Give Valley residents what they need to survive crisis
The Sonoma Valley Housing Group believes every effort should be made to provide every individual and family in the Valley what they need to survive this crisis.
We commend the efforts being made by local groups to do so. We encourage the Valley’s wealthy to dig deep and contribute. But as the crisis lengthens, these efforts may well fall short. We call on government — local, state, and national — to guarantee our basic needs.
If the federal government can spend trillions of dollars to keep corporate America afloat, it can spend trillions to keep flesh-and-blood, Main Street Americans fed, housed, educated, and in good health.
All of us are now appreciating and celebrating the everyday workers, often poorly paid, who do — and have always done — the actual work that keeps us going. In the Valley, many of these workers are Latino and many are undocumented — unable to access the jobless benefits their payroll deductions pay for.
Making sure these hardworking people are taken care of makes for a healthy community. But doing so takes an extraordinary reaching out, and is also best accomplished by including them in decision-making. It’s not good enough that resources be made available, the most vulnerable need help in accessing them.
What does all this mean practically?
Where there is need, rents and mortgages should be paid from community or government funds. So should the upcoming property taxes, car payments, phone payments, utilities — the basic bills that families living paycheck to paycheck can’t meet while sheltering in place.
We know local funds may run out before federal funds become available (if they do). In that case, rents, mortgages, and other payments should be cancelled outright and forgiven, right up the line, including restaurants and other small businesses. We note that a bill to do that is currently in the New York state legislature. If it can be done there, it can be done here.
Is there a silver lining to all this? The horrendous crisis gives us an opportunity to truly shine as a community — to right old wrongs, up our game, and come out of it with unity and love. We think that that is already under way.
— Dave Ransom, The Sonoma Valley Housing Group
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What about the homeless? We need to get them sheltered in place. Can we put them in public buildings such as Veterans Hall. They are vulnerable and with parks closed they are spread through the community making then susceptible to the virus.