California Forever CEO Jan Sramek talks about the project during a California Forever town hall meeting in Vallejo. (Chris Riley/Times-Herald)
A company’s plans to build a city-sized community from scratch in Solano County are leaving a series of open questions about what this project could mean for low-income people.
California Forever on Monday hosted the final installment of a series of town halls in almost every city in Solano County. Crowded, contentious and charged with emotion, these events have offered the public a chance to gain more information about California Forever before the company presents concrete plans in the form of a ballot initiative next month.
Despite these extensive, in-depth talks about priorities and goals for the proposed development, there’s still at least one major uncertainty.
Who would actually be able to live there?
California Forever has committed to building housing “designed for all levels of incomes.” It has also floated the idea of providing down-payment assistance programs to help people including teachers, police officers and construction workers buy homes.
“The principle we have is that the people who build the community and the people who work in it should be able to live there,” Sramek said in an interview.
At this point, however, the company has not committed to building workforce housing. It has not said how many housing units, if any, it will set aside for low-income people. And it has not yet presented a coherent picture of how the new community would affect the cost of living in Solano County’s existing cities.
These unanswered questions leave people on the front lines of housing equity projects unsure what to think but fearing for the worst.
“The biggest concern right now is that mismatch between what they think of as housing for residents of many different brackets, and the reality of people in poverty in Solano County,” said Shannon McCaffrey, the managing attorney for the Solano County office of Legal Services of Northern California.
Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, said, “If they want the construction workers who build the housing there to actually be able to live there, then they should be committing right off the bat to building workforce housing.”
California Forever Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf said low-cost housing is still on the table. However, the company’s focus is on “missing middle” housing: Medium-density homes at a medium price point.
“This is the type of housing that most cities in the Bay Area have the hardest time producing, so we think it’s a niche we can uniquely help serve, and deliver a lot of units that are affordable by design,” he said. “We are also having discussions about workforce housing with multiple stakeholders, as we try to balance out what we prioritize to reflect the desires of the community – between various competing priorities like creating workforce housing while also creating good paying jobs and also providing missing middle homes and downpayment assistance.”
The company said it will be releasing a paper on the topic of housing equity in the new year.
Will this raise rent?
The voice of Cristal Gallegos, senior organizer for the Vallejo Housing Justice Coalition, fills with pain as she speaks about the people she works with.
A woman living with three-foot-tall mushrooms in her apartment, her children hospitalized for breathing toxic air. A blind senior evicted over a bedbug infestation. A young father evicted for not being on the lease when his wife died.
She recalls the hours she spent reviewing paperwork with that father, trying to fight a legal inevitability.
“We cried together,” Gallegos said. “And he’s like, ‘I can’t believe you helped me. Nobody would help me.’”
Gallegos is deeply skeptical that a billionaire-backed company like California Forever will do anything but worsen the suffering of underserved communities. Fearing rent hikes and heightened income disparities, Gallegos’ sadness turns to anger when she speaks about the company’s plans.
“A fundamentally predatory move,” she calls them. She says she’s bracing for “a fight” trying to stop the project and protect Solano County’s most vulnerable people.
“For us, preserving and creating affordable housing is critical,” Gallegos said.
Housing experts, however, disagree over the likely impacts of California Forever’s project.
As California governments and developers struggle to solve a state-wide housing crisis, what kind of housing to build remains a core question. Debate continues over the exact roles that subsidized and market-rate housing play in meeting the needs of low-income people.
One thing everyone agrees on is that housing costs are generally governed by the law of supply and demand. Factors that make a community more livable – attracting high-paying industries, improving amenities, even cracking down on code enforcement – typically increase demand for housing in an area. This makes it more expensive to live there.
Building more homes, on the other hand, increases the supply of housing and lowers housing costs.
For people like Matt Regan, vice president of public policy at the Bay Area Council, this makes the needs of Solano County and the Bay Area as a whole obvious. For a region starved of homes that people can afford, constructing more housing, in Regan’s view, is almost always good.
“Anybody who’s preparing to build a substantial amount of new housing in the Bay Area, where housing is so desperately needed – natural, we’re going to support that,” he said.
Stephen Menendian, director of research at the Othering and Belonging Institute in Berkeley, doesn’t see it that way.
He sees low-, moderate- and high-income housing as separate “products.” Building more homes for middle-income people will make middle-income housing more affordable. But he said it will have little impact on low-income people’s housing costs.
“Unless you build overwhelming housing supply,” he said, “it might never filter down.”
Supporting vulnerable communities’ housing needs, in Menendian’s view, is not something that the free market tends to do.
“The job of affordable housing is not the job of developers in the market. It’s the job of government,” he said.
Menendian doesn’t have enough information to predict whether California Forever’s impacts on the supply of Solano County homes would outweigh its effect on the demand for local housing. But in general, he said, “tenants are basically always screwed when it comes to housing.”
Regan bristled when asked about Menendian’s claims.“I find those arguments nonsensical at best. I sometimes suspect the motives of the people who make them,” he said.
He compared reluctance around California Forever’s plans to “NIMBY” strategies in places like San Francisco, where he believes refusing to build more housing during the tech boom caused high-earning tech employees to snatch up homes. If a region fails to commit to development, “the people who suffer are not the wealthy.”
“When you choose not to build market rate for people who can afford market rate, you’re forcing them into competition with people lower down the income ladder,” Regan said.
He argued that building homes of almost any kind makes housing cheaper for everyone.
Meanwhile, Metcalf pointed out on behalf of California Forever that there is “broad agreement” that failing to build homes caused California’s housing crisis.
“We know that the status quo of not building enough is not working,” he said. “For families wanting affordable homes so they can stay in Solano instead of being forced out of state. For seniors wanting safe, walkable communities where they can live without having to drive. For small businesses needing economic growth to thrive.
“We are proposing to try a new strategy, to bring a new tool to the problem of providing homes that everyday Californians can afford.”
‘From all walks of life’
California Forever’s current lack of commitment to homes for low-income communities doesn’t just raise economic questions. It also raises legal ones.
Under the federal Fair Housing Act, Solano County has an obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing” – that is, to contribute to overcoming patterns of segregation and disparities in opportunities. In McCaffrey’s view, California Forever isn’t on track to do this.
“If they were to propose a situation where there would be, basically, an entire new city … and none of that housing is going to be restricted, affordable or otherwise guaranteed to be affordable for low- and extremely low-income people, that would have a disparate impact,” she said.
The down-payment assistance plan could be a boon to middle-income people, McCaffrey admitted. But she questions whether equity advocates and California Forever mean the same thing by the word “affordable.”
“The type of language they’re using when they talk about affordable housing, really to me is moreso talking about the needs of middle-class families or mid-income families,” McCaffrey said.
Even a studio at market rates is not affordable for most low-income individuals, let alone low-income families.
Additionally, McCaffrey took issue with Sramek’s commitment to building housing for the people who build and work in the new development. She called this approach “very ablest” and “exclusionary of individuals with disabilities,” who are often on fixed incomes and unable to work.
At Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, Peattie raised concerns about what kinds of jobs this project would attract. One of her worst fears would be the company building a tech campus.
“That is going to be exactly how people get driven out of Solano County,” she said.
California Forever has said that it is attempting to draw in industries “that build on existing strengths in Solano County,” such as renewable energy; agriculture technology; and defense, aerospace and advanced manufacturing.
“What we are trying to do is build a community with a full range of people and a full range of jobs,” Metcalf said. “The idea is to provide the option of a walkable, safe community that people from all walks of life can afford.”
Peattie ultimately reserved judgment but warned that if the company focuses too much on high-paying jobs and too little on current Solano County residents, “that’s going to cause a ripple effect.”
“It could be that it’s a good thing. It’s just, I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t ultimately weigh in on whether this particular effort is going to be good for the area or disastrous for the area.”
What kind of housing gets built, McCaffrey said, matters immensely.
“Housing is good for the needs, but only if it’s intentional and is actually looking at the needs of all parts of the community,” she said.
