Valley Forum: Housing is Sonoma’s most pressing challenge

Sustainable Sonoma hopes that by bringing together diverse thought leaders, the community can better find solutions to its most vexing problems.

DAVID MORELL, SONOMA ECOLOGY CENTER, January 6, 2020

Since the creation of Sonoma Ecology Center on Earth Day 1990 — 30 years ago — we have pursued our vision of a sustainable environment here in the Sonoma Valley. Our many successes in that regard have been hindered by ongoing challenges that impact our whole community. 

True sustainability requires fostering the interconnectedness of social, economic and environmental aspects of local life. When our whole community recognizes that social and economic success is tied to having a healthy, beautiful local environment, that environment is more likely to be enhanced and sustained. 

Over decades of Sonoma Ecology Center’s work, we discovered that most people want many of the same things for Sonoma Valley, though often for different reasons. Similarly, most people working toward various missions or mandates feel powerless to improve the fundamentals of our community. For Sonoma Valley to get where we all really want to go, we need to frame our big unsolved challenges as systemic, and work together toward solutions that bring multiple benefits, rather than meeting some goals at the expense of the others. That is the need that inspired the creation of Sustainable Sonoma.

When forming Sustainable Sonoma, the Sonoma Ecology Center counted on people loving this place enough to endure the discomfort of joining forces with non-traditional allies, if it means a real chance at solving major challenges that are otherwise too overwhelming for anyone to take on alone. We are gratified that so many stakeholders in the community indeed are ready to act together around this common ground, and are committed to taking Sustainable Sonoma’s novel approach to solutions.

Two weeks after the October 2017 fires, Sustainable Sonoma first convened its Council: people from about 30 organizations spanning health, business, schools, emergency response, social justice, environment, housing and viticulture. When leaders around that table described how the fires affected the people they serve and represent, housing was a common thread. 

Sustainable Sonoma’s 20 listening sessions in 2018 heard from community members of all kinds, asking what was most important to them about Sonoma Valley’s future. Again, housing and housing affordability was far and away the most pressing issue across the board, for business owners, workers, families, nonprofits and others.

Now, Sustainable Sonoma is bringing Sonoma Valley’s different sectors together to increase, improve and preserve housing that is affordable for people who live or work in the Valley, within already developed areas, to create diverse, safe, complete neighborhoods. If Sonoma Valley — all of us working together — transforms our housing future this way, we will create enormous social, economic and environmental benefits.

What’s in it for environmentalists? When Sonoma Valley achieves the goal stated in the previous paragraph, we will house our community without destroying hundreds of acres of open space. Infill development saves land, wildlife, views, trails and water. Just as important, if most of the people who work here could afford to live here, many fewer people would commute long distances, avoiding tons of climate-harming pollution each year. Newer homes are far more efficient in their use of water and fossil fuels, as are the smaller homes that today’s and tomorrow’s households prefer. From the Ecology Center’s point of view, these environmental wins probably can not be gained except through a cross-cutting coalition like Sustainable Sonoma.

The broader success of Sustainable Sonoma is that many other community interests beyond the environment – from youth services, to health services, to wine and business — also see that they can achieve their big goals better, by joining forces with their Sonoma Valley colleagues at the Sustainable Sonoma table. 

This is the latest in a short series of Valley Forum op-eds from various community leaders addressing the Sonoma Valley housing situation. David Morell is the President of the SEC Board of Directors.