county adds 18,000 new jobs and only 70 market-rate rental units, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a housing shortage.

It remains that we have heard all this before. It’s a lot easier to talk about affordable housing than it is to do something about it. There will be no quick fixes.

With state and federal support, local governments must seek out opportunities to subsidize housing.

Local agencies also will need to push back against the political and bureaucratic inertia - focusing on ways to reduce fees that make housing more expensive. For a long time, we’ve lived in a political culture in which you couldn’t go wrong making life difficult for home builders. In Healdsburg, only 14 new homes were built in the past two years.

When markets are constricted in this way, the law of supply and demand guarantees that housing will cost more.

Meanwhile, political activists will need to resist the temptation to believe that rent controls and living-wage ordinances alone will be enough to remedy what is fundamentally a problem of supply and demand.

Most of all, people need to embrace the urgency - and understand why this issue is important to everyone who cares about a healthy economy and a healthy community.

A place than wants to prosper can’t turn its back on working people.

A place that boasts of its humanitarian values can’t look the other way when thousands of people, including many children, are left to substandard housing or to homelessness. When a 10-year-old tells the Santa Rosa City Council that her family was forced from their home by mold and rats, when a college student says she expects to be homeless next week, it’s not OK.

A place proud of its efforts to prevent climate change shouldn’t accept policies that force workers to commute long distances. The result can only be more carbon emissions, more air pollution, more traffic. Plus, it doesn’t get easier to create a sense of community when people don’t feel welcome in the town where they work.

The conversations taking place in Healdsburg, Santa Rosa and elsewhere represent a necessary beginning, but they will be meaningless without commitment and staying power.

In the economic recovery now underway, Sonoma County is celebrating the new jobs being created in retail, food and wine, education, health care, tourism and more.

But the folks who work in these industries don’t just materialize out of thin air each day. Like everyone else, they and their families need a home. Wise and compassionate communities will make a place for them.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.