Connecting the Dots ~ Fred Allebach

Fred Allebach Fred Allebach is a member of the City of Sonoma’s Community Services and Environmental Commission, and an Advisory Committee member of the Sonoma Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Fred is a member of Sonoma Overlook Trail Stewards, as well as Sonoma Valley Housing Group and Transition Sonoma Valley.

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Affordable Housing or Green Checkmate?

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Fred Allebach

Many local issues appear to be about one thing but are at the same time systemic and connected to many other things. One such issue is greenbelt community separators.

The simple take is that if such land protections as separators and UGBs are not in place, developers will run wild with new unsightly strips and tract housing. It is sine qua non that developers are greedy and care only about money. Thus protections are needed against growth free-for-alls lest we end up with a proliferation of ugly strips and cookie cutter housing developments, and destroy all the nature around us in the process.

For their part developers say this is an issue of supply and demand, if housing prices are so high what’s needed is more housing to lower the heat on the demand. So then, are houses to always be built on a fresh, unlimited frontier or do we build more densely in urban cores?

Green protections do constrain housing; this is an effect, and constraining land use to urban cores is certainly a contributing factor in the matter of housing price. You don’t need to be a developer to make this obvious point.

Sonoma has a voter-approved UGB around the City that will expire in 2020. The county has green separators in the Mayacamas and on Sonoma Mountain. Voter-approved county greenbelts in general are set to expire in 2016. A BOS hearing will take place Dec 15th to shape a possible ballot to continue county wide greenbelt protections and perhaps also strengthen them. This is likely a forum where development and green stakeholders will be lobbying for their respective interests.

How is this issue going to be framed at the BOS? The separators will probably pass but with some horse trading and small amounts of fresh land opened up to throw a bone to developer campaign contributors.

Allow me to connect a few dots here. We know that affordability in the housing market nationwide is systemic with many contributing factors: subprime mortgage bubble popping, underwater homeowners foreclosed, a steep rise in renter population, existing low inventory of rental housing and finally, cash sales of houses to wealthy investors who take the opportunity to run up rents because of a tight market.

In the Bay Area we have 3 of the 5 most unequal counties in the country: San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara. Marin directly borders the core unaffordable zone. In Sonoma County we are there, part and parcel of some of the worst housing inequality and unaffordability in the nation. We’ve got lots of green parks and nice nature though. Am I conflating issues here and making too big a stretch between affordable housing and the proliferation of green spaces?

An alternate map of the US describes the west coast from Santa Cruz to Seattle as Ecotopia, a place where forward-looking environmentalists predominate. This paradise however seems to have a steep price of admission.

Cities and municipalities are seen as, or hoped-to-be-seen as islands of progressive planning. The only trouble is that the Ecotopians themselves have no actual power to mandate social equity. They fight the good fights, rearguard actions against the unjust tide of inequity emanating from the San Jose ground zero of regional gentrification. But they need three votes to get stuff done and often enough those three votes have been infiltrated by free market financial Ferengi.

Part of the green separator, open space, UGB rationale is to preserve agricultural lands, which in the case of Sonoma Valley and County amounts to preserving a hybrid and evolving form of ag that we see as the wine-tourism-hospitality combine. The combine is hard at work to blur the lines between rural and urban as an internecine wine war unfolds between the urban core tasting room model and the rural Chateau event center model.

Preserving ag is in effect, preserving the current combine, a combine who’s motives and aggregate effects have been called into question by many. Will the green separators put some brakes on the urbanization and commodification of ag in rural areas? Preserving wildlife connectors is more compelling to me personally.

Back to housing: The subprime bubble also resulted in the loss of state redevelopment money that local governments used to pursue affordable housing options.  Yet even with redevelopment money in hand, all the City had to do was show enough land was potentially available for low cost housing. No developer was or is obligated to build low cost housing and frankly, none want to; they have to be made to do it as a condition of building market rate housing. Thus there is a large backlog of affordable housing capacity in the City that never got built.

Non-profit developers like Mid-Pen are a great option to balance the housing scales yet these outfits are contingent on government grants, and somehow while the region and county is awash with money, governments don’t have enough to share out. You got to wonder where all the money is going? The loss of redevelopment money appears to be a total blow to any further planning or fund generating creativity.

So, we don’t want private developers to build in the ag and open spaces that protect the environment and make the Sonoma County view shed so pleasant. We are concerned to preserve the environment and rural character. I can’t argue with that; everyone can enjoy pleasant surroundings and feel good about being good stewards of the land. But then developers are not doing anything inside the City for affordable housing either. So far, the City and county have not made bold moves to regain funding sources for the loss of redevelopment money from the state. Yes there are solutions, but where’s the beef?

Solutions? The following are ideas have been presented multiple times by the Sun Editorial Board:

  1. Raise the TOT (Transient Occupancy Tax) 2% (both city and county) and place those revenues in an affordable housing fund for land purchases, buyer subsidies or non-profit developer assistance.
  2. Dramatically increase commercial “housing impact fees” on new development and add those revenues to the affordable housing fund.
  3. Create an affordable housing “trust fund” to which donations are tax-deductible, and use those revenues to facilitate the creation of housing.
  4. Look into the ramifications of increasing the Real Estate Transfer Tax paid upon the sale of property, and if increased, place those revenues into the affordable housing fund.

Additional ideas: solicit development in Sonoma for 4 to 5 story affordable housing apartment buildings downtown; work for more non-profit developer partnerships that will use the above generated funds; get a Grocery Outlet and Trader Joes on 8th Street East so the people living in the new affordable housing don’t have to drive to the 101 corridor to shop.

From the news and through the grapevine, renting household after household in the Valley is being turned out as landlords look to spiff up and cash in on the rental rates boom. A homeowner can make a month’s mortgage in one or two days through a vacation rental. Where is the incentive to build or rent at rates that service wages here support? We have systemic housing troubles nationally, regional inequity in the stratosphere and also have the TID stoking the fires of gentrification while hapless residents and renters suck up the consequences. This is where we are.

The current over-priced housing situation is Exhibit A of why not to trust the market for fair social outcomes. This is why we need government action.

So what are renting citizens supposed to think here about green separators and UGBs? On one hand there is a fine enough movement to protect open space and on the other, urban spaces that are increasing in price by the day and show little evidence of the progressive planning that is supposed to save the Ecotopian day. Are these issues connected? Is questioning these green separators a nuanced project or simply playing into the hands of greedy developers? What can practically be done?

For renters there is nowhere to go and no hope in sight. Your damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Better hope you can stay in your apartment; if not you’re outta here. The fine pleasant rural CA character will not be the same in Vallejo, American Canyon or Lake County. Do they have UGBs and green separators there?  Probably not. Oh well, exporting troublesome problems will at least get them out of sight.

What we have is an elite Satanic mill stemming from Silicon Valley and the 1% in general that is cashing in on the green character of our region and marketing it as authentic small town life when in fact the aggregate systemic effect is that one, it’s increasingly a façade, two, the top dogs are running off with all the equity, and three hapless residents are left to cling to whatever quality of life they can find while the poor plain get run out of town.

The Valley servant class has no representation, no champions. Why should they even care about the effects of growth, CO2 footprint, water or sustainability? It is plain the system cares not for them and is content to chew them up and spit them out as collateral, disposable damage. High falutin’ ideals on one side and pure greed on the other, renters are checkmated by the whole system, period.

As with the drought and drawing down of Valley groundwater, that we are all in this together is a familiar refrain. We are not all in this together. The working class is being abandoned and all I hear from my officials is that there is not much we can do…. The larger world and national system is corrupt and rotten and needs fundamental change. A critical measure of sustainability is social justice and equity, which is in precious short supply in the Bay Area. Democracy has turned into flat out kleptocracy.

What renters get is palliative care from non-profit NGOs and no structural changes proposed because in many cases, government is in bed with the 1% whose goal is continued wealth extraction. This is not a rant; this is national fact from which we  are not regionally exempt. The issues of society’s low-rung stakeholders are non-issues for the power elite. That much is clear by Exhibit A, the housing situation alone. What we see in the end by many citizens is a profound alienation from all institutions: government, corporations, NGOs; they are all complicit in the current kleptocracy.

Greenbelt separators, UGB, affordable housing, sustainability? Working class renters are screwed no matter which way they turn. Yet I encourage the BOS to vote for the separators and strengthen them.

For the greenbelts and UGBs to pass, we need a commitment to seriously up the density of urban cores and government financial and economic support to make this happen. If government does not make this commitment then greenbelts and UGBs will indeed function as a green checkmate on affordable housing, as no lands will be available for such housing either inside or outside the City.

The only actor with the power to structurally alter the socio-econ contract and make affordable housing possible is the government. Government is the gatekeeper that regulates the excesses of the market and channels it to social benefit. Letting private foxes run free to guard the henhouse does not and will not work. What we need to see from government is the will to act, to take up the responsibility of elected office in the creation of an ethical society.

Oye; renter stakeholders for their part have to show up and say their piece. If you don’t show up, someone else will make the call for you. Hopefully Ecotopians can rally for more fundamental changes in the system as a whole, in whatever ways it takes. Come up short and fallible as we are, we’re still in the vanguard of the country. We’ve got good things, good people and good work to build on. We need the greenbelts and UGBs. We need infill, social and housing equity too; this has to be part of the deal or the “escape valve” of sub-urban housing shouldn’t be shut off.



4 thoughts on “Affordable Housing or Green Checkmate?

  1. Good job Fred of explaining the many arcane layers of gov’t. interaction at the various levels; federal, state, county and city. It reminds me of trying to rake leaves in a howling wind storm! I am presently embroiled in the planning stages of a soon to be “affordable” housing project at Broadway and Clay Streets. There seem to be so many players and schedules that actually knowing ahead of time what’s coming is proving to be quite frustrating and difficult. Somehow I/we will get through this maze and something will be built, but it won’t be enough and the arduous process will begin anew.
    Again, thank you for shedding light on the dynamics of this whole byzantine process.

  2. The Sonoma UGB does have a provision to push the boundary for affordable housing, or critical public services like a hospital. Lands adjacent to the city could be looked at for an affordable housing project. First get funding in place through city government actions, then contract with a non-profit developer like Mid-Pen to continue to address a serious community need.

  3. There are lands WITHIN the “city” boundaries which are available for affordable housing development. The 1st Street East across from the ballpark for instance. What’s that I hear? It’s not profitable?.. Tough. Maybe the new real estate developer players have a Vineyard or two which could be built on, since they are already consuming too much groundwater. Not to mention polluting creeks and vernal ponds, poisoning birds and bees ( and people) with chemicals including fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

  4. I have since come to find out that the Sonoma UGB provisions to push the edge are all but impossible to satisfy, and my current position in 8/18, is that the Sonoma UGB needs to be enlarged to accommodate more affordable housing.

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