SONOMA VALLEY HOUSING AFFORDABILITY ROADMAP

An action plan to address our community’s housing affordability crisis, funded by Sonoma Valley Catalyst Fund.

The Roadmap Advances the 3 P’s of Housing

Preserve affordable infill homes

Keep lower-income people in their affordable homes by partnering with philanthropy and other funds to assure that subsidized, below-market-rate homes in Sonoma Valley stay that way.

Produce affordable infill homes

Build new homes that embody the principles of the Sonoma Valley Housing Declaration: affordable, for people who live or work in the Valley, within already developed areas, to create diverse, safe, complete neighborhoods.

Protect precariously housed residents

Keep people housed and prevent homelessness by helping lower-income renters with housing services, cash assistance, and legal help.

ABOUT

  • This deeply researched Housing Affordability Roadmap describes 8-15 strategies that together reimagine housing affordability in Sonoma Valley. The Roadmap names the organizations best positioned to lead each strategy, estimates costs for each strategy, and identifies cost-saving synergies among the strategies.

    The Roadmap focuses on homes that are accessible to local workers and others with limited means. (It does not include homeless services.)

  • The goal of the Roadmap is to provide clarity and actionable direction for the community, housing-related organizations and agencies (including SVC), funders (including Catalyst), and Sonoma Valley’s thought leaders about the subset of strategies that, together, over the next ~3 years, will most improve housing affordability in Sonoma Valley.

  • The Roadmap lays out the next phase of housing affordability work, both for Sonoma Valley overall and for SVC. SVC built credibility as a broad-based, effective coalition promoting housing affordability in the City’s and County’s Housing Elements. Now that those policies are in motion, it’s time to create an updated, actionable implementation plan, tiering off strategies laid out  in the Housing Elements and in SVC’s 2020 Homes for A Sustainable Sonoma Valley

Let’s work toward a future where no one in Sonoma Valley suffers because of the cost of their housing, and where people essential to our community can afford to live here.

HOUSING 101: UNDERSTANDING THE SONOMA VALLEY HOUSING CRISIS

OVERVIEW OF
STRATEGIES

STRATEGY 1
Create A Non-Profit Sonoma Valley Community Development Corporation


STRATEGY 2
Keep Renters Housed

  • Strategy 2a: Strengthen Housing Services

  • Strategy 2b: Educate Tenants and Landlords

  • Strategy 2c: Just-Cause Eviction Protections in the City of Sonoma

STRATEGY 3
Assure That Affordability Commitments Are Kept

  • Strategy 3a: Adopt a Strong Rental Registry

  • Strategy 3b: Ensure That People Living in Income-Restricted Homes Are Those Who Need Them

STRATEGY 4
Preserve Existing Lower-Cost Housing

  • Strategy 4a: Rescue Affordability Guarantees Before They Expire

  • Strategy 4b: Preserve Unsubsidized “Naturally Occurring” Affordable Housing

  • Strategy 4c: Preserve Mobilehome Parks

STRATEGY 5
Improve Zoning & Land Use Rules

  • Strategy 5a: Different Land Use Rules to Incentivize New Affordable Infill Housing

  • Strategy 5b: Address local zoning policies that constrain development

  • Strategy 5c: Incentivize ADUs that are Affordable

  • Strategy 5d:  Parking Reform

  • Strategy 5e: Reduce Vacation Rentals and Incentivize Renting to Locals

STRATEGY 6
Use Community Land Trusts to Reduce Costs for Residents

  • Strategy 6a: Establish a land bank entity

  • Strategy 6b: Use community land trusts to reduce cost to residents

STRATEGY 7
Workforce Homes & Homeownership

  • Strategy 7a: A Strategic Action Plan for Farmworker Housing in Sonoma Valley

  • Strategy 7b: Building a path to homeownership for middle-income families


STRATEGY 8
Create More Funding Streams to House Our Community

STRATEGY 1

Create A Non-Profit Sonoma Valley Community Development Corporation

Summary

Sonoma Valley needs a mission-driven nonprofit to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the development and preservation of affordable and workforce homes. A community development corporation (CDC) is a proven model, filling gaps left by existing agencies. A Sonoma Valley CDC would track housing needs, identify development opportunities, coordinate stakeholders, and overcome barriers to housing production and preservation.

STRATEGY 2

Keep Renters Housed

Summary

Expand accessible services: landlord-tenant negotiation, housing navigation, rental assistance, and eviction prevention.

STRATEGY 2a

Strengthen Housing Services

Summary

Sonoma Valley’s renters need consistently funded, culturally accessible, more coordinated rental housing services, including resources to find and keep their housing, cash rental assistance, and help with landlord-tenant relations.

  • Many people who live or work in Sonoma Valley cannot cover their housing expenses without compromising on other basic needs like food or medical care. Their income from work or government assistance is simply not enough to pay the rent. Two groups that especially struggle to make ends meet in Sonoma Valley are seniors and Latino households. If we want these fellow community members to remain in Sonoma Valley, they will need help. Government funding for housing services is usually substantial, but it is grossly insufficient to meet the need and subject to unpredictable political and budget forces. For the next three years that are the timeframe of this Roadmap, government funding is expected to continue decreasing, while the need becomes more extreme. 

    In our reality that government does not provide a sufficient safety net, nonprofits perform heroic work to fill at least part of the unmet need. 

    It’s a challenge for low-income people in Sonoma Valley that housing services are fragmented and inconsistent. At least five nonprofits offer some or all of these services (and more), but most struggle to consistently provide sufficient services that can attack housing instability from multiple angles. For example, 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. The largest government funding sources are unpredictable. For example, entities that once provided robust housing navigation services, like Adult Protective Services, had this funding cut.

    Sonoma Valley needs consistently funded rental housing services, whereby a person can access, through any “front door”, multiple consistently funded and staffed housing services: housing navigation, rental assistance, out-of-court dispute resolution/mediation, and easy referral for eviction defense counsel. The goal of “one front door” or “every door is the right front door” is shorthand for an ecosystem of service providers who consistently coordinate with each other to prioritize which organizations will provide which services to which clients. Petaluma People Services Center and Catholic Charities have both come close to this model in other locations. Sonoma Valley could create the first regional model in the County that offers holistic housing strategies.

The Power of Coordination

If coordination across organizations is working properly, for example, a household requesting emergency help with one month’s rent could, after one intake conversation, have their case referred to multiple organizations who could help address problems behind their need for rental assistance such as, for example, help negotiating with their landlord, learning more English, getting a ride to a medical appointment, or finding childcare.

STRATEGY 2b

Educate Tenants and Landlords

Summary

Create tenant-landlord education curriculum for tenants and housing providers in Sonoma Valley.

STRATEGY 2c

Just-Cause Eviction Protections in the City of Sonoma

Summary

Pass a permanent just cause eviction protection ordinance in the City of Sonoma.

STRATEGY 3

Assure Affordability Commitments Are Kept

Summary

Local governments jointly create a rental registry that delivers transparency, accountability, and tracking.

STRATEGY 3a

Adopt a Strong Rental Registry

Summary

Sonoma City and County need a rental registry to track rental costs, occupancy, evictions, and displacement patterns across mid- and low-cost rental housing in Sonoma Valley. Without this data, policymakers cannot identify and address issues in the housing market.

STRATEGY 3b

Ensure That People Living in Income-Restricted Homes Are Those Who Need Them

Summary

Identify subsidized homes (including “inclusionary units”) and ensure that those units are indeed rented to qualifying low-income residents. Absent this follow-through, deserving people are being excluded from affordable homes.

STRATEGY 4

Preserve Existing Lower-Cost Housing

Summary

Buy out deed-restricted units before their affordability expires, to prevent loss to the open market.

STRATEGY 4a

Rescue Affordability Guarantees Before They Expire

Summary

Sonoma Valley has many deed-restricted, below-market homes, but most of them have time-limited affordability protections that will expire, leaving those units and their occupants vulnerable to the extreme prices of the open market. A coalition of property owners, government agencies, and nonprofits can rescue those subsidized units and extend their affordability.

STRATEGY 4b

Preserve Unsubsidized “Naturally Occurring” Affordable Housing

Summary

Sonoma Valley still has lower-cost, unsubsidized homes, studios, mobilehomes, and apartments. We need to locate those homes and rally partners and agreements to keep them affordable even as overall housing costs rise.

STRATEGY 4c

Preserve Mobilehome Parks

Summary

About 10% of Sonoma Valley’s residents live in mobilehome parks, mostly seniors and lower-income families, so it is paramount that these communities remain affordable. We need to strengthen local mobilehome park closure and conversion ordinances and prevent conversion of mobilehome parks. Ample examples across California show the way.

STRATEGY 5

Improve Zoning & Land Use Rules

Summary

Several local policies impede the construction of lower-cost housing in infill locations. Policies should instead incentivize and streamline such construction. As SVC and others demonstrated successfully during the City’s and County’s Housing Element updates, advocacy can change these local policies.

    1. The City of Sonoma controls how land can be used, minimum parcel size, parking requirements, and a host of other rules affecting housing within the 2 square miles of the City. The elected City Council decides on policy after the appointed Planning Commission makes recommendations. 

    2. The County of Sonoma controls how land can be used, minimum parcel size, parking requirements, and a host of other rules affecting housing in most of Sonoma Valley. The elected Board of Supervisors decides land use policy after the appointed Planning Commission makes recommendations. Permit Sonoma is the relevant County agency.

    Both jurisdictions operate under a General Plan that describes higher-level land use policies. Both the City General Plan and the County General Plan are being updated now and will remain in force for about 20 years. The City’s General Plan update will likely be finalized in 2026; the County’s could take several years. Fine details of policy that allow staff to implement policies are described in ordinances and codes. 

    • Advocates

      • Sonoma Valley Collaborative, and its members on their own

      • Generation Housing

      • California YIMBY

      • Legal Aid of Sonoma County, North Bay Organizing Project (depending on the policy)

      • Developer advocates

        • Incremental Developers Alliance

        • Habitat for Humanity

        • California Housing Partnership 

        • Burbank Housing

        • Eden Housing

        • MidPen Housing

        • PEP Housing

        • SAHA

      • Construction and trades

        • North Bay Leadership Council

    • Advisors

      • Sonoma County Community Development Commission

      • California Department of Housing & Community Development

      • California Housing Partnership

      • National Housing Law Project

      • National Low Income Housing Coalition

      • Novogradac

      • Redwood Credit Union and other community-based banks

  • Costs for advocacy to improve land use policy are primarily in the category of staff time for strategy meetings and coalition-building, policy research, writing and revising statements for different audiences, creating and promoting media messages, conversing with decision-makers in private, recruiting and supporting community members who may not have confidence in their ability to be influential, and participating in public meetings which can last for hours. Lesser costs include printing for 1-pagers, occasional creation of buttons or other identifying items, occasional small costs to boost social media posts, and occasional travel for regional strategy meetings. 

    The sub-strategies below could each likely be achieved by a 6 to 12-month campaign. Multiple substrategies could be combined and packaged under a compelling umbrella as resources permit. Tackling one or two of these substrategies for 6 months could cost $8,000-$10,000, whereas pursuing several substrategies simultaneously, as a unified campaign over 12 months, could cost $30,000-$50,000. The policies in this substrategy are strictly about land use and zoning, but other substrategies could also be combined into a single policy advocacy campaign; these include Strategy 2c Better Just Cause Eviction Protections, Strategy 3a Adopt a Strong Rental Registry, and Strategy 4c Preserve Mobile Home Parks.

    Investors, donors, and funders should realize that supporting policy advocacy is fundamentally different from funding services or projects. The outcome of advocacy work is not guaranteed, because unlike in a conventional nonprofit project, advocates face actual opposition, and the opposition is often better funded. Local government’s limited bandwidth can also limit success. On the upside, regardless of near-term success, advocacy done well builds alliances, both among advocates and with decision-makers, and these linkages then open doors for more good work.

STRATEGY 5a

Different Land Use Rules to Incentivize New Affordable Infill Housing

Summary

Encourage truly affordable housing (through subsidy or design) on most urban parcels throughout the City and unincorporated Sonoma Valley, by offering strong incentives to developers to build or otherwise create affordable units.

SUB STRATEGY 5b

Address Local Zoning Policies That Constrain Development

Summary

Eliminate or revise restrictive zoning policies to allow taller, denser, and more cost-effective housing, including below-market and incremental projects.

STRATEGY 5c

Incentivize ADUs that are Affordable

Summary

Sonoma Valley has more ADUs than ever but, in our housing market, they are rarely affordable. We need to reduce construction costs and incentivize affordability guarantees, before we see ADUs smaller size translate into affordability.

STRATEGY 5d

Parking Reform

Summary

Reduce or eliminate parking minimums to reduce housing development costs and promote walkable, sustainable communities.

  • Each additional parking space can add $25,000-$65,000 to the cost of development in high-cost locations like Sonoma Valley. Local governments seeking to boost housing supply should reduce or eliminate parking requirements to lower costs and promote more sustainable development. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, which famously allowed small multifamily development across most of its residential zoning in 2019, much of the resultant increase in housing and reduction in housing cost was actually caused by the simultaneous elimination of parking requirements, according to Minneapolis advocates speaking to the Sonoma County housing community in 2025. 

    The Association of Bay Area Governments prepared a comprehensive parking policy playbook that can help guide decision making on which parking reforms should be prioritized. 

    Although most people living or working in Sonoma Valley currently feel they need a car, in the future Sonoma Valley will have better ways to get around. One way to hasten that future is by removing government parking requirements.

    • Remove parking requirements that drive up development costs. Instead, if anything, set parking maximums to prevent excessive land use for parking. Developers will allocate land to parking based on what they expect buyers and renters to prefer, so local government does not need to dictate parking minimums. The City of Sonoma has reduced the required number and size of parking spaces. Sonoma County will reduce requirements in the course of its coming general plan update.

    • Allow shared parking between residential, retail, and office spaces.

    • Allow and promote “unbundled” parking, especially for multi-unit projects, which separates the cost to a resident for parking space from the cost of rent.

    • Allow an ADU and new living space (for example from converting a garage to a bedroom) without requiring new parking.

    Advisors and Collaborators Specific to this Sub Strategy

    • Transform https://transformca.org/. Transform works across the Bay Area to reshape transportation and housing using community-driven solutions and transformative policy advocacy.

    • Parking Reform Network https://parkingreform.org/. They have an extensive library of parking policies enacted across the country.

SUB STRATEGY 5e

Reduce Vacation Rentals and Incentivize Renting to Locals

Summary

To prioritize housing for people who live or work in Sonoma Valley, reduce the number of non-residents living in our limited homes.

  • About 10% of Sonoma County’s housing stock is estimated to be unavailable to local residents because it is used for whole-house (also called “non-hosted”) vacation rentals or as a second or third home. The City of Sonoma already bans new vacation rentals except in newly adapted historic structures; it has about 50 licensed vacation rentals. See Sonoma County’s map of vacation rentals, including well over 100 in Sonoma Valley. Sonoma Valley’s previous County Supervisor was able to get small areas in Sonoma Valley to limit the number of vacation rentals, but could not get a supervisorial majority to enact county-wide policy. 

    Generally, the City and County’s regulation of existing, permitted vacation rentals is strict. However, there are many illegal vacation rentals that are not actively sought out for enforcement. And the number of allowed, existing vacation rentals is still high enough to degrade the social infrastructure of neighborhoods and remove homes from the Valley at a time when we need every possible home available to people who live or work here. The following approaches are recommended:

    • Limit non-hosted vacation rental permits to one per owner. Current multi-permit holders may retain their permits but cannot renew them or acquire new permits. 

    • Require vacation rental permit/license holders to be “natural persons”, to avoid corporate ownership (City)

    • Revoke vacation rental permits upon sale or transfer of property (City)

    • Resume hiring contractors to locate illegal vacation rentals, and enforce the law.

    • Evaluate the cost and benefits of creating a new program providing an incentive to landowners to rent to locals, as in North Lake Tahoe and Truckee.

    Note that although many support a tax on vacant homes or second or third homes, as a way to help fund affordable housing and reduce the number of empty homes, it is not clear that such a tax would generate more money for affordable housing than it would cost in staff time to monitor and enforce. The City of Sonoma is investigating this tradeoff; the County has not, so far.

STRATEGY 6

Use Community Land Trusts to Reduce Costs for Residents

Summary

In Sonoma Valley, the extremely high cost of land is the over-riding barrier to lower-cost housing. An effective way to remove the burden of the cost of land, for people living in Sonoma Valley, is to use the Community Land Trust model, in which a housing nonprofit owns the land, so the resident pays only for the value of the home they live in.

STRATEGY 7

Workforce Homes & Homeownership

STRATEGY 7a

A Strategic Action Plan for Farmworker Housing in Sonoma Valley

Summary

To address the urgent and unacceptable housing crisis among Sonoma Valley farmworkers, we need a focused farmworker housing needs assessment, practical assessment of feasible solutions, and development of farmworker-specific housing.

STRATEGY 7b

Improve Downpayment Programs for Lower-Income Homebuyers

Summary

When Sonoma Valley workers cannot secure homeownership, we all lose – on diversity, a skilled, dynamic workforce, and community. Assisting first time home buyers with downpayment funds is an established way to boost home ownership around the nation.

STRATEGY 8

Create More Funding Streams to House Our Community

Summary

Federal and state funding for housing, though necessary, is unreliable and comes with expensive, cumbersome requirements. We need local sources of funding. Local funds also provide a required “match” that can unlock more state and local dollars.

Acknowledgements

The Sonoma Valley Housing Affordability Roadmap is by Sonoma Valley Collaborative, in partnership with Legal Aid of Sonoma County, Generation Housing, and Donna Dambach. SVC authors are Caitlin Cornwall, Maria Membrila, Kim Jones, and Mia Sasaki, with research help from Julian Mackie. Legal Aid authors are Patrick McDonnell and Caitlin Vejby. Generation Housing authors are Calum Weeks, Josh Shipper, and Max Zhang. 

Sonoma Valley Collaborative is deeply grateful to Sonoma Valley Catalyst Fund for funding this project and for being a long-time thought partner on what Sonoma Valley needs.

Thank you to the following people for sharing their expertise to make The Roadmap:

Amy Appleton, SHARE Sonoma County

Leonardo Lobato, Sandy Sanchez, Patricia Galindo, Maria Calvillo, La Luz Center

David Guhin and Jennifer Gates, City of Sonoma

Felix AuYeung, MidPen Housing

Sandy Piotter, Tom Haeuser, and other board members, Friends in Sonoma Helping

Efren Carrillo, Gallaher Community Housing

Janet Connors, Summit State Bank

Nick Friend, Housing Land Trust of Silicon Valley

Rafael Morales, Self-Help Credit Union

Darryl Berlin, Common Space Community Land Trust

Zeke Guzman, Latinos Unidos del Condado de Sonoma

Hunter Scott, HomeFirst

Jennielynn Holmes, Catholic Charities

Ann Colichidas, Golden State Mobilehome Owners League

LinMarie DeVincent, TriPark Committee

John Kyle, Sonoma County Mobilehome Owners Association

Diana Sanson, Marney Malik, Angela Ryan, Sonoma Valley Catalyst Fund

Jen Klose, Generation Housing

Sunny Noh, Margaret DeMatteo, Legal Aid of Sonoma County

Rocio Torres, UndocuFund

Josh Dickinson, Zip Code Sonoma

Suzanne Ashimine, Compass

Robin Stefani, Renewal Enterprise District

Ananda Sweet, Metro Chamber

Michelle Whitman, Rhonda Coffman, Sonoma County Community Development Commission

Kristina Tierney