Forum on Valley housing crisis
Dear Editor:
On June 17th, residents of the Sonoma Valley will begin engaging one another in the question of “what will we do about this housing crisis?” Members of El Verano Elementary School, the First United Methodist Church of Sonoma, and the North Bay Organizing Project, want to build the relationships, hear the stories, and engage in creative solution making necessary to begin impacting the question of housing from the perspective of working people.
Currently, renters have seen rents go up 30% in less than 3 years, have felt the impact of a 1% vacancy rate, and understand that no protections for renters exist that would stabilize rents or help avoid unjust evictions. Renters, both working class and middle class, are stuck and being squeezed at the same time, and yet the solutions most vocally being touted are based in the logic of the same market that got us into this crisis. We hope that local communities inserting themselves into the equation can provide human based solutions and demonstrate resilience in the face of pain. Policies such as rent stabilization and just cause eviction should be on the table, but so too should the ability of renters to organize ourselves and begin exercising collective legal rights as tenants, exposing slumlords and unfair practices.
If the needs of the workforce are not made priority, we will no longer be able to afford to live in the County, causing commutes, traffic, CO2 emissions, family stress, deeper poverty, and deeper segregation of people. The only interactions will be brief economic transactions, if even that. We must engage in an expressed effort to lift up the voices and rights of those who this system is preying on, so that we have the power to provide solutions that benefit us. Creating a County that all can live in, work in, pray in, play in, will benefit us all in the long run, but the solutions need to begin now.
This Forum will be a place to start hearing what residents are facing, and what they’d like to do about it. Please join us, Wednesday June 17th, 6:00 – 7:30pm at El Verano Elementary School (Cafeteria).
Davin Cárdenas
Lead Organizer – North Bay Organizing Project
One thought on “Forum on Valley housing crisis”
Comments are closed.
As a direct response to the federal government via the Senate Banking Committee, droves of bad loans were made to individuals under the “Fair Housing Act” who could never possibly afford a home. Then, the same politicians that headed up the SBC and forced banks into making these bad loans then guaranteed to buy these securities. This caused the financial horror that decimated the economy. Then these same politicians brought us the Dodds Frank bill making it virtually impossible to get a loan which created a huge demand for rentals thus driving the prices sky high. Search YouTube and watch conservatives plea with the SBC between 2003-2007 to stop encouraging these loans. Warning of the dire consequences that would ensue if they did. So now what? Are more politicians going to fix this? Hope not. They’re incapable and incompetent..