Golis: Housing and the two faces of California politics

“As prices have jumped, lower- and middle-income families are being pushed out of entire cities and sometimes whole counties.”

- From a report in the San Jose Mercury News.

The Economist magazine last month called out the pretense: “San Francisco liberals are the kind of people who abhor nativism in all its forms and recoil at statements, like those recently made by President Donald Trump, that America ‘is FULL!' Yet in their own neighborhoods, they often act as if the country were packed to the brim.”

The magazine goes on to recount how San Francisco - a self-declared “sanctuary city” - often resists efforts to build housing for the people who want to live there.

In San Francisco, you can now rent a median-priced, one-bedroom apartment for $42,000 a year. If you're paid $20 an hour, you'll be $400 short of having enough money to pay the rent - much less pay for food, health care, clothing, taxes and everything else.

A San Jose Mercury News analysis found that even people with six-figure incomes could not afford the median rent in 72% of Bay Area neighborhoods, and “not a single ZIP code in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties.”

We live with the mixed messages that come from Californians who declare their support for working people and immigrants but pale at the thought of new housing in their neighborhoods. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times recounted how neighborhoods now are deploying environmental laws to block the establishment of homeless shelters.

When housing moves from being an abstraction to what people perceive as a threat to their quality of life, everything changes.

The Editorial Board of The Press Democrat recently declared: “The solution to the housing crisis is housing.” Here was a not-so-subtle reminder to politicians and interest groups. Blue ribbon committees, yearlong studies and high-flown proclamations are nice, but they don't build housing.

With government‘s permission, financing and the opportunity to make a profit, builders build housing.

The editorial went on to outline legislation that would require local government to approve high-density development in neighborhoods near new jobs and transit (though not in cities of fewer than 50,000 people in counties, like Sonoma, with fewer than 600,000 residents).

This sounds much like what the city of Santa Rosa has in mind in its downtown (though many other cities have not been keen on having state government dictate terms).

But a legislative committee on Thursday shelved the bill for another year. A disappointed author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, spoke to the state's ongoing ambivalence when it comes to housing: “We're either serious about solving this crisis, or we aren't. At some point, we will need to make the hard political choices necessary for California to have a bright housing future.”

In the aftermath of the disastrous fires of October 2017 and the loss of 5,300 homes, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Sonoma County's population declined by 3,300 people between July 1, 2017 and July 1, 2018, and that number could go higher when we have a full accounting of the fires' impacts.

Some people won't mind, but much depends, as a letter writer noted recently, on who is leaving. If people of working age are leaving, the growing numbers of retirees may not like it when there is no one around to supervise their health care, repair a broken pipe, track down a burglar, fix their teeth, teach their grandchildren or provide care in a nursing home.

A year ago, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors expressed the hope that 30,000 new homes would be constructed in the next five years. Given all the costs and obstacles associated with new construction, it was a number more fanciful than real. “(It's) not going to happen,” Supervisor Susan Gorin told her colleagues at the time.

But the number did manage to scare the pants off people who fear the fires will be used as a pretext for runaway development.

The county board then proceeded to spend a year pursuing a development plan for the old Sutter Medical Center property on Chanate Road, only to have a judge agree with the neighbors that the project couldn't proceed without an environmental review.

In a perfect world, home construction wouldn't involve these kinds of stops and starts. Time is money, and people need a place to live.

But there remain so many uncertainties about what kind of housing is needed, about whether large numbers of people will want to live downtown, about whether downtown housing can be delivered at a price people can afford.

The situation is made worse by the fact that jobs are being created in industries in which workers can least afford the cost of housing in Sonoma County. We only exacerbate the problems of housing and traffic if we push job growth without providing housing for the people who occupy those jobs.

There also remain questions about the public's willingness to embrace new housing. There's no shortage of people who complain about traffic and declare that we can't build our way out of this mess. Recall that it was Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015 who told The Press Democrat, “The problem is, you people don't want housing up there.”

After the fires, home construction is moving at a good pace, though not as quickly as we wish. Now we seek answers that help us better understand future needs - and how we can best respond to what we learn.

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

You can send a letter to the editor at letters@pressdemocrat.com