Home
A home is the outcome that a housing unit can create. Everyone deserves a safe, healthy, functioning home, a place where they can have privacy, be protected from the weather, and sleep.
Housing, Housing Unit, or Dwelling Unit
These are terms for the constructed space where a household of any size makes its home. A housing unit may share walls with other homes, as in an apartment building, condo, duplex, or fourplex, or be free-standing as in a single-family home, cottage, cabin, or mobilehome, or be on wheels as in an RV or travel trailer. It may be paid for through rent, lease, or a mortgage.
Sonoma Valley
There is no consistent government-sanctioned geographic area called Sonoma Valley. Sonoma Valley Collaborative defines Sonoma Valley using the boundaries of the 166-square-mile Sonoma Creek watershed, because when you look up from most places in Sonoma Valley, your view is bounded by the hills that form the basin of the watershed. The Mayacamas Mountains are on the east, with Napa Valley on the other side. The long ridge of Sonoma Mountain is on the west, with Rohnert Park on the other side. This visual container defines our sense of community and of place. This is a human-scale place, where we can feel the consequences of our collective action or inaction. The north boundary is Pythian Road, between Kenwood and Oakmont. The south boundary is the marshes of San Pablo Bay, south of Sears Point.
Other boundaries for Sonoma Valley are useful for certain analyses: Sonoma Valley Unified School District (which does not include the area around Kenwood), Sonoma County Supervisorial District 1 (which is significantly larger), and several census tracts.
Most of Sonoma Valley is unincorporated, meaning not in a city, so its land use is governed by Sonoma County. Sonoma Valley includes the City of Sonoma, which governs land use within its two square miles. Sonoma Valley is far from the County center in Santa Rosa. We benefit from that distance, in that we have our own identity, and we are harmed by it, in that many services don’t reach us.
The population of Sonoma Valley is roughly 50,000, of which the population of the City of Sonoma is about 10,000.
Affordable Housing
Fundamentally, housing is affordable for a person or household when they can pay for housing costs while also paying for other essential costs such as food, healthcare, childcare, and transportation. A longstanding government standard is that housing is considered affordable if a person or household pays less than 30% of their income for housing-related costs. Similar concepts are meant by terms such as “accessible” or “attainable” homes.
Types of affordable housing:
Homes may be affordable “by design” or “naturally occurring”, meaning that the cost to live there is low because of its construction or location instead of any rules or subsidies. The units may be small, lack parking, lack a yard, share walls, be in a noisy location, or be old or dilapidated. It’s generally agreed that Sonoma Valley real estate is so expensive that there are no “affordable-by-design” homes here.
Homes can be made affordable through deed restrictions that legally constrain their cost to residents using various formulas, either permanently or temporarily. Sometimes this type is indicated by using capital letters, as in “Big A” Affordable Housing. Often the deed restrictions are guaranteed for 20-30 years after construction, after which they will “convert” to being on the open market and therefore not affordable to previous residents. Therefore, a key strategy for retaining affordable housing is to extend deed restrictions before they expire.
Making Projects “Pencil”
A project that “pencils” or “pencils out” is one that repays its investors’ costs on a timeframe, and by an amount, that meet the investors’ particular criteria. Costs to build Affordable Housing are high. Today’s cost to create one new unit (a home or apartment) of government-subsidized housing that is restricted for people with a low enough income to qualify is roughly $700,000, compared to, very roughly, $400,000 per unit for modest market-rate housing. Both costs are rising fast. Both costs include physical costs like land, site prep, utilities, materials, contractors, and labor, and also “soft” costs like developer staff for design, permitting, and public meetings, and land payments while waiting for permits. This is a good explainer about funding and building “big-A” Affordable, subsidized, deed-restricted homes in California. Here is a website where you can experiment with the economic tradeoffs of building Affordable, below-market housing.
Workforce Housing
Housing that is affordable to people making more than 120% of the Area Median Income (compared to classical “Big A” Affordable Housing which is restricted to people making below 120% AMI). These are often households where all adults are working middle-income jobs such as nurse, firefighter, teacher, or small business owner. In our region’s housing market, such housing must still be subsidized in some manner, because its returns on investment to the developer are less than its costs. This range of housing is often called “missing middle” because many government subsidy programs don’t cover it.
Over-Crowded
This is a term used by the US Census when there is more than one person per room of a housing unit (not counting bathrooms and kitchens). One way to pay the rent is to share space with more people. Census tracts in the Springs are the most over-crowded in Sonoma County.
To Learn More
This glossary has more housing terms, including many related to California housing policy: https://housingca.org/resources/glossary/.