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.
Housing march of folly
Sonoma County pre-fire was a national, top ten most unaffordable place in the country for housing. So was the city of Sonoma. Efforts to address this were stuck in familiar patterns some of which were:
- Dominance of the market by super-inflated market rate housing
- High inflation and cost of living caused by boosting of a luxury tourism market
- Not enough government-regulated, non-profit affordable housing
- Resistance by the powers that be to rent control and tenants’ rights
- Resistance to high density infill
- Areas to build hemmed in by UGBs and green separators
- Lack of adequate public transportation
Pretty much what we had in the North Bay, pre-fire, was people who had some measure of the California Dream, of rural-esque communities of character surrounded by farmland and open space, being squeezed by others who wanted the same thing, or who wanted to capitalize on it. Sprawl had been beaten back by the UGB movement, so housing speculation now took the form of high inflation, concentrated value in buildable areas. Real estate speculation in general followed in the form of wine event centers pushing the boundaries of acceptable development, and of vineyards pushing into everywhere at over $100,000 an acre.
The fact of the matter is that Sonoma County and Sonoma have become targets for high dollar, global, corporate, wine-tourism investors. Deflate that…
As the rest of the country rusted away or was dominated by bone-headed, backward red states, many saw California and its great climate and geography as the place to be, so they packed up their bags and moved to Beverly… Demographics…
Residential newcomers and workers have found they are not welcome at the party because of the multidimensional checkmate of price and limited space created by the above set factors. To get an entry ticket now-a-days, you need to be a millionaire. Lose your spot as a renter and you are gone, game over. This is trickle down hypothetical inclusion morphed into trickle out exclusion.
Post-fire, it seems that speculators, in the grand tradition of California, have lost no sleep, with rent gouging taking place, median home prices and rents going up at very high rates, Costa-Hawkins repeal (rent control) shot down by Santa Rosa/ North Coast state representative Jim Woods, and burnt properties being bought up to sell at higher prices. This enshrines the build, build, build cohort, as housings’ salvation, leaves current tenants hung out to dry, and augers poorly for future rent prices.
Marty Bennett, of North Bay Jobs with Justice has recently calculated that a living wage is now $28 an hour. The state-mandated raise to $15 an hour minimum wage, still years away, is paltry unless you are teen living at home, or an immigrant packed communally into a house or apartment.
Out of the post-disaster landscape quickly entered forces of unknown intent to “rebuild”, but for whose benefit and why? If there was already a bad housing crisis, how is that rebuilt? The intent is simply not clear, and the core actors’ track records and true motivations are legitimately suspect, from a non-monied liberal standpoint. The North Bay does need more housing, but that is not a rebuild. Efforts by government and private actors to streamline and do away with community-protecting regulations and housing-related climate plans can at once help some rebuild, but also be seen as a speculative coup d’état.
The coup is that build, build, build will be the only answer to address the incipient greed of landlords and speculators. Prices will never come down. Foxes are in the housing henhouse now. If a proportional-to-need amount of deed-restricted, non-profit built, area median income-focused housing gets built, then I could be wrong about all of this. If the lion’s share of the proportion of benefot goes to the 1%, liberal or not, well.
Sonoma County housing is starting to meet the definition of a tragedy, countervailing forces on an inevitable crash course to mutual ruin. Why? The bucolic lifestyle is going to be overrun either by high density infill or sprawl, and egalitarian ideals will be overrun in either case by powerful, inside player speculators. The fate of Sonoma and Sonoma County may be Carmel- and Marin-ification.
Of particular folly, is the determination to rebuild in an area already twice burned. This is like the Sisyphusian constant rebuild of coastal properties in the reoccurrring path of the ocean’s fury. Why are insurance rate payers forced to support this? Why should all be forced to assume this risk?
The sad part about it is that government, politicians, they seem to sbe ubject to and constantly vulnerable to the effects of big money that steer towards Marin County-type outcomes. The post fire landscape provides the perfect moral cover to speculators and their boosters. Big money is a constant Trojan Horse entering and threatening to enter into how county and city policy are made. One only need to look at the prime beneficiaries, and losers, to see whose values dominate. Only a very few politicians stand out as willing to speak against the tide of big money. The others talk a good game but at the end of the day, they sell out, which takes the form of unsatisfactory, mealy-mouthed explanations about having to deal with the reality of the status quo. Tell-it-like-it-is, speak truth to power poltiicians are exciting and compelling, but rare.
The following are a few quotes from Barbara Tuchman and her book The March of Folly, especially regarding rebuilding the twice-burned Fountain Grove area: “Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian’s statement about Phillip 2 of Spain, the surpassing woodenhead of all sovereigns: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”
“Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them was a primary folly. They were deaf to disaffection, blind to alternative ideas it gave rise to, blandly impervious to challenge, unconcerned by the dismay at their misconduct and the rising wrath at their misgovernment, fixed in refusal to change, almost stupidly stubborn in maintaining a corrupt system. They could not change it because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.
“More than patronage, the lure of power and status has bewitched men of all times and conditions, in comfortable circumstances no less than in needy.
“Crisis does not necessarily purge a system of folly; old habits and attitudes die hard.”
Maybe I am just now cumulatively disillusioned by Trump and America’s fall from whatever grace we had, possoble nuclear war, and by the coming global train wreck of climate change, by the failure of the collective community to balance luxury tourism boosting with social equity and residential quality of life. Of particular disappointment is the notion that we are in a liberal area of the country, yet we are still subject to the value-less vagaries of big money anyway. What the heck is liberal about that?
Maybe I just don’t get it. I am underestimating the politicians and the big developers; I’m too cynical, locked into my own pre-framed views that I can’t see outside of? I’m not in the loop and don’t know what has not yet been reported. I don’t know, maybe human nature has magically changed as the result one fire disaster. In spite of wanting to play, beung nice is part of it, but maybe I also have to stand up for what I think just rules ought to be. To quote Charles Barkley, “I could be wrong, but I doubt it.”
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Yes, I agree with most of what you have said….. It was back in the mid 1990’s that real estate offices began opening on the plaza in earnest. Soon prices soared… 2008 saw a short lived correction…..
It is a sad fate but Sonoma is now aspen, santa barbara, carmel by the sea and other high priced areas…..
We are not alone. Other areas of America have the same fate that are like Sonoma. If you want to find somewhere affordable consider moving to another area but not Seattle. Regular homes in north seattle now are over 1 million each….
sad but true…. good luck MR Allebach as the times are not a changing… they already changed….