At their annual goal setting meeting, the Sonoma City Council once again “reaffirmed its commitment to addressing housing affordability and availability in Sonoma.” For many years creating more affordable housing has been on the City Council’s list of goals, but not much has been done to further the effort. We don’t expect it to change much this year either.
A shortage of housing for low wage earners – the people who tend our yards, clean our homes, make beds in hotels, look after our children, repair our vehicles, wash restaurant dishes, etc. – is not a new problem; it’s been growing for years. Unfortunately, solutions are not. The biggest problem in affordable housing creation is a lack of money, and for all the lip service given to the issue, little in the way of funding its creation has happened.
Affordable housing used to be called “subsidized housing,” but that term fell into disfavor. Despite that, affordable housing still needs to be subsidized by the government or it doesn’t get built. Affordable housing developers, like Burbank Housing and Midpen Housing, create projects in communities that have contributed either land or money to make it happen. Sonoma hasn’t provided either. The most recent affordable project of 48 units on Broadway – Alta Madrone – was able to be built because the successor to the City’s Redevelopment Agency still owned the property and contributed it to the project. That’s the way creating that type of housing works; cities or counties must help subsidize projects.
The best tool the City has to help fund housing is its Housing Trust Fund, but money in that fund has only increased slowly. One percent of the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) collected by the city goes into the fund, about $500,000 per year, but when it comes to the cost of creating housing, it’s a drop in the bucket. That amount could increase substantially, but it would require the city to reallocate its spending – putting more toward housing than tourism – and that’s politically unpopular. Moreover, the City of Sonoma recently balanced its budget by enacting a half-percent sales tax increase, without which its General Fund was operating in a deficit position. The city is not flush with money to contribute to Affordable Housing, and that’s not going to change soon, either.
The city’s housing goals use plenty of encouraging words, like “implement, streamline, identify, monitor, prioritize, participate, and assess,” but the most important words are “create a funding plan and policy for use of the Housing Trust Fund.” We’ve been advocating for a real funding plan for years, but so far mostly words have resulted.
It doesn’t help that City Manager David Guhin is leaving for a bigger job with the County of Sonoma and that the City has to hire a new Finance Director. Historically, an interim City Manager plays the role of a placeholder while the recruitment process for the permanent City Manager happens. That might not be completed until the end of the year, making major changes in City budgeting unlikely. And so it is that another year will go by without any new project.
The City is entering year three of its eight-year housing element, and the State of California has set housing numbers that the City must meet. Unless things change and change quickly, Regional Housing Number Allocations are unlikely to be met.
If the City of Sonoma is truly committed to increasing Affordable Housing, it is going to have to increase funding for the Housing Trust Fund, and it is going to have to do that real soon.
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