In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots, intensifying global conflicts and a pandemic that killed millions, perhaps your food was the last thing you felt you could control. Grabbing a paper bag of pristine chanterelles at the farmer’s market might have felt like the least fraught thing a person could do.
That was until January, when a shooting spree at two mushroom farms in the seemingly idyllic seaside town of Half Moon Bay left seven people dead and a community reeling. Prosecutors said the man facing murder charges was a disgruntled worker who had been living with co-workers in derelict conditions on one of the farms.
The shootings exposed to the world what local advocates have long understood: After decades of obstructionism by local communities, decent homes for those who cultivate the nation’s food supply were the exception, not the rule, in San Mateo County.
With the eyes of the world upon them, Gov. Gavin Newsom and local officials vowed action. In one of the most NIMBY communities in America, the struggle to build affordable housing suddenly received much-needed momentum. Survivors of the massacre were hustled into Airbnbs for the rest of the year, away from the deplorable housing conditions exposed in crime scene photos. The local Farmworker Advisory Commission has continued to advocate for workers, and at a March 8 meeting, county officials assured the members that they were committed to building long-term affordable housing solutions.
At that meeting, county Supervisor Ray Mueller championed a new task force empowered to inspect the livability of worker housing at area farms and hold employers accountable for mistreatment.
Now, six months after the shootings, has the problem been fixed? Can you go back to feeling OK about mushrooms, if not the world?
There has certainly been progress worth celebrating. In June, California’s Department of Housing and Community Development awarded $5 million to Half Moon Bay to develop housing that farmworkers could live in and eventually own. Of that amount, the county allocated $3.2 million to Half Moon Bay to build up to 50 manufactured homes for farmworkers at a city-owned property on Stone Pine Road, including some specifically for people displaced by the January shootings.
Because of the emergency situation, the county has been able to expedite the process of building affordable housing, said San Mateo Assistant County Executive Iliana Rodriguez. Normally, a housing development would take years to complete; she predicts that the Stone Pine Road project will be move-in ready within 18 months.
New state laws, if passed, could help speed developments like this along even further. San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB423 would streamline the building of affordable housing, even in coastal communities like Half Moon Bay, while also maintaining strict environmental and labor standards. Such projects would be exempted from the California Environmental Quality Act, the law that Gov. Newsom recently panned as “broken,” allowing the state to be “held hostage by NIMBYs” — though the governor still hasn’t actually done anything substantial to fix the problem.
Things sound hopeful, for now. If nothing else, grinchy homeowners living in multimillion-dollar houses might have a harder time reconciling their worries about declining property values with images of families stuffed into campers and glorified storage sheds, struggling to live without heat and running water.
But the root causes of the region’s housing insecurity remain to be addressed.
The elephant in the room is San Mateo County’s eight-year housing plan — its housing element — for unincorporated communities. Among other problems, the state’s latest review of the proposal called out the absence of meaningful solutions for racial segregation in the county, including policies that could make richer, whiter neighborhoods more inclusive — especially for the immigrant farmworkers who feed them. While Half Moon Bay has gotten a lot of attention, unincorporated rural communities like Pescadero and La Honda have critical housing needs that are still being overlooked, says Hyun-mi Kim, rural public policy director of the community resource center Puente de la Costa Sur.
Unfortunately, the farmworker housing task force has been suddenly put on a two-week pause. Via email, Mueller said it was to halt “unnecessary evictions” from safe, but unpermitted, homes — a reasonable concern.
But there might be more complicated motives at play here.
At a July 25 public meeting, Patrick Horn, a member of the Pescadero Municipal Advisory Council, said that “community members” objected to the housing inspections as unconstitutional intrusions onto farmers’ private property. (Somehow, I doubt it was farmworkers protesting.) Though Mueller’s spokesperson said that he is committed to finishing the inspections, the fact that a key oversight body created in response to a deadly shooting can be so easily derailed underlines who really holds power in the region.
Farmworker advocates remain concerned about the effectiveness of the county’s solutions. Kim told me that farmworkers, who are largely undocumented immigrants, haven’t gotten straight answers regarding whether or not they’re eligible for home ownership programs like the one in progress at Stone Pine Road.
“For the vast majority of farmworkers, not having legal status is one of the greatest barriers they face,” Kim said, “and that’s the question I’m being asked by a lot of community members.”
Kim said there’s a lack of optimism among the farmworkers she’s spoken to — many of whom are sick of promises being made in the heat of the moment, then forgotten.
The mushroom question probably seems flippant compared to the bigger issues at play here. But it also crystallizes the cognitive dissonance presented by so many of the beautiful, delicious things on our grocery shelves. Can you block out those terrible images? Should you? Doing that is easy — and maybe that’s been the problem all along.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
