Golis: Confronting the need for more workforce housing

Before we forget, let us take a moment to appreciate the Santa Rosa City Council. In recent days, council members seem to have decided three tough issues - rent stabilization, rules governing evictions and a rent-hike moratorium - without yelling at each other.

If this sounds like no big deal, you don't remember how past councils managed (so to speak) their differences. It's not necessary for council members to be best friends, but it continues to be helpful if they can avoid the distractions associated with open hostility. So, good for them.

It is not optimal, of course, that these controversial measures won approval by the narrowest of margins. But so it goes. The math is simple: Count to four and you win.

In endorsing a rent stabilization regime, Councilman Chris Coursey said, “If this is a crisis, let's treat it like a crisis. Let's use all the tools available to us.”

Citing other housing initiatives also under way, he added, “It fits into the larger strategy by preserving what we have. It will help people.”

Coursey also offered an analysis worth considering by passionate people on both sides of the issue. Rent control, he said, will neither be as transformative “as supporters hope it will be” or as “onerous” as opponents fear.

It remains to be seen how quickly the city can design and implement a rent control program, or whether it will work. These initiatives take time - in part, because that is just government's way and, in part, because these are tough and complex issues. If solutions were easy, communities all over the Bay Area wouldn't be struggling with their own housing crises.

Fifteen months have passed since the Santa Rosa council placed housing and homelessness at the top of its list of priorities, and 15 months have passed since Gov. Jerry Brown told Press Democrat Editorial Director Paul Gullixson: “The problem is you don't want housing up there.”

This is the issue we've been dancing around for a long time.

Measures to limit rent increases or to provide shelter for homeless people can be important, but exploding rents and people living on the street remain symptoms of a community's failure to plan for a housing mix that meets the needs of all the people who live there.

What we don't like to say out loud is that this housing crisis emerges from inattention to the needs of people who make less money, the people who can't afford to buy a house - shop clerks and laborers, young teachers and students, farmworkers and people who work in restaurants.

This is not about building more McMansions. It's about building more small homes, duplexes, triplexes and apartment buildings so everyone has a place to live.

If you've spent time around Sonoma County politics, you know how the conversation proceeds from here. All development is good, or all development is evil (except, of course, for the house where you live).

Some will claim people who advocate for new housing only want to pave over Sonoma County. So, the argument goes, we shouldn't talk about housing in any form.

The quality of life in Sonoma County begins with the growth limits and urban boundaries adopted over the past 25 years. We should celebrate these successes. But measures to control growth also oblige communities to pay special attention to the impacts on people who can't afford a $600,000 house.

It shouldn't be OK that the apartment vacancy rate is the functional equivalent of zero.

It shouldn't be OK to celebrate the job growth and other rewards associated with world-class wine and tourist industries while disregarding the housing needs of many of the people who work in those industries.

And it shouldn't be OK that families are living in cars and under bridges, living with two and three families in the same apartment, or living in buildings infested with cockroaches and rats. How can we feel good about these conditions?

If we care, we can maintain our quality of life and do a better job providing housing for working people.

California is growing at a moderate pace - less than 1 percent a year. Yet, as a Press Democrat editorial noted recently, the number of new housing units in the state declined in 2015.

In Sonoma County, local builders said early this year that they're hopeful 2016 will bring new construction - with the emphasis on multi-family housing - after eight years in which residential building failed to keep pace.

On June 7, the Santa Rosa City Council will resume its review of what officials call the “housing for all” recommendations. Expect more controversies along the way.

No one should be fooled into thinking we simply can build our way out of this housing crisis. Land prices and other economic factors remain stubborn impediments to making sure that everyone can afford a decent place to live.

But doing nothing shouldn't be an option either. If more families find a decent place to live, how can that be bad?

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