Late last year, I was approached by the leader of Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful’s Deb Kramer. Deb is your typical nonprofit leader - committed, mission driven, and hard working. The name of the organization is descriptive of what they do, yet Deb has expressed frustration. That frustration is borne out of the fact that she can’t focus on the real work she would like to lead, to truly restore Coyote Creek to an incredible ecosystem. Why? That work is bogged down by the fact that our society has created a community and economy that leaves many people unable to afford housing. As a result folks live in our waterways and she, with teams of wonderful volunteers, (probably many of you!) spends an inordinate amount of time on creek cleanups.
(That, by the way, is how Deb and I originally met as our organizations often partnered together to clean up the creeks and provide water education. You can learn more about those creek cleanups, called Wheels and Waterways, at SVBC led by Eleni Jacobson, SVBC's Program Manager who is also a graduate of the District's Water Ambassador program, as am I!)
Creek cleanups are not why Deb got into this line of work yet that’s what her organization now does. Her dilemma reminded me exactly of the dilemma I faced as the leader of the Bike Coalition and it relates directly to the dilemma now faced by the District.
This is a Board level question to answer. Given my experience working in housing for 15 years and my experience at the Bike Coalition grappling with this question, it is exactly the kind of issue I would like to be a part of resolving if you elect me to serve as your Water District Director.
The question is: What do you do when an issue not core to your work impedes your work.
Bikes and Trail Quality
For the Bike Coalition, the quality of trails became a huge issue during Covid, an issue that remains. Daily riders complained that the amount of broken glass, trash, offleash dogs and towards the end of Covid, cars, made the trails an unpleasant and unsafe-feeling place to be. Yes, some even were chased and bitten by dogs. And flat tires due to glass are no fun. (For the car drivers out there, imagine having to fix a flat tire on your car once a month. It’s no fun.)
So, what does a bike coalition do? It is not a housing organization so what is the appropriate role? The same question is now being faced by the Water District and the same question is being faced by Deb at Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful.
In the case of the Bike Coalition, you can read about what we did here. But in short, we first helped the thousands of SVBC members understand the problem and why it existed. We then provided tangible ways for people who ride bikes to help solve the problem outside of the Bike Coalition, namely that if/when there’s proposal for affordable housing near you, show up with your helmet on and bike bell and be a cheerleader for it. We also encouraged our membership to support the various funding measures for housing over the years, like Measure E and now the Regional Measure 4. We sat down with members of the unhoused community to ask how we might help. (The response was to help get them dumpsters so they could properly dispose of trash, which, apparently is easier said than done.)
On top of all this and most fitting for SVBC was that instead of sitting back and complaining about the trails being dirty, we created programs to do trails maintenance and creek cleanups, which became one of the many ways that I have worked with the Water District.
So, even though SVBC is not a housing organization, we recognized that just staying in our lane and asking someone else to take care of the issue was not appropriate. And we didn’t have to become a housing organization or move away from our core mission to play an appropriate role.
The Water District and Housing
In the case of the Water District, the same issues exists. District staff is actually in the waterways doing critical work and is hindered from that work due to those who are struggling to make ends meet camping in the creeks. Creek restoration projects that have been paid for with your tax dollars have been uprooted and destroyed. Many of these types of projects also serve the purpose as CEQA mitigation measures for environmental damage caused by other District projects. And the refuse washing into our streams goes against one of the District’s core functions, making sure the water is clean for the fishies and ecosystem.
Last year, the legislature passed a bill expanding the Water District’s scope and allowing it to spend District resources on housing. Now, the Board should move forward with further defining exactly how that will take shape. I would relish the opportunity to bring my years of experience in housing to this conversation and have outlined some ways of moving forward below. I also want to say that we should not overcomplicate things. We don’t need new ideas or new layers of bureaucracy. We need land, we need money, and we need people who can implement.
Before you leave, I wanted to draw your attention to other pieces I have written on this topic over the years. One is a history of why and how homelessness, for so long was not a public policy priority and the other is a history of Agrihood, an affordable housing project that took 24 years to build. I have been an intimate part of both and both pieces are intended to help people understand the reasons it takes so long to build housing so we can then identify the choke points and change them.
But again, what can and should the Water District do, especially since its role is to make sure that we all have clean, safe, water? 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 someone who has experience navigating exactly this question, I would work with my colleagues in the following ways:
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, especially since we're spending millions of dollars on encampment sweeps. On that, the District has a housing “summit” scheduled later this year. That summit should be used more as a study session for the staff and Board in order to develop policy and priorities for how to engage, (especially since the last thing that everyone in the housing world wants is to go to another summit when they just need help doing the work that they know how to do).
3. There is an amazing opportunity to support the creation of more affordable housing and more by supporting Proposition 5 on the November ballot. The support of the District and passage of the measure will make it easier to pass housing measures in the future in addition to other public infrastructure.
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