New Sonoma County housing study details the costs renters pay for housing shortage

It positions housing as a crucial linchpin that impacts everything from racial equity to public health, from efforts to tackle climate change to the needs of workers ranging from teachers to landscapers.|
JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Films explore housing needs

Young professionals, teachers, farmworkers

Thursday’s Housing Solutions Summit will feature the screening of a short film about farmworker housing in Sonoma Count by photographer Erik Castro. Castro’s unrelated freelance work has been featured in The Press Democrat.

Generation Housing commissioned two previous short films from Castro, the first about young professionals and the housing market and the other about teachers and their housing needs.

“Those are some of the groups of folks who have specific housing needs and challenges, but there are many groups of people in the community who experience the housing crisis in a unique way and this is one of them,” said Jen Klose, Generation Housing’s executive director. “Farmworkers have some very unique challenges.”

Castro said that in making the film, “One thing that stood out is that when I would go to these places during the day, there’s nobody there. Everyone is working. You can’t be a remote farmworker.”

The film, he said, “is a conversation starter, it’s not, ‘Here’s what you need to do.’ It’s ‘here are some really good ideas.’”

Sonoma County has significantly too little housing to meet its needs, making life a lot harder for residents, contributing to persistent inequities that span race, family size and income, and painting a worrisome portrait of the future, a new report finds.

That’s largely because housing production hasn’t kept up with population trends for more than 20 years, and also because of a historical emphasis on zoning for single-family home construction, according to the findings of the 2023 State of Housing in Sonoma County.

This report, which will be officially released today, was produced by North Bay research and advocacy group Generation Housing. It aims to inform and shape an ongoing urgent discussion about how to ease the housing crunch in Sonoma County.

It will be the main focus of a “Housing Solutions Summit,“ organized by Generation Housing that will be held from 1 to 6 p.m. Thursday at the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa.

The event will include presentations that range from housing as an economic development engine to housing solutions on the 2024 ballot.

Tickets are available through the Generation Housing website and the event will stream live on the group’s Facebook page.

The 84-page report depicts a housing system causing significant distress to Sonoma County residents, but it also surveys Sonoma County and its nine municipalities to highlight policy solutions that could lessen those burdens.

While it dips into the challenges homeowners face, the report focuses on Sonoma County’s 179,964 renters.

It positions housing as a crucial linchpin that impacts everything from racial equity to public health, from efforts to tackle climate change to the needs of workers ranging from teachers to landscapers.

“We really think that if this report becomes used as a tool by service providers and elected (officials) to understand the challenges their constituents are facing in a broader context, whatever policy area they're working on — education, drug use, domestic abuse, overall safety concerns, climate — we can show that housing is a through line between those policy areas,” said Joshua Shipper, the report’s lead author and director of special initiatives for Generation Housing.

This graph represents the percentage change in housing units and population in Sonoma County between 2001 and 2021. During that time, the county added an average of 1.3 percent new housing units to its housing stock each year before plummeting to annual growth rates of 0.3 percent until 2017. The year-over-year rate of housing production outpaced population growth before 2007 but remained below the rate of population growth for the next decade. Housing gets pinched after 2010 as we begin building at a lower rate than population growth — reaching nearly flat levels of housing stock growth. The series of fires experienced by the county starting in 2017 led to a major loss in housing stock. In response, the county launched several re-build initiatives resulting in a net 3.5 percentage point jump in the rate of production. Yearly increases to housing stock are now at a 20-year low. The county saw a deceleration in housing production and now sits at a 1.2 percent rate of growth as of 2021, setting the county up for larger deficits unless trends are reversed. (U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program and American Community Survey; IPUMS NHGIS)
This graph represents the percentage change in housing units and population in Sonoma County between 2001 and 2021. During that time, the county added an average of 1.3 percent new housing units to its housing stock each year before plummeting to annual growth rates of 0.3 percent until 2017. The year-over-year rate of housing production outpaced population growth before 2007 but remained below the rate of population growth for the next decade. Housing gets pinched after 2010 as we begin building at a lower rate than population growth — reaching nearly flat levels of housing stock growth. The series of fires experienced by the county starting in 2017 led to a major loss in housing stock. In response, the county launched several re-build initiatives resulting in a net 3.5 percentage point jump in the rate of production. Yearly increases to housing stock are now at a 20-year low. The county saw a deceleration in housing production and now sits at a 1.2 percent rate of growth as of 2021, setting the county up for larger deficits unless trends are reversed. (U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program and American Community Survey; IPUMS NHGIS)

Despite a recent uptick in housing production, driven by building to replace homes lost to wildfires, the report finds that residents are increasingly stressed by the burden of housing costs — with 22% of all tenants paying more than 50% of their monthly income toward rent.

The benchmark to be considered rent-burdened is paying more than 30% of one’s income toward rent and utilities.

Meanwhile, nine of every 10 extremely low- and very low-income renters, or 52,572 people who earn below $41,600 a year, are rent burdened.

A rent burden for years

The analysis turned up another measure of how strained the housing market is: median income renters in Sonoma County have been rent-burdened since 2005, paying at least $200 more a month in rent and utilities than that 30%-of-income benchmark. That rent gap peaked in 2018 at $240.

“The median rent has maintained a constant upward trend even when average income falls or stagnates,” the report said.

“Try as you might, new jobs, new sources of income, combined households, that affordability gap to me represents a number of sacrifices that families are making month to month in order to fill that gap,“ said Shipper. ”It's a finding that I think just cuts across household sizes, races, income levels.“

This graph represents median rent and median renter income, 2005-2019, in Sonoma County. Year over year, since 2005, the median monthly rent for an apartment in Sonoma County has outpaced the county’s median “affordability line”—a calculation of what the median earner can afford on rent without spending over 30 percent of their income. The effective rent gap for households earning the median income in Sonoma County has remained roughly $200 since 2016 and peaked in absolute dollars at nearly $240 in 2018. The largest disparity between median rents and affordability by percent was in 2006 when rents reached 126 percent of median affordability. The median rent has maintained a constant upward trend even when average income falls or stagnates. (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey)
This graph represents median rent and median renter income, 2005-2019, in Sonoma County. Year over year, since 2005, the median monthly rent for an apartment in Sonoma County has outpaced the county’s median “affordability line”—a calculation of what the median earner can afford on rent without spending over 30 percent of their income. The effective rent gap for households earning the median income in Sonoma County has remained roughly $200 since 2016 and peaked in absolute dollars at nearly $240 in 2018. The largest disparity between median rents and affordability by percent was in 2006 when rents reached 126 percent of median affordability. The median rent has maintained a constant upward trend even when average income falls or stagnates. (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey)

Another key finding: without “intervention and decisive action“ to create more affordable low- and moderate-income housing, especially in the rental market, the share of county households with children could drop from 27% today to 20% or lower by 2037. That would leave, in addition to an aging population, fewer people able to support the local economy as a current and also future workforce.

The 84-page report also determines that flaws in the local housing system perpetuate unsustainable race and class inequities, in part by making life more expensive for Black and Latino families who have a lower median income, and in part by making it harder for those households to generate wealth by becoming homeowners.

For example, 37.5% of Black households own their own homes, and 43% of Latino households, compared to 70% percent of white households. Also, 63% of Black renters and 56% of Latino renters are rent-burdened.

While it paints a picture of a housing system, and a population, under great stress, the report also points to an array of what Shipper calls a “suite” of solutions, many contained in progress reports on Sonoma County and each of its nine municipalities.

Those progress reports measure performance in “pro-housing” policies in areas ranging from zoning to the length of project review to reducing impact fees

More ‘objective standards’

One change the report recommends is that more ministerial review be built into the process of approving affordable housing projects, which could decrease the extent of public and discretionary review over project applications.

“That’s just kind of a fancy term for allowing a more objective set of standards for developers to follow when designing their housing projects so that they can more clearly understand what the city wants,” said Shipper.

"I would not advocate for the ending of public reviews,“ he said. ”I think it's the third round, the fourth round, the fifth round that can spread out over years and force developers to add a ton of costs to their projects and also just experience a ton of uncertainty over whether a project has a chance of being developed.“

While it’s no silver bullet, Shipper said, emphasizing the development of multiunit housing over single family homes — the report refers to multiplex buildings of from four to 11 units as “missing middle” housing — would be central to efforts to ease the housing crunch.

Of Sonoma County’s 188,420 occupied residential structures, 140,592, or 74.6%, are single family homes, according to Generation Housing’s analysis.

“Our overall inability to add to our (housing) stock and to do it rapidly and to add to the diversity of housing stock … that is hamstringing us,” Shipper said. “Reforming single family zoning to allow for this -plex style or missing middle housing is an essential part of that three- or four-step policy package. Without that, it will be very, very difficult to continue to build more affordable, denser housing almost anywhere in the county.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay

Films explore housing needs

Young professionals, teachers, farmworkers

Thursday’s Housing Solutions Summit will feature the screening of a short film about farmworker housing in Sonoma Count by photographer Erik Castro. Castro’s unrelated freelance work has been featured in The Press Democrat.

Generation Housing commissioned two previous short films from Castro, the first about young professionals and the housing market and the other about teachers and their housing needs.

“Those are some of the groups of folks who have specific housing needs and challenges, but there are many groups of people in the community who experience the housing crisis in a unique way and this is one of them,” said Jen Klose, Generation Housing’s executive director. “Farmworkers have some very unique challenges.”

Castro said that in making the film, “One thing that stood out is that when I would go to these places during the day, there’s nobody there. Everyone is working. You can’t be a remote farmworker.”

The film, he said, “is a conversation starter, it’s not, ‘Here’s what you need to do.’ It’s ‘here are some really good ideas.’”

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