Housing crisis hitting Petaluma school districts

The lack of affordable housing in Petaluma, called a crisis by some leaders, has forced working class families to move out of the area to cities with available housing options. As a consequence, school-aged children have been uprooted with their families, and local schools are dealing with dwindling enrollment, according to Petaluma’s deputy school superintendent, Jane Escobedo.

“We lost 220 kids last year because housing is so expensive their families were forced to move,” she said. “At McDowell Elementary School, we lost 100 kids when the Greenbriar Apartments closed down and then re-opened at higher rental prices. The lack of affordable housing in Petaluma is one of the factors in our schools’ declining enrollment.”

Steve Herrington, Superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education, said that the shortage of affordable housing is also impacting teacher recruitment as many educators are finding it difficult to live in the communities where they work.

“We have 8,000 teachers in Sonoma, 31 percent of whom are over the age of 55. They are earning a median income of $66,000 per year,” he said. “This is a recruitment problem, since too many of the younger teachers, who make far less then the median income when they start their careers, are priced out of the home and rental markets.”

Lack of availability

Petaluma Housing Coordinator Susan Castellucci issued a report to the City Council last month which showed a rental vacancy rate of 1.86 percent for Petaluma, essentially full occupancy. The report showed that while there were more than 3,000 rental units in the city, only 56 were available for rent. The average price in Petaluma for a one-bedroom apartment was more than $1,700 per month, while a three-bedroom unit averaged just under $2,300 per month.

“The numbers are pretty startling,” said Petaluma City Councilman David King. “We have a situation where the rents are too high for most low income people. We need more apartments, but there’s not a ton of space left to build within the city’s boundaries.”

The April report showed 14 apartment complexes or rental developments had subsidized units, which allows those who qualify to receive an amount equivalent to 30-percent of their adjusted gross income in financial assistance. On average, this meant subsidized monthly rents for apartments averaged around $800 per month. But of those 14 complexes, only three units were available, all at the Vintage Chateau apartments on North McDowell Boulevard.

“People are afraid to sell their homes, for fear that they will not be able to move into something of equal value,” said Brad Paul, deputy executive director for the association of bay area governments. “There is so much demand for housing in the Bay Area, yet I’ve heard statistics saying that 40 percent of single family homes are owned by a single occupant. That is usually an elderly person who can’t find a new place that will be equal to the home they own. That dries up the market for younger people wanting to purchase their first home.”

Senior housing key

Paul suggested that building more senior housing and assisted living facilities might be one path to opening up the housing market. He said local governments should make it easier for owners of single-family homes to subdivide them into apartments and 2nd-unit “inlaw” rentals. He also supported more aggressive “acquisition rehabilitation” programs on the part of local governments, where a city purchases dilapidated housing, repairs the homes and then puts them on the market for rent or sale to low-income families, usually with some financial subsidization by the local government.

“There are a number of things local governments can do, including using surplus land as a way to underwrite new housing,” Paul said. “Many school districts have surplus land. Can that be used to build housing for teachers? This is a question local governments can investigate.”

Market forces at play

Supervisor Susan Gorin said the financial crisis that began in 2008 hit the area housing market hard, and the key now is to figure out how to finance housing development.

“Look, we had a recession,” she said, adding that in the last seven years, Sonoma County has failed to build housing to keep pace with demand, according to regional housing numbers issued by the Association of Bay Area Governments.

“Over 15,000 units were approved, but only 5,000 units were constructed,” she said. “There are a number of reasons for this, but the six-year recession and credit market disruptions affected most of those developments. Other reasons include the dissolution of redevelopment affecting the construction of affordable housing by non-profit developers.”

No redevelopment

Redevelopment agencies, eliminated by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2011, allowed local governments to use funds set aside for housing, called “in lieu” funding, from redevelopment agencies. These dollars came from development projects that either agreed to build affordable housing or set aside money so cities could develop housing for low-income residents. When redevelopment agencies were eliminated, those funds eventually dried up.

“This ended the 20-percent set-aside public funds that used to subsidize low-income units,” Gorin said. “And as market rate housing failed to move forward, in lieu fees from those units failed to materialize.”

Gorin said the “most promising strategy moving forward” was to examine how to “jump-start the construction of already-approved” developments. During a recent North Bay housing summit in Petaluma, Gorin raised the issue of wages and jobs, saying the county needed to “examine mechanisms for increasing salaries and creating jobs” so that employees could afford to live in Sonoma County and the North Bay.

“Napa County has developed an employee housing loan assistance program, and perhaps this is something that might be embraced by employers and government to help our employees live in the communities they work,” she said.

She added that Sonoma County was “developing programs to retain and rehabilitate” the current housing stock.

“These programs include facade loan programs, rehabilitation loan programs and rent control for mobile home parks,” she said.

Other factors affect our housing stock include the practice of renting houses on the short-term, vacation rental market, she said.

Many local leaders have said building new housing will require increasing densities within current city boundaries, since “sprawl development” and elimination of greenbelts, urban growth boundaries and open spaces will not be tolerable to voters.

“We don’t want sprawl growth,” said King.

Living wage advocated

Gorin said “adequate land” was located within the urban growth boundaries of the cities in Sonoma County to provide housing for the next four years. But she reiterated that development of housing was not the sole answer to the problem. She said raising the salaries and wages of local employees was a necessary component to solving the problem. North Bay Labor Council Executive Director Lisa Maldonado agreed that wage stagnation played a critical factor in the crisis.

“You can’t build your way out of this crisis,” Maldonado said. “This is an affordability crisis.”

Maldonado said she worried that the building industry would “manipulate” the discussion of a housing shortage to try to get more projects approved, but not build until they saw an economic profit for developing new housing.

“There is a shortage of affordable units, and wages in this county are not keeping up with the cost of living,” said Maldonado. “Keep in mind that developers are concerned with making money, not solving homelessness or affordability in housing. I worry they are using this crises to make money.”