>> So I remember growing up, actually with about two other families living in our one floor housing area.

>> People who make the community work can't afford to live here.

That we're losing our selves because of the high cost of housing.

>> I have a child who's a sophomore in college right now, and we're trying to figure out, you know, where she's going to land and whether or not the return ability is there for her to live independently.

>> Shelter is very fundamental to just being a human, being able to live in this world.

>> It's stressful.

How are people supposed to have community when they're stressed out?

Like, how are people supposed to think of the future when they're stressed out like that?

>> Home is everything.

If where you lay your head at night is causing you stress and making you broke.

Nothing else in your life can work.

>> It takes time to build the housing, but the laws that protect people today is important.

To put caps on.

What they have today is crucial.

So that's what I would start with.

>> Mobile home parks are super special because they are pretty much the only remaining kind of lower cost housing that requires no subsidy.

They just are cheaper.

>> I think they need to open their hearts and understand that not everybody is like them, that they have.

You know, we live in a mobile home because we can't afford a house.

It's too expensive.

>> But we can get consensus for proposing new development that's in our developed areas.

And we also have consensus for not just building new, but also protecting the people who live in low cost housing and the low cost housing itself.

>> There's a lot more in common than we realize, and that we are stronger when we work together.

>> I've lived and worked in Sonoma Valley for a long time.

I love this beautiful place and I care deeply about the people and the community here.

But I keep coming back to this same question who who gets to be part of its future?

And the people who teach our children, who care for our neighbors, who work in our businesses, who make this place feel like home.

They should be able to live here, too.

Our kids should be able to imagine adulting here and now.

I understand why people don't like change.

A new building can mean noise or more people on your block.

Those concerns are real.

But I also think all the time about the people who we don't see at those public meetings.

Someone who's working a shift or caring for a child, or a young person who's already given up on the idea of being able to afford to live here.

I want my community to be welcoming.

I want people who are striving to make a life here, to enjoy this gorgeous place as much as I do.

Our history is important.

It's part of who we are.

But for our community to have a future, we need others to be able to afford to make this their home also.

And I believe we can make room for both.

>> As a kid in Roseland, I knew what it meant to make room.

My parents, my sister and I shared one room and two beds.

Two other families lived under the same roof.

We made it work because we had to.

I remember how hard people worked.

I also remember the questions that followed us home.

Could we afford another year here?

Would someone need to take a second job?

Could we make space for a relative who needed somewhere to stay?

My dad eventually opened a small business, and our family was able to buy a home.

Then we lost it during the Great Recession and we became renters again.

I've learned how quickly a sense of security can change when you're always worried about keeping a roof over your head.

It's hard to imagine what comes next.

No one should live with the anxiety of not knowing what next month brings.

That's why I care so much about the families living here now.

I want the kids growing up in Roseland today to have more than a way to get by.

I want them to have a future they can picture right here.

I want them to envision a future they can build right here for their own kids.

>> I grew up in Sonoma County.

My family has been here for more than 100 years, and for a long time, I assumed that every family had the same chance that mine did to find a home, support themselves, and build a good life here.

As I got older, I realized how much I had taken for granted, and that's part of why I came back here after law school.

In my work now, I meet members of our community whose housing is at risk.

Some are being priced out.

Others have had devastating disruptions to their lives that affect their housing.

Still others do not even know why they are being asked to leave.

But across all cases, when people are afraid of losing their homes, their entire lives can become unstable.

I believe we need to build more homes.

I also believe we have to care for the people who are trying to stay in the homes they have today.

They cannot wait years for the housing that we hope to build.

This is a beautiful place to live.

I want the families who work here, who raise children here, who are just starting out here to have a real chance to call it home.

I once thought that was already true.

I still believe it can be.

>> If you if you're a place where people want to live, the price is going to have pretty decent upward pressure on in trend over time.

>> And it wasn't, you know, people worked very hard and it wasn't always pleasant, but people tried.

But you could also feel the desperation.

People are just trying to like, okay, we got to make this work.

We've got to make this work.

We got to make this work.

You got to take on the second job.

You got to cram another friend, a relative into the house.

We got to our landlord isn't great, but maybe we can just get by another year, you know, save enough and move elsewhere, buy a house somewhere else.

So people were always under pressure.

>> But it also is really a disaster for the local business community.

They cannot hire people.

There aren't people to hire.

And that's a problem environmentally.

Also, we have in the city of Sonoma, for example, there are for every five jobs in the city, only one of those workers lives locally.

>> And I organize with tenants across Sonoma County and unincorporated rural areas and in the cities.

And what I'm hearing from tenants, first and foremost is that the rent is too high, and that there are too many forces that are pushing them out of their home and threatening their right to a roof.

This looks like illegal rent increases.

This looks like illegal evictions.

It looks like extreme habitability issues where changes are not being made by the landlords.

And so what I'm hearing is that tenants are fed up.

And this myth that we've been given, that we have to build our way out of the crisis, isn't matching the lives of people.

>> Folks who, whether for even if for no fault of their own, they haven't been able to pay the rents.

Oftentimes those folks at least, you know, they can see sort of the displacement or the threat of displacement coming.

And you have other classes of tenants who are being evicted for no fault of their own, and sometimes for no designated reason at all.

And those folks just sometimes get hit with a ton of bricks, right?

Where it's that threat of you're going to lose your shelter within 60 days if you don't get out.

>> Let's think about students first.

Think about Sonoma State as just a microcosm of where students come to when they come to this area.

Santa Rosa Junior College is another place.

If we're the intention is for them to stay, then the hope is the training we give them provides them a career opportunity or career opportunities that then lead to incomes that allow them to buy homes here, or at least set roots here, in which they then have family formation and they have lives here.

You can make it as kind of a broader workforce economic, social development model.

>> Because I think the human cost of this towards families and people actually experiences.

A lot of people talk about it in dollars and cents.

They talk about it in ratio, they talk about it in percentages.

But like, where's the cost of the two family household?

Who has 3 or 4 kids in substandard educational facilities who just got their budget slashed again, you know, stress out of their mind with jobs that don't pay them enough to, to work there.

And then like they're told, actually there's no help for you or you have to wait a couple of years until we build something to maybe pay a little less on.

Where is that story?

You know, where is that being centered?

>> We do need more buildings that people can live in, and that means change.

That means noise.

It means dust.

It means somebody else parking near where you live.

And so any construction project generates opposition and construction projects like this one end up going to public meetings.

And unmistakably, there will be more people in the room coming to oppose it than to support it.

>> So if you are low income options are extremely limited.

It's a high cost of living area, right?

You are going to be basically locked out of the private housing market if you are on if you're extremely low income, which is to say that you are making less than 30% of the area median income.

These are folks that we think of as being on fixed incomes.

Oftentimes, they're reliant on Social Security checks.

They're reliant on disability checks, right?

These are folks for whom there is basically almost no option for housing at all.

Even the subsidized like tax credit housing is not often going to be affordable for for those people.

And then if you are undocumented or you're not a legal, you know, legal status in the United States, well, then anything that touches sort of a federal subsidy, you're basically systematically blocked from.

>> For a developer, one of the biggest concerns is whether or not the local political environment and the local municipality in which you intend to build is going to be a partner or a problem.

And, and what's been over the 25 years or so that I've been working off and on in communities, the biggest problem is really sort of trying to bridge the gap between the developer who's generally driven by profit, unless they're a nonprofit developer really focused on affordable housing, and the municipality that's facing a need for housing units, specifically here in the wake of the 2017 fires and the neighborhood issues around the type of housing that should come in.

>> You know, we know this is a huge issue for families with children, birth to five, and people are struggling and making compromises in their life just to afford housing.

It's just one of these expenses that absolutely tops out and causes enormous stress for families.

>> As America enters its 251st year, we're asking a question close to home can the people who make a community work still afford to live in it?

Tonight, three neighbors who know this issue in different ways will share what it takes to stay here and explore what we might change together.

First, we'll hear from each of them in their own words.

We've seen what housing pressure can do to a family, a workforce, and a community.

Estelle, you described the pressure inside a home when you don't know what next month will bring.

What do people who have secure housing most need to understand about what it feels like to live with that kind of housing uncertainty.

>> What people need to understand.

When you have uncertainty, you can't plan for the future.

You don't know what the next couple years are going to look like.

You don't know how your life is going to go.

You can't make the decisions that you need to make to ensure the quality of your own life and the quality of your family's life, and that takes a toll on people.

And that and people who have security should see that as something.

Everyone should have the right to have to plan their own futures, and not just for those who are lucky enough to feel and have security in their lives.

>> Pat, renters are facing rising costs, but small landlords are also facing rising insurance maintenance, repair.

What happens when both sides are feeling that squeeze?

>> Well, I think when both sides are feeling that squeeze and that squeeze is real, I do think that when we look at policy interventions, we have to think of what are the relative risks of these two groups.

Right.

And it's not to say that the mom and pop landlord who is being squeezed and feeling the rising costs, right, that that is not worthy of some sort of attention or concern.

But the tenant who is facing rising costs, who may not be able to afford to live here, that is an existential threat, right?

The landlord has fundamentally an investment interest in their property.

The tenant needs shelter.

And so when we're looking at how we're going to respond to this from a policy perspective, we do need to keep the relative interest that those two groups have and what it means for their own lives in perspective.

>> And Caitlin, you work with people of all differing perspectives and opinions.

There's a broad agreement that we need more housing.

But what are you seeing that keeps standing in the way of solutions?

>> Well, first of all, housing is really expensive to build, and we just have a sort of fundamental societal mismatch between what a lot of people are making or what their income is and what the cost of housing has become.

If you go back 40 years, housing was a lot cheaper.

It wasn't very good.

It burned down often.

It didn't.

It didn't keep you warm or dry all the time, but it was more affordable.

So now we sort of have swung to the opposite end.

Our housing is extremely expensive, and so it's slow to build.

So that's that's an obstacle.

And then we also have, especially here in this spectacular place where people move from all over the world to enjoy it the way they first saw it.

And so we have just an incredibly high resistance to change here.

And that's a major obstacle.

We have sort of a, a geographic area where whose mindset is, let's keep it the way it was.

And that just doesn't make room for the kind of turnover and dynamic that you need to have to have a functional community, right?

>> We're seeing people moving away.

We're seeing commuters going farther distances.

We're seeing students and young people who are choosing not to stay here.

So to your point, what does a community have to lose if the people who study here, who grow up here can't afford to stay here?

>> I like to speak on that.

>> I believe that a society that can't provide stability is always going to have people not having a sense of permanence or sense of home.

Everything becomes, for now, for this moment, they can't make plans for the future.

We're also saying to those people who do dream of staying here, you must meet this minimum threshold if you ever have a future here.

But what about the people who decided to become artists, who decided to become teachers?

People who decided to pursue careers in civil service?

We're saying you can't afford to live here.

Please go elsewhere.

So we can't, as a society, expect to have the complexity, the dynamism that we want to see.

If we don't make that a possibility.

Here.

>> Let me there are two, I think, social dynamics that we see, like all over our county that I think are housing issues fundamentally, even though they're not always connected to housing, and that is school closures and traffic.

Right.

And it's sort of like, no matter how comfortable you are, like how set, how far from you, right?

The housing crisis feels right.

You observe greater traffic, which occurs because people are having to live farther and farther away from their jobs in order to find an affordable place to live.

And we are constantly closing schools because families are not able to afford to live here or where we once had.

Families that were able to start their lives earlier, have 2 or 3 kids.

They're not having any kids at all.

They're having one kids.

As a result, you end up having to close the schools because we don't have the school age population and we get into these massive, just community like rending fights when we have to close schools because there's such an important part of our community's identity.

And the solution to those school closures is a solution that we did not take or did not access 30 years ago, when we should have been building housing for the families that we wanted to be living in these communities today.

>> And in my community in Sonoma Valley, you know, businesses cannot find staff.

There's they're a working person, can't afford to be there.

So it's really being seen, you know, and I'm coming at this from a cross-sector coalition, the entire spectrum of community leadership sees that we're sort of seeing the death of our community.

Like this issue can kill the future if we don't want just sort of retirement Disneyland for seniors.

We have to do something different.

We we have to we have to have starter homes.

We have to have lower rents.

We have to make it easier.

It's sort of tied also to these issues of making it easier to start a small business.

And we just have to embrace the dynamism of a growing community, even if even if our total numbers don't need to grow.

It's just that we need the freshness, the newness, the kids, you know, people.

One of the reasons that these school conversations are so heartbreaking is because those kids are the community's future.

And we have these whole neighborhoods now who don't have kids in them.

Nobody can afford to live there, who has kids.

And even if they can, they know their kids aren't coming back.

When they graduate high school, they're gone.

>> Right.

And to your point, we talked about in the video this idea of preserving the character of a community.

What does that mean?

The character of a community and who gets to define it?

>> This is a it's a it's a very deep question.

But some things that come to mind is, you know, a quality, the quality and the character of a community should be the values it represents.

And I believe a lot of good people see whole families.

They see places they can be happy in.

They can retire in places that they can embrace their whole lives is part of those values.

And they, they want to see that enacted.

And maybe they haven't found a way or the right path to have that represented in policy yet.

And if we're going to aspire to complete the values that these people have, we have to take action decisions.

That gets us there.

Because I know there are people who I grew up with, who left the county, who are not coming back because they became teachers.

They can't afford to live here.

They can't afford to have kids.

They can't buy a house here.

And worse, I think some of them went to school elsewhere.

They couldn't they can't find any place to move back to.

And then also, I've heard about people who's whose parents have become grandparents and they cannot get any of their kids or grandparents or grandkids to come back here because it's unaffordable.

So I think we need to address these serious issues.

>> Do you want to jump in, Pat?

>> Sure.

I mean, I think that a community is never in stasis, right?

There is no such thing as sort of like the golden age of like Sonoma County that we just like need to get back to, right?

We're always in flux and like we're always changing.

And the question is always, what is the community that we deserve to have today that we maybe are falling short of?

And how do we build that community for tomorrow?

And I think when you talk to people, right, and try to have them visualize sort of what are the qualities of a community that they that they remember the best parts about the community, that they sort of have this gilded image of in their head.

You know, you hear things like open storefronts, vibrant businesses, you know, laughing kids, full playgrounds, right?

And those are exactly the sort of things that require us to have affordable options for housing for the folks that are going to be working in those storefronts, starting those businesses, having and raising those families and those kids.

And that's something that we're falling short of today.

And if that's what we want for our community, that's we need to be taking these policy interventions in the housing realm so that we can get there somewhere in our future.

>> Two thoughts on that.

Who deserves to define right?

You were saying it's usually not the people who come to most public meetings.

And so there's a real sort of democracy.

Angle to this, that it shouldn't just be the usual suspects who get to decide.

It needs to be.

We kind of need to find ways to represent the people who aren't even here now, who've had to leave.

Their voices need to be in the room.

And then my second thought is that a lot of those great qualities that Patrick was just describing, they are created out of a certain level of density.

If you want people walking with their kids from the ice cream store to the hardware store, they need, those stores need to be close together.

They need to have walkable sidewalks and density.

In other words, just buildings being closer together or buildings being taller.

That is a positive thing to embrace.

I'm always struck by people who will oppose any construction project here, but they travel to Europe, say, where things are incredibly dense and you walk everywhere and it's fantastic.

And that's why they went there.

It's like, we need some of that, right?

>> People, people love their their Tuscan vacations, right?

And like something that is about like, you know, Tuscany as idyllic as it is, right?

As you have these like beautiful landscapes as countryside and you have highly, highly dense medieval cities.

I mean, you have 75, 000 people like living together on a hilltop in Siena or Assisi or one of these places.

Right.

And it's like those are built for historical reasons hundreds of years ago, right?

Those economic forces are not the same ones that we have today.

But it is to say that like, we can have our cake and eat it too, if we're courageous enough to like, build that society as we can have very dense communities where people can afford to live, right?

And we can preserve the green space and the beautiful natural environment around us.

>> And I concur with this point of view, like it's a false choice of we have to develop everywhere and expand everywhere, or we have to preserve the green space.

I don't think that's right.

We need to go up.

We need to go dense.

We need to build around transit and embrace mass transit and let people have a vibrant life.

>> Right.

And it brings up the question of we talk about a shortage of housing, and we talk about a shortage of affordable housing.

What are we short of?

Are we short of housing?

Are we short of affordable housing?

Is it a mix of both?

>> I would say top line.

It's it's both.

You know, we need more units in the in the area.

That has not been nearly enough housing built to meet the needs of the population that wants to be here.

But also we need affordable housing.

For example.

I know that this gets talked about a lot, like, how do we implement this?

And I think one of the ways we do that is, you know, having a human centric and housing first approach to, to these people, we're here to housing is meant to have people have community.

It's meant to have people have happiness, security, stability.

And we need to expand on that philosophy.

Like how do we empower more people to be here and feel participants?

>> Perhaps you have a thought on that.

>> I mean, I think Estelle is right.

We need we need both.

I think that what becomes challenging in the conversation is sometimes that they're, they're presented.

You say that you need both, but the market is providing for one.

Right?

The market is not at the rates that we would necessarily like to see or the rates that are like helpful in terms of lowering rents for everyone.

Right?

But the market is providing housing for a certain socioeconomic class that can't afford it with the market doesn't provide is the deeply affordable housing.

The market will basically never provide housing for the folks who are on fixed incomes who are very, very low income.

And so we need both.

And also, when we're looking at the policy interventions that we need, we actually do need to systematically try to create affordable housing, right?

The market is able to take care of this sector more easily on its own.

The policy interventions need to be for the folks who are most desperate for the housing, because that's the thing that the market will not and has not provided.

>> Yeah.

If you just drive around Sonoma County, you see these big, big houses up in the hills that, you know, have very few people in them.

So we have lots and lots and lots of bedrooms, but there's not enough housing for people who have to work for a living or who used to have to work for a living, and now they're retired and they're on a fixed income.

So like our, our coalition, our push is housing affordability.

It's not just housing.

It's but affordability applies to a lot of people.

Basically.

Now the situation is so extreme that if you're not a rich person, you probably have a housing problem, right?

>> And we're talking about these two sides of the conversation where we need housing, we need more affordable housing.

And Pat, you're confronted with people every day who don't have years to wait for this type of housing.

Where do these two pieces of the conversation come together?

And where is there still tension?

>> Well, it's just it's just a multi-pronged problem and it needs multiple solutions and it needs them implemented over decades.

We got it's been 40 years of under production that got us here.

So there is no one right answer.

It's not only build or only protect, it's it's, it's all of the above.

We certainly can't afford to let go the small amounts of lower cost housing that we still have.

>> Well.

>> I want to speak just like my experiences with people who already have housing right now, sometimes people who have low cost housing or affordable housing live in some pretty bad situations.

It may not always be a place where they have feel like they have any rights, any voice.

The tenant protection rights that exist don't apply to them.

And many people rent out of single family housing, which doesn't apply to them.

And they can't stand up to a landlord who is jacking up the rent, who is abusing them, who's talking down to them, who doesn't let them have rights, you know, where they even live.

And it's like, do this or you're gonna be kicked out on the street.

And especially when they have kids or they're concerned about what little they have, like, how are we supposed to give any real solutions to those people?

But I think robust tenant protections will also focus on having expedited, you know, permitting of like how we get building stuff built today and help match that also with conditioning of like, we're going to have, you know, people who are low income only pay a certain percentage of their income to this housing.

And that's the condition if you're going to build this housing here.

Now, these stuff like this helps make smooth the transition to having more housing and keeping we protect we have right now and give a pathway to in the short term.

>> I'll just drill down on one thing that Estelle said, which is that the majority position in Sonoma County, because of the kind of rental housing stock we have, which is to say that the majority of renters in Sonoma County live in single family detached homes.

What you think is like a classic house with four sides and a roof, right?

And as a result of that, those folks at the end of their a year term lease, presumably when they go month to month, they can be evicted at any time on 60 days notice for any reason or for no reason at all.

And that is usually pretty shocking and scandalous to people to recognize that the majority of tenants in Sonoma County can be evicted at any time for no reason at all.

And so when we talk about just cause and tenants tenant protections, it's this, in my opinion, bare minimum level of protection to ensure that no tenant in Sonoma County is being displaced without any reason, any legally justifiable reason.

Right.

>> We have heard a strong case for supporting current residents and making room for new neighbors.

Here are several attempts to do that.

When we return, I want to know which would work here, who would carry it and what it would cost.

>> These landlords would tell you I would never evict a tenant without a reason.

And so then why don't we just require it, that everyone has to have a reason in order to evict their tenants?

That is that person's shelter.

It seems like we should have a relatively high threshold and barrier before we put that person potentially out on the street.

>> So one of them is building new housing that people can afford.

And this is a great example of that.

Another is keeping a hold of the lower cost homes that we already have.

So this looks like, for example.

Re renewing subsidies that are on homes or apartments, or sometimes it can look like buying a whole small apartment complex and managing it as a nonprofit so that people can continue to live there who don't make a lot of money.

It's been really satisfying, actually, for me.

I've been working with these incredibly informed mobile home park residents, advocating for better policies at the city and at the county so that people can be secure.

For most people who live in mobile home parks, if they had to leave, there is no place for them to go.

They would be on relatives, couches or homeless because there's nothing there's nothing cheaper.

So it's really important that they be protected.

Obviously, a mobile home park owner needs to not lose money.

They're running a business, but it's a very strange kind of business because they're running a business that hosts hundreds of people's last home.

So that's that's an example of housing work that is not about construction.

It's about protection.

>> They told me what you need to do is a town council meeting in a couple of days.

You need to come to the town council meeting and speak to the town council in the mayor and let them know what's going on in evergreen, because we're not aware anything's going on.

So within a couple of weeks, I was at the town hall meeting, letting the mayor and the town council know exactly what was happening because they were not aware of it.

>> I see a pipeline to resident ownership as a real solution to keep the rents low.

I also see a solution of us ensuring that we cap the rents that we cannot live with rents being more than 5% a year.

Our our salaries are.

Incomes don't go up that much, so why should our rents go up that much?

So really putting in those protections that keep the rent lower just so that we can get afloat as neighbors, as as low income, working class folks?

>> I think any sort of conversation around developing open space has to also be done in conjunction with expanding on existing developments.

I know we could probably, like in other parts of the world, they and other models of housing, they build housing on top of businesses.

There's multi-use buildings, housing on the top, business on the bottom.

It's more effective, maybe taking existing domiciles and adding in, you know, making them multifamily operations, taking, you know, housing that is on the verge of being being lost to foreclosure could be one of those things that the county buys up or the cities buy up and keep in the land trust and turn those into multi multifamily housing.

I think that's really it's to go denser instead of going wider and also making sure because ultimately people want a safe place to live and they want to feel comfortable when they're there.

They want people talk all the time about how they like to live with their grandparents.

>> I think that would look like more affordable by design, housing that is geared for families with integrated play spaces, with integrated on care, on site child care that, you know, our city and county zoning and permitting would reflect how important it is to provide certain types of housing, walkable environments that are good for families with young children.

>> Oftentimes better for everyone is that if I can settle out a case where, you know, the tenants have the ability to get their feet under them, especially if they have the ability to stay, the landlord feels like they have some representations of how this is going to be, in their eyes, a better arrangement going forward.

I much prefer people to, you know, leave tenants and landlords feeling like they have an effective reset and an ability to communicate with sort of clear parameters going forward.

>> I want people to have hope again.

I want people to know there is a way to change things that's real and that you're not alone.

Like I organized with 150, 160 active members on a pretty regular basis, and we're always boosting each other up and we're helping each other out.

And this thing has become my community.

>> I think it's just a constant, a constant tension between protecting what's great about what we have versus making room for the new, the young, the lower income.

You really need both because you need the dynamic economy that younger and poorer people bring and more diverse people bring.

And then you also need to retain some feeling of community identity, like who are we?

And part of that is our history.

But part of that also has to be our future.

>> Caitlyn, you talked about protecting the housing we have, preserving what's still affordable and producing more.

If you could choose one area that you would see tangible growth within the next year, which one would you choose and why?

>> Well, honestly, I wouldn't.

We're working on all of them because it really has to be all of the above.

But one thing that I think will improve in the next year, and actually all of us here are working on this right now is making it harder to close mobile home parks.

That's something that there are policy options available to cities and counties in California.

That's a new thing that these are available.

And if cities and the county take this up, it means that mobile home parks really can only be closed if something utterly catastrophic happens, or if there is a change in use that would still provide lower cost housing.

And that's just really, really critical.

For example, in the city of Sonoma, there are three mobile home parks, and it's something like 8% of the city's population.

It's a very high percentage of the population.

And in all of the mobile home parks around the county, there are so many.

If people lost their housing in mobile home parks, they would have nowhere else to go.

There's nowhere cheaper.

So that's very important, very urgent, very timely and totally doable.

>> Right.

And in the vein of protecting the housing that we have.

Yeah.

Pat, you're working with a lot of people that are facing a lot more immediacy and they don't have time to wait.

What are some visions or ideas that you have for more immediate solutions?

>> So in addition to protecting mobile home parks, which I think is, is, is critical.

And I'm glad that Caitlyn mentioned that the just cause housing protections that I had mentioned earlier, I think are essential and I think should be a baseline protection for all tenants in Sonoma County, which is to say before you can get evicted, right?

The landlord needs to have a reason that is recognized as sufficient under the law to evict you.

And that might be the tenant is at fault for something for a lease violation.

And they're also what are called no fault, just cause reasons where the landlord is withdrawing the property from the rental market is moving in a close family member.

Right.

But at least we need to be making meeting that threshold before we're displacing somebody and taking away their shelter.

And the second policy intervention that would offer is just, I think we should have a rental registry, which is to say that we should know where the rental units are in this county, what the prevailing rents are that are being charged for them so that we can have an actual data tool to understand what are the policy interventions that we need to stabilize our housing going forward, because right now we are really flying blind in a lot of ways in terms of these policy interventions, because we don't have data on what the rental market actually looks like in Sonoma County, and the lived realities of the people who are most affected by it.

>> And Estelle, you spoke about unequal power dynamics between the ones who are making a lot of these housing decisions and the communities and the families that they're affecting.

What would meaningful community input look like?

>> Great question.

It would mean making sure that people who can actually are impacted by this crisis can make the meetings, but also have a direct way to express their voice in this process.

I think that if we're going to do right by the families and the people who need our help the most, we need to be able to implement it in a way that's very, very, very responsive to the urgent need to to have protections, to have affordability come through like rent caps come through like a percentages of like, you know, what's allowable to be charged to them.

I think having like a bigger voice in terms of like.

So a lot, a lot of times people are fundamentally unable to assert their rights.

And so they, they don't have what they feel like is a support system to get them there.

And so that's why we take the pieces of the tenant protections, we take the pieces of affordable housing, and we also like make sure that we prosecute people who are abusing them.

>> Right.

And this is something now that both you and Caitlin have brought up about, you know, a lot of these family members, these community members that might be affected are not maybe the ones always showing up to these meetings.

What are some ways to bring more voice to these public meetings?

>> In many ways, I mean, what has worked really well in the mobile home park community?

I mean, it still has a long way to go, I would say.

But just peer to peer education is really important.

People are signing away rights that they have because they don't know that they have them.

So we we see people kind of digging themselves into a deeper hole because they don't know what levers are available to them.

So that is really important.

I mean, honestly, also just, you know, local elections matter a lot, electing people who can understand what it's like to be a disempowered renter is really important.

And it really shouldn't be as hard a lift as it is because of it's traditional for business interests to oppose renter protections.

But renters are, are, are employees.

Like that's who makes businesses work in my community.

That shortage.

The shortage of affordable housing is a reason that businesses are going under all the time.

And, and so it we ought to be able to make that argument.

I actually think there ought to be more possibilities of making alliances between renters and business people.

It's the nature of the economy.

You need people who need to work in order to work, to work the jobs, to make the businesses run right.

>> I would even say it's like when she's talking about it's like building affordable housing.

And having people have rights gives people the ability to stay in their communities, and people know what the treatment is going to be.

They know how to plan, they know how to how to make make plans for the future, how to bring their families here, how to bring their kids here, how to develop their careers here.

And, you know, it's actually an investment for the businesses and the well-being and the prosperity of this county, both in cultural sense, the social sense and economic sense to empower having affordable housing.

This is not an either or.

This is this can be all of the above and have it be beautiful, multi-use.

It can be something you're proud of.

You point you look.

Come to this place.

It's such a great place to raise your kids.

It's so affordable.

You, you know, you treat people fairly here and we wouldn't you like to set up shop here and have your kids.

>> One of the things that I know in the intro to this segment is that we were talking about what are, what are the, what are the costs of these different reforms that might be proposed?

Right.

And a reframing that I think is important is, you know, what is the cost borne every day of us not having the community that we want to have?

Right.

What is the cost of the closed schools?

What is the cost of the extra miles driven to work?

What is the cost of having to, you know, go understaffed for months and months and months at different businesses because you can't find people to work there?

What is the cost of just not having this just, you know, kind of intangible feeling of vibrancy that you might have remembered from your community years ago.

You know, that is a cost that we bear every day.

So while certain policy interventions feel expensive, right?

Because there's a dollar amount attached to them, we are bearing the cost of not having the community that we deserve every day that we choose to live with it.

>> Yeah, the road system is expensive.

The education system is expensive.

We, we pay them because we know they are essential parts of having a functioning society.

So housing is the same people.

It's really easy to treat housing like a like a, just another commodity.

It is fundamentally different.

It is where people thrive or don't, right.

>> But when we talk about costs, you know, the difference between, you know, what a house might cost, even an affordable house and what a working family can afford to pay, there is a difference.

So who should be picking up that cost?

>> You know, it's, it's always it's one of these questions.

And I think for the scale of the crisis that we have, we need to also respond in scale.

Like one of the potential agents could be the government comes in with money.

For example, in Los Angeles, they have the L.A.

which is a tax on transfers of property over $5 million.

They get a percentage of that.

They're funding public housing.

They've got $1.2 billion in the last couple of years out of that.

That could be something we do, but it's never borne by the people who already have so little to pay for it.

And they can take that money and build either public housing or is dignified, is low income, or rather, it gets it gets people who need who need it the most help today.

But also when we work with developers, we condition them.

Coming in your house must be affordable.

You must meet these environmental requirements.

It must be high density, it must be these kind of things.

So we're able to keep people here, lower the cost by building more supply, you know, and it's, it's a, it's a, you know, we have to be a partner and work with where people are, but also know, recognize who has the wealth to afford to pay for these things.

And it's not the working class people who can barely afford to stay here.

>> And I think there are ways that we can all be active in reducing the costs of housing, right?

I mean, so much of what has kept housing from being built is a sort of protectionist mindset of our own housing or our own, the character of the neighborhood, right?

The value of our own asset.

Right.

And if we're willing to accept that housing for families is going to be built in our neighborhood, right?

And that we are actually on board with that, and we're showing up to support that.

That in and of itself lowers the costs of that development.

It also incentivizes the government to do what they can, because they know that something has popular approval to, you know, eliminate fees to make sure that permitting is expedited, right?

Whatever the local government's power is to get that housing built, it's a lot easier for them to do it when they have a populace that is actually encouraged and wants the housing affirmatively, and isn't trying to be a, a hurdle to any sort of housing being built because they're so scared of how that might change the neighborhood that they love.

>> We're we just launched a new organization in Sonoma Valley.

It's called Sonoma Valley Commons that is a nonprofit, community driven development entity, because no one is going to come in and save us.

We are far from the one on one highway.

We don't have the population density that attracts lots of government money, and we are going to be leveraging the power of our just our local networks, who we know, the landowners, we know, the people that we can, the opportunities we can hear about because we're on the ground in the community to encourage people to do modest things like building backyard cottages, eventually buying and taking over small apartment buildings and refurbishing them and renting them out at affordable rates and eventually maybe doing larger projects, even mixed use projects, converting a shopping center, you know, we don't need as much retail space as we used to.

Those are big places that are near to walkability and near to downtowns.

So that's one way that we're really taking the bull by the horns and trying to become our own developer.

And another solution that's out there is that there's going to be there is a giant housing bond on the ballot this in November.

So that's a solution right there.

Yes, it's expensive, but when we all pitch in, it becomes much cheaper.

That's that's the whole idea of social, the social investment.

>> And I don't think it has to be an either or thing, you know, yes, we have to provide supply that is in reach of people who live here.

But also, you know, developers want to come in and do certain things.

Like, I know in New York City, they just passed a voter measure that allowed them to do that.

Like they're able to do like 12, 13 districts now.

They have a rapid approval process.

It's based a lot off the Tokyo model, and the people are able to.

It's a quick reviews with significant community input.

Within 90 days of turning around and building new housing and different plots of land or redeveloping.

But again, with the conditioning of the government and saying, you will come in, you will have this affordable housing, you will use union labor, you will have tenant rights, you will have these things.

If you're going to make a buck, you're going to cap it in a reasonable way.

That recovers your costs without gouging people.

There's ways you can do both.

>> Right?

And as we're having these conversations tonight and we're watching these videos, what's something that has maybe changed your perspective on where the solution lies in this conversation?

On housing, on affordable housing, even if it's maybe not the place that you would start.

>> I mean, I, for my part, you know, I'm willing to and have, especially on production side stuff, right?

When we're producing more housing, especially affordable housing, that is going to meet the needs of, you know, folks who are lower income.

Like I've stood arm in arm with, you know, developers, right, who are looking for just, you know, the ability to get a project approved.

And it's ultimately a profit motive that is leading them to that project.

Right?

But it's sort of like if that is the way that like folks in this community are going to have affordable housing options.

And I hear what Estella saying, right, of like, we need to make sure that like our policy interventions are trying to prioritize the kinds of housing that are going to the people who are most in need and most impacted by the affordable housing crisis.

But I am not, from my part.

Right.

Afraid of the sort of like profit incentives that are often necessary to get this housing built.

And, you know, again, I'm willing to stand arm in arm on the production side.

As long as we are having housing, that is going to be actually affordable and help really make us a better community and a more equitable community.

Right.

>> I have just continued to be amazed at how the housing well, really, it's just that housing is everything.

You know, it is if you get if you can get housing right, it means that you have gotten kid kids lives, right?

You've gotten your your walkability, right, your transit right.

Getting housing right is a massive environmental win.

It's really a key that unlocks so many other issues.

And, and so what it means is that you can meet many, many agendas in, say, one project or one policy.

It just ramifies through, through all of society and makes a lot of things better.

At the same time.

>> She really hits on something that's really important.

You know, it's having a human first, people first, you know, perspective on these things.

You know, housing is a human right.

Housing fundamentally in the long term shouldn't be profit driven.

It should be something that we build because humans need it to live and we need it to build societies.

And but in the short term, you know, we have to deal with the reality that we live in.

Like, you know, developers aren't going to come spend the money.

They don't feel like they're going to profit, fine profit, but have rent caps, find percentages that make people feel a robust tenant protection rights so people know they can assert themselves and speak up, make sure it's, you know, the other side of it isn't really talked about in this conversation is making sure people have livable jobs.

Like, you know, they have jobs that they can actually afford to, to live here on, you know, on one side, we're like, we can't ask them to spend too much money or we can't afford, they only come in, they only spend, you know, a certain way.

But on the other side, it's like we're not having businesses pay their people enough, you know, recession, sorry, inflation has gone up drastically and people are still making the same 5%, you know, wage increase year after year if you got an increase at all.

Right.

>> So and Pat touched on this a little bit, but you know, we want more housing.

Yeah.

And we want, you know, to be able to know how it's built, where it is.

There's a lot of different requirements that come into play.

So what is one area that you might be willing to take a little bit of a step back on?

And what's something that you absolutely would not compromise on?

I'll throw that first to you.

Caitlyn.

>> Well, smaller.

I, I personally, I just feel like a lot of people live in these buildings that are so big, like, hello, are you there?

I'm doing the laundry.

It would be more sociable.

I feel like we would do better mental health wise if, if we kind of lived a little closer to the people that we live with.

So in a policy context, that means you and many jurisdictions have done this.

You reduce the minimum allowable size for a building.

You reduce the the setbacks that are needed from the edges of the property.

You reduce the minimum size of a lot.

You can make a lot more housing if you do that.

>> And I'd like to leave viewers with one more final thought from each of you.

What is one action you want our community to take next?

And what would make it possible for the people that call this place home?

Start with you, Pat.

>> So in terms of, you know, policy priority, I would say for, for my world, just cause housing protections, which I've mentioned, but I think in general, right, becoming a housing advocate in across all sectors and seeing, right, that we need to produce more housing, right?

We need to protect the people who are here and give them stronger rights to ensure that they can keep their housing and what affordable housing currently exists.

Right.

We have to, you know, make sure that it remains affordable and that these are sometimes different.

These are different ideas that are being made to trade off from each other, and they're not zero sum.

And we need to reject the narrative that they are zero sum.

>> Fundamentally, we need to center like whole families, whole communities, a whole people.

As part of this project, we, we need to have, as you were talking about, like tenant protections and people have the ability to live in a dignified place and it's affordable.

But, you know, people should take what they have in a walk away, you know, feeling they have a voice.

They're not alone.

They're not isolated.

Right?

They all have the ability to talk to their neighbors, to organize with each other to.

>> Of course, just in the concept of time.

Caitlin, if you want to just jump in with one last final thought.

>> Just I would urge people to open your mind like, these are just people who need a good place to be.

And they're just like you and me, and let's do it together.

>> I want to thank our panel for their willingness to describe what it means to call this place home, and how easily that can become uncertain.

Estelle reminded us what housing pressure feels like inside of a family.

Pat showed us why people at risk of losing a home cannot wait for solutions that take years.

And Caitlin asked what kind of community we become if the people who give it life can no longer afford to stay, they may not agree on every policy or on who should bear its costs, but the question they leave us with belongs to all of us.

How do we protect the neighbors who are here now, while making room for the neighbors who need a home next?

That conversation doesn't end tonight.

Thank you for joining us for Magnetic North.