Golis: Housing merry-go-round keeps going around and around

In 2018, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors set a goal. The people of Sonoma County, the board agreed, should build 30,000 new homes within five years.

The number was fanciful even then. Supervisor Susan Gorin told her colleagues at the time, “30,000 units in five years is not going to happen.”

Flash forward to last week. Since 2015, Staff Writer Ethan Varian reported, a combined total of 8,340 new homes have been approved in unincorporated areas and the county’s nine cities.

That’s 8,340 homes in seven years, which will not be confused with 30,000 homes in five years.

Now the Board of Supervisors and the city councils in nine cities are facing pressure to generate the construction of 14,500 more homes between now and 2031. The consequences for failing to respond to the state’s mandate could include lawsuits, fines and the withholding of state funds earmarked for local government.

And so here we go again.

It remains that housing is expensive because housing is scarce. Housing is scarce because we don’t build enough housing and because 5,300 homes — houses and apartments — burned to the ground in the 2017 fires. Only about half have been rebuilt.

Also, the big city exodus during the pandemic has driven home prices even higher in places like Sonoma County. Everyone who has sold a house has a story to tell about multiple all-cash offers with no contingencies. (Varian reported on Thursday that the median price of a house reached $769,000 in 2021, a 10% increase over the previous year.)

Elected officials may have good intentions, but the housing merry-go-round remains a reminder that government spends too much time promising things that it can’t deliver. Recall the mess that followed the Board of Supervisors’ initial plan to sell the old Sutter Hospital site to a homebuilder five years ago.

Setting themselves up for failure is not a winning strategy. It leaves voters deflated and even more skeptical of government’s capacity for solving problems.

Just ask Gov. Gavin Newsom. In 2018, Newsom vowed that 3.5 million new homes would be built in California by 2025. That’s 500,000 homes a year. Then and now, it was not a projection grounded in the realities of home construction in California. The state has averaged fewer than 80,000 new homes a year over the past decade.

Nor was it a projection that recognized the limits of what government can do. As Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Rogers noted the other day, government doesn’t build houses. Homebuilders build houses (and apartments, too).

When land, building supplies and building fees are expensive, it doesn’t get easier to build anything. Also, would-be home and apartment builders often must navigate neighborhood opposition and the cost and delays associated with local development rules.

There remains a generational divide when it comes to housing. Many people of a certain age who own their homes don’t see a problem, and many worry about the impacts of new development. (Talk of 30,000 new homes in five years sets their teeth on edge.)

Young people and moderate-income workers have a different view. They find their paychecks can’t keep up with the price of housing. In an aging county, a place where employers often can’t hire the people they need to be successful, this becomes an obstacle to economic opportunity and to the region’s long-term prosperity.

We even have a housing advocacy group called Generation Housing. Responding to Portrait of Sonoma County, a new report spotlighting disparities in income, health outcomes and housing, Generation Housing Executive Director Jen Klose told Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez, “We have a great imbalance of folks who are working hard jobs for low wages, but we don’t have enough homes at an affordable level.”

In Generation Housing’s annual report, Klose adds, “The future economic vitality and resilience of our county is jeopardized if young workers, students, and families cannot stay or cannot live in a healthy way because of housing cost burden.”

We blame government — and government deserves some blame — but the rest of us have some responsibility, too. When housing projects are under consideration, not many people are lining up to say: Hey, we need this.

But many will show up to say: I’m all for housing, but not in my neighborhood, thank you very much.

Given all the problems we face, it would be useful if people came to believe that government could make progress. Whether it’s responding to a virus that has killed more than 875,000 Americans, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, promoting housing or addressing the multiple challenges presented by climate change, we need effective government.

But here’s the trap we’ve set for ourselves: Government is ineffective because we don’t trust it, and we don’t trust it because it’s ineffective. It doesn’t help when government promises what it can’t deliver.

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

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