December 2003

Planning

Copyright by American Planning Association

My Holy Grail

A personal account of life, work and the search for housing in the Bay Area.

By Duane De Witt

When the twig broke next to my head, I snapped awake, even though I was exhausted. Instinctively I grabbed for the black shoulder bag I was using as a pillow and readied myself to swing it for protection.

At this time of night in Berkeley's People's Park, you had to be wary of thieves, or cops rousting you. But luckily it was just a young woman fumbling around in the dark, trying, like me, to find a place to rest. While I tried to find a more comfortable position on the ground, I thought back to my youth and how I loved to camp out. Those days were long gone now, and I was unhappy about being out in the elements on this cold autumn evening, with fog swirling and wind blowing off San Francisco Bay.

But it was better than being cramped in my car with all my belongings packed onto the roof. My mind wandered to the old westerns I used to watch on television. There was always a boarding house where a man passing through town could find a dry spot to sleep for a fair price.

Such is not the case today, at least not in California. Rooms rarely go for less than $50 a night these days. That is more than a day's pay for a person earning the current legal minimum wage here. There is also the problem of whether or not you could even find a room in the Bay Area; rooming houses, boarding houses, and single occupant residences are rare. Most have been demolished to make way for new hotels, shopping malls, and convention centers.

Homeless, not hopeless

How does a working stiff like me get into this predicament in the first place? Surprisingly, it is not hard in an area whose housing is among the most expensive in the U.S. Since my service in the Army in the mid 1970s, at the end of the Vietnam War, I have always been able to earn a basic living and provide for myself. Trained as a medic and respiratory therapist, I have usually been able to find enough work to rent a room and share expenses near the town where I grew up — in the north Bay Area.

But times began to change in the mid 1980s, during the recovery from the recession that occurred during the first Reagan administration.

By 2000, times were very good for some in Silicon Valley and parts of the San Francisco metropolitan area. But those good times had a down side for many others like myself, who constantly struggle to keep up with the rising costs of living.

While I was sleeping on the ground for lack of an affordable room on that chilly night in 2000, I at least had a small car where I could stay dry. Many others scattered around the park that night, plus countless other places throughout the Bay Area, and did not have that luxury.

I also had part-time work, so I had some income, though not nearly enough to rent my own apartment. Studio apartments and run-down, one-bedroom apartments were renting for at least $1,000 a month in the fall of 2000. With first and last month's rent, plus a cleaning deposit, you were looking at $3,000 just to get your foot in the door.

Housing had become so tight back then, with so many prospective renters competing for "bargain" units, that you would be lucky even to be called for a phone interview. And so there I was, on the ground.

Still, I had a plan. After repeated attempts to get into the University of California at Berkeley, I finally fought my way into the school as a transfer student. I was a third-year undergraduate during that fateful autumn of 2000. I was not going to give up that opportunity for the life of me, housing or no housing.

I decided to face whatever hardships came my way to earn that much needed bachelor's degree so I could compete for better paying work over the next 25 years. During my first semester years as an undergraduate at Berkeley, I lived off and on in People's Park for three months.

Double whammy

Being a member of the working poor is not a sin or disgrace; it is an unfortunate fact of life. For many, their work may turn that situation around — but then again, it may not. Working against the working poor are public policies that favor economic development over affordable housing.

In my view, "free market" approaches won't solve the housing crisis because builders want to build for customers who can pay top prices. Building rental housing is not nearly as lucrative as building 1,200-square-foot frame tract houses on 4,000-square-foot lots. In the Bay Area, such a house fetches $500,000.

Yes, many people in the Bay Area are paying half a million dollars for a "cracker box on a postage stamp lot," in the words of my departed grandfather, who is probably spinning in his grave over this turn of events.

During the 1930s, my grandfather bought a four-acre farm in Santa Rosa, 54 miles north of San Francisco, for $2,800. He sold the farm for a "fortune" of $30,000 in 1963. In its place, he bought a three-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot tract home for $13,500. I lived there with him until 1973, when I enlisted in the Army. Today that house, with a paint job and a new roof, would sell for over $300,000.

This seems ridiculous to me, but that is the nature of the current housing market in California.

Supply and demand

Right now I live in a small, one-bedroom unit in South Berkeley, next to the Oakland city limits. Gang killings and drive-by shootings are routine.

I receive a Section 8 housing voucher and live on student loans while studying in Berkeley's Graduate School of City and Regional Planning. There I focus on housing and community development topics, searching for a way to build the more than 50,000 additional affordable housing units that will be needed annually in California for the next 25 years as the population explodes to 50 million people.

California has had an affordable housing deficit for close to two decades, in my eyes, while our population has tripled from 11 million to 34 million, according to the state's demographic experts.

One solution is to build more affordable housing now, and to keep building it. Are city planners part of that solution? In my experience in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County, as in Berkeley and the East Bay, I fear the answer is no.

Santa Rosa (pop. 154,000, the county seat of Sonoma County) favors growth and new housing development, but not affordable housing. Almost a decade ago, housing advocates there (myself among them) pointed out the need for more affordable housing units, yet the city frequently turned down viable projects. Eight years ago, I helped a group of low-income senior citizens and military veterans save their mobile home park from destruction and replacement by a Home Depot. One Santa Rosa city council member worked with us, but I'm sorry to say the city staff acted as if they were taxpayer paid advocates for the developer.

Now the median price of new housing in Santa Rosa is $400,000, according to the California Association of Realtors. The Association of Bay Area Governments contends that the city has built only one-third of the 2,500 additional low-income housing units that ABAG says the city will need by 2006. At the same time, the city overbuilt its share of above moderate-income housing years ago.

A fight for the working stiff

Things are even worse for working people in the rest of Sonoma County, where the housing stock tends toward the mini-mansion variety suitable for wealthy retirees. According to newspaper reports, Sonoma County wine country is the fifth most expensive place to live in the nation, with a median housing price of $430,000. Folks who pick the grapes, landscape the yards, and clean the houses can't afford to live there.

To confront the lack of affordable housing in Sonoma County, several of us formed a Housing Advocacy Group and, in 1999, successfully sued the county for lacking a valid affordable housing component in the housing element of its general plan, as required by state law. When the county lost the lawsuit, it followed up by preparing a suitable housing element addressing where to site affordable housing in unincorporated areas. The court accepted this solution in 2001, and it was approved by the state.

Last year, the Housing Advocacy Group settled a lawsuit with Santa Rosa, obliging the city to comply with a state law requiring municipalities to identify sites where enough affordable housing could be built. This exercise is part of what every municipality must do to comply with its regional housing needs determination in the Bay Area.

After the city settled the lawsuit, it was allowed to claim its housing authority as a housing trust fund, which enabled it to seek funding from the state's $2.1 billion housing bond of 2002.

Will there be more affordable housing in Santa Rosa's future?

I certainly hope so. I am becoming a city planner because I am a dreamer. Like Ebenezer Howard, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jacob Riis, and many others, I believe that community planning for better growth can help solve current housing needs while making our communities better places for all citizens.

Duane De Witt is a first-year graduate student in the School of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.