Build affordable housing, advocates urge California Forever

A company’s plans to build a city-sized community from scratch in Solano County are leaving a series of open questions about what this project could mean for low-income people.

California Forever on Monday hosted the final installment of a series of town halls in almost every city in Solano County. Crowded, contentious and charged with emotion, these events have offered the public a chance to gain more information about California Forever before the company presents concrete plans in the form of a ballot initiative next month.

Despite these extensive, in-depth talks about priorities and goals for the proposed development, there’s still at least one major uncertainty.

Who would actually be able to live there?

California Forever has committed to building housing “designed for all levels of incomes.” It has also floated the idea of providing down-payment assistance programs to help people including teachers, police officers and construction workers buy homes.

“The principle we have is that the people who build the community and the people who work in it should be able to live there,” Sramek said in an interview.

At this point, however, the company has not committed to building workforce housing. It has not said how many housing units, if any, it will set aside for low-income people. And it has not yet presented a coherent picture of how the new community would affect the cost of living in Solano County’s existing cities.

These unanswered questions leave people on the front lines of housing equity projects unsure what to think but fearing for the worst.

“The biggest concern right now is that mismatch between what they think of as housing for residents of many different brackets, and the reality of people in poverty in Solano County,” said Shannon McCaffrey, the managing attorney for the Solano County office of Legal Services of Northern California.

Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, said, “If they want the construction workers who build the housing there to actually be able to live there, then they should be committing right off the bat to building workforce housing.”

California Forever Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf said low-cost housing is still on the table. However, the company’s focus is on “missing middle” housing: Medium-density homes at a medium price point.

“This is the type of housing that most cities in the Bay Area have the hardest time producing, so we think it’s a niche we can uniquely help serve, and deliver a lot of units that are affordable by design,” he said. “We are also having discussions about workforce housing with multiple stakeholders, as we try to balance out what we prioritize to reflect the desires of the community – between various competing priorities like creating workforce housing while also creating good paying jobs and also providing missing middle homes and downpayment assistance.”
​
The company said it will be releasing a paper on the topic of housing equity in the new year.​
​
Click here to keep reading.