One of the most significant challenges for low-income people is how fragmented and inconsistent housing services are. Legal Aid is the primary agency for legal defense, but cannot help residents find new housing, pay rental debts to stay in housing, or even usually mediate prior to legal action. Agencies like Catholic Charities, La Luz, and Friends In Sonoma Helping offer some of these services (and more), especially rental debt assistance, but struggle to consistently maintain wraparound services that can attack housing instability from multiple angles. Even entities that once had robust housing navigation, like Adult Protective Services, have had their funding cut for this purpose.

Sonoma Valley needs consistently funded “wraparound” rental housing services, whereby a person can access, through “one front door”, housing navigation, rental assistance, out-of-court dispute resolution/mediation, and an easy referral system to Legal Aid or other eviction defense counsel. A housing navigator who pairs local residents with existing housing options would go a long way to preventing homelessness by ensuring that people who are displaced, or need to move, can land on their feet without a gap in their housing. The wraparound model might also adopt a “risk-mitigation fund,” allowing local housing providers to tap into a pool of money that can compensate them if a “riskier” tenant ultimately does not pay rent or causes damage. The key is to offer multiple services through dedicated staff who build relationships with local elected officials, department heads, allied nonprofits, and housing providers. Petaluma People Services Center and  Catholic Charities have both come close to this model. Sonoma Valley could create the first regional model in the County that incorporates holistic housing strategies

  • Housing navigation services: 

    • Includes finding rooms, apartments, or homes that may be available to rent, or other programs such as government housing vouchers

    • help filling out highly complex applications and submitting them to property managers, property owners, or subsidy programs like Section 8. This includes deciding how to handle information about a household’s immigration status. Housing navigators should record the application fees charged to low-income renters, and the upfront costs charged by landlords (see strategy Rental Registry). These fees appear to be very high, and data could be the basis for a future campaign to limit fees.

    • Helping renters when managers or owners speak a language the renter doesn’t speak. Sonoma Valley is home to many people who speak a variety of Indigenous languages and for whom even Spanish is a difficult second language

    • help for low- or no-literacy renters, or people for whom digital technology is a challenge

    • A service not yet available in Sonoma Valley, that Catholic Charities has successfully pioneered, is master leasing: CC can “master lease” a multi-unit housing site from a landowner. As the only leasee, CC can create its own individual rental/lease agreements with multiple residents. In this structure, CC takes on the financial and legal liability for tenants who may have bad credit, be unable to pay upfront costs, have no tenant history, or be otherwise risky. Taking that liability away from the landowner can enable the landowner to say yes to renting to higher-risk, lower-income tenants.

  • When low-income people can’t pay their rent without compromising their ability to pay other essential expenses like health care, medication, clothing, shoes, and food, there are multiple hard-to-find possible programs that can write a check to help with rent. Most programs provide money only once, some only for “emergencies”, with the definition of “emergency” varying. 

    Rental assistance involves: help finding and deciding among which assistance providers to approach, help filling out and submitting applications especially when clients have low literacy or low tech skills, making a compelling argument for why they need help, tracking the status of their application, and receiving the assistance if they are unbanked or don’t have a physical address, paying out money to approved clients for rent, deposit, or related costs.

    Rental assistance programs should expand from one-time payments, to help households get back on a solid financial footing. Sonoma Valley should explore a program where eligible people receive a guaranteed amount for 4-6 months, with amounts decreasing each month on a predictable schedule. (Thanks to La Luz for this concept.)

  • Low-income people, and people with any type of immigration issue, are often at a disadvantage if their living situation is unsafe or unhealthy, because they cannot afford to alienate their landlord and replacement housing is difficult to find. Such people need assistance seeking resolution of problems, with their landlord. It is also generally in the best interest of landlords, especially small-time landlords who make up the majority of Sonoma Valley landlords, to retain their tenants instead of losing them, to maintain consistent rental revenue. There’s a spectrum of landlord-tenant negotiation services, from facilitating problem-solving conversations or bridging a language barrier, to formal mediation, to full legal action.

    Housing is a localized issue. People seeking help almost always start with local community-based organizations who are trusted throughout their sub-community. Because many nonprofits provide related and overlapping services in Sonoma Valley, this strategy required careful research and multiple interviews. Providers shared information such as:

    • What housing-related services are being offered now, by which organizations?

    • What’s working well? What’s not working? Which organizations have particular strengths in certain services?

    • What types of costs are involved? How much staff time do these activities require?

    • What would improve the overall housing services ecosystem in Sonoma Valley?

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