Last year, Director Beall led the passage of a bill to expand the scope of Valley Water to include affordable housing (I’m oversimplifying). This was in response to the post-Covid influx of families and individuals living in our waterways. I’ve had a long career in affordable housing and co-founded the County’s premier affordable housing nonprofit, SV@Home. I would relish the opportunity to figure out the appropriate way(s) a water district can partner with other agencies to help alleviate homelessness.
For almost 15 years, I worked for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, completing my tenure in 2015 as their Executive Vice President of Housing and Community Development. In that role, I oversaw the organization’s housing, transportation and land use policy and worked with cities to help get more affordable housing built, a frustrating endeavor due to slow permitting processes, complicated financing schemes, and the fact that perfect sites for affordable housing are a unicorn.
Fast forward to today and housing is even more unaffordable as is obvious by the number of people living outside. This problem is one that is going to take an all of the above solution. We need to build long term supportive affordable housing and in the interim, we need short term housing solutions. In order to do that, we have to find sites which is why it is important for public agencies, including the Water District, to look at their land assets to evaluate which sites could be appropriate locations upon which to house the ~6,000 people that need a roof over their head.
In my own neighborhood, we have a relatively new emergency interim housing community (EIHC) that has been up and running for about a year now. It is a “no barrier” facility that pulls from a small geographic radius in recognition of the fact that housing solutions, even short term, work best when people don’t move very far from where they were camped. Because it is a no barrier facility, there have been legitimate challenges with mixing different types of people in different stages of their lives. Some are high functioning individuals down on their luck, some will never be what we conventionally consider “successful”, and some are relearning life skills.
A specific example of how this gets translated into day-to-day operations is that parents who have been separated from their children may not have their kids visit the facility. Another example is that there are strict rules about allowing friends to visit, so strict that it means people loiter out front which upsets some existing residents. This also impacts the quality of life of residents at the EIHC because these rules make it hard to simply live life as a normal person.
As a part of the EIHC, a Community Advisory Council was formed. My participation on the CAC has given me a front row seat to a tumultuous process as the City, in an effort to move fast, has been learning on the fly how to work through these aforementioned issues. And, similar to many neighborhoods, we have experienced some frightening incidents, including two fires in the last 6 months that threatened homes (not related to the EIHC but the EIHC gets blamed). No one would contest that our EIHC started rockily and that as a result, the community lost trust in the City and the housing service provider. But with a lot of work and the attention of Councilmember Davis and the Mayor, things have improved and continue to. I also credit the community members who have engaged in the process with a constructive skepticism. That skepticism has pushed the City to do better more quickly.
Other communities, like near the Lelong site, are starting to go through a similar process (although the housing model is different and even more new to the City.) I was at the community meeting on Lelong and in conversations with a few folks, mentioned that given the experience of our EIHC and the CAC, peer-to-peer sharing across neighborhoods would be invaluable. That way those of us who have already lived through this kind of process can share some of the do’s/don’ts. It would be wonderful to see the lessons we learned be used by another community and vice versa.
I would also say that it has been a rewarding and fruitful experience for residents to be an intimate part of fleshing out the nuts and bolts of how the housing will work. I say that because, sadly, If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years at the Leadership Group going to community meetings it is that the views of residents are discounted. It is hard to do community engagement right, especially when people are mad and untrusting, but the reality is people who live in the area are often the best source of information. These issues are hard and the solutions are imperfect. This is why it is essential for constructive, solutions-oriented residents who understand that we all have a responsibility to solve these problems, to come together and figure it out.
Today, things in our neighborhood are good. We have organized joint events between surrounding residents and our new neighbors, including a coffee at Crema late last year where we had a jam packed social hour with home baked goods to share. We’ve also hosted crafting sessions together and have explored a job board where odd jobs in the community could be fulfilled by our new neighbors. It’s a work in progress and I’ve been honored to be a part.
So, as a Valley Water Director, what would I propose? First, like you all, I want our tax dollars to be spent well. Over the last three years, over $12 million was spent on trash pickup and encampment relocations. That treadmill of wasteful spending of our taxpayer dollars needs to stop. How? Build more housing that is affordable.
How do we do that?
We need land, we need money, and we need to speed up project delivery. If you’re interested in some of the ways in which projects get bogged down, you can read a piece I wrote here about Agrihood, an affordable housing project that took 24 years to build.
But again, what can and should the Water District do? The District is not a housing agency but it does have a role to play, namely following the lead of the nonprofits and governments for whom housing is the main function. As a Director, I would work with my colleagues to direct the District to:
1. The District owns a lot of land. When appropriate, based on Board developed policy, make sites available for temporary, interim, and permanent housing solutions. The District has already taken the first step on this by assessing its properties to understand which ones might be appropriate.
2. Begin/continue conversations with housing industry professionals to identify appropriate ways for the District to help, beyond land assets. Out of those conversations, create policy for the types of activities the District deems appropriate to prioritize and spend money on.
3. There is an amazing opportunity to support the creation of more affordable housing by supporting Proposition 5 on the November ballot. The Districts support and ultimate passage will mean that local housing bonds and public infrastructure projects will require a 55% vote instead of 2/3rds.
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