Affordable Housing

By Susan Gorin

Affordable Housing is a matter of fairness to our working people. It allows our adult children to live in our community, too.

Our supply of rental housing is being seriously eroded by the conversion of apartments into condominiums and mobile home parks into private lot ownership. Our seniors and people with low incomes and special needs are the most vulnerable to high housing costs. What is Santa Rosa doing to preserve our existing stock of affordable housing?

In January, 2005 our community was able to contact 2,232 homeless individuals within a 24-hour period. Although Santa Rosa has opened up two homeless shelters, providing 80 more beds, more needs to be done.

Action Plan for Our Future

Bring together all interest groups in Santa Rosa to craft fair and effective policies that would encourage housing for all income levels, and to also serve the needs of the homeless and special needs in Santa Rosa.

Proactive housing policies:

• Require that affordable housing be integrated in all developments over 5 units.

• Require that attached units pay an in-lieu fee, if they are above-moderate units.

• Adopt a commercial linkage fee (similar to that of Sebastopol, Rohnert Park and Sonoma County) to add to our affordable housing fund.

• Encourage affordable housing in the core areas of Santa Rosa so that people of low incomes can easily use transit or alternative forms of economical and efficient transportation.

• Adopt a Living Wage Ordinance for all city contracts and organizations receiving city subsidies to boost wages for workers.

• Work with Assemblymember Noreen Evans on her bill to provide workforce housing in our community.