Sonoma’s green checkmate

The Joe Rodota trail homeless situation has revealed an ugly truth: everyone professes sympathy but no one wants the homeless anywhere near them. Unfortunately, this same pattern applies to low-income Affordable Housing, the last rung on the ladder before homelessness.

While there are other housing remedies, deed-restricted, high-density Affordable Housing, built by non-profit developers, is the only housing prescription that delivers anything close to the numbers of units needed to seriously address our Affordable Housing crisis. Affordable Housing with capital letters means it is deed-restricted, and dedicated to people who make less than the area median income (AMI). In Sonoma County, those making below 80% AMI have a heavy housing cost burden.

 If we are to include workers in a region where low-wage work is predominant, and we are to move forward from where we are now, Affordable Housing is a necessary provision of social goods. It has to be created, or we end up more and more in a bifurcated society of haves and have-nots. This is not “growth;” it’s clawing back the already displaced. 

Furthermore, if we are to take seriously the negative effects of our collective use of, and demand for fossil fuel energy, people need to live where they work. Each community has to house the workers that keep it all going. This much is agreed upon; we’re all sympathetic, right?

How does this relate to Sonoma’s urban growth boundary (UGB) ordinance, and what version of it may come up for voter authorization next November? It relates in a number of ways. First, let’s be clear that any municipal boundary is an arbitrary line. There is no God-given truth to one line or another; these are planning preferences, put in place by particular interest groups.

In the case of the Sonoma UGB, one interest group led by Greenbelt Alliance and a few weighty locals prefers to keep the exact same UGB in place, for a total time period of 40 to 50 years. These actors have created a narrative and regulatory framework that I call the Green Checkmate. The Green Checkmate amounts to a situation where environmentalists insist nothing can happen at UGB edges, and small town character NIMBYs ensure that nothing happens inside the boundary. This Green Checkmate is powerful voodoo.

The intransigence of coastal California Green Checkmate actors has precipitated a severe state legislature reaction to the state’s housing crisis. New laws now seek to break down the hegemony of too much local control, where all flavors of NIMBYism have stymied market rate housing and commercial development, but ironically, also prevented the creation of enough workforce Affordable Housing. 

If it’s really true that all are sympathetic to the have-nots, but no one wants necessary Affordable Housing anywhere near them, in Sonoma how will that jibe with the Green Checkmate UGB plan to put every housing option on West Napa Street? Congestion anybody? Will Sonoma be able to simply rezone the Safeway parking lot, change a few development codes, and magically the market will make Affordable Housing? Not likely. No nonprofit-built Affordable Housing scenarios, i.e., what is really needed, are realistic on West Napa Street.   

This is the housing scenario local voters face by keeping the same UGB ordinance in place. Housing and a UGB ordinance are related. How? Because the Green Checkmate option forces all housing to West Napa Street. It’s the same exact pattern that put the homeless at Los Guilicos: everyone of influence pulls out all the stops to push away any options near them. West Napa Street is the lowest common denominator, it’s Sonoma’s Los Guilicos. Green Checkmate.

A reasonable remedy here is to have a new UGB ordinance, with a few strategic language changes to allow more Affordable projects-only at city boundary edges. In a two-square mile town, strategic, Affordable-only edge additions are infill, and will account for the ugly truth that you can only get a needed Affordable Housing project where one, the land costs less, and two, there are not enough NIMBYs to stop it. We all want to help, right? Well, let’s help by creating the best chances for the housing we all say we want and support. 

Fact: current UGB ordinance language makes edge additions, even for 100% Affordable Housing, near impossible, as illustrated by Green Checkmate opposition to the erstwhile Habitat for Humanity possible project on 285 Napa Road. 

The pragmatic path forward is to have a supportive city staff and three council votes bold enough to stand up to Green Checkmate actors, endorsing a UGB ordinance ballot alternative with a few language changes that make necessary Affordable infill projects more likely.