As the Santa Maria City Council prepares to consider an updated housing plan, local advocates and officials are concerned the city isn’t doing enough to provide its sizable low-income population with places to live.
While city housing projections exceed state requirements in Santa Maria’s newly revised Draft Housing Element, the goals won’t make up for a “major shortage” of affordable housing, according to Deborah Brasket, executive director of the Santa Barbara Community Action Network.
“Legally, it follows all the requirements of the law and the state housing mandate,” Brasket said. “But the spirit of the law was created to get jurisdictions to look seriously at their housing needs and shortages and to make plans to address those.”
In the document, the city identifies 1,494 units presently associated with low-income housing programs. For the current planning period, which lasts until June 2014, a total of 3,200 new dwellings are allocated. And 1,280 of those are projected for “low” to “extremely low” income levels.
Since 2006, Brasket said, only 24 low-income housing units have been built in town—that’s 259 overall since 2000. She said the numbers are evidence of a “disconnect” between city planners and residents.
“Two-thirds of Santa Marians are low-wage earners who are not able to find enough adequate housing for their families,” Brasket said. “They’re doubling up, having multiple families living in one home, or just going out on a limb to pay for their housing.”
Based on data collected from the 2000 Census, the Draft Element describes a city faced with overcrowding issues and about half of its renters overpaying on rent.
The data shows 23.3 percent of overall housing units and 35 percent of renter households in 2000 were overcrowded—defined as having more than one person per room. Almost half of all renters, 47.6 percent, were spending more than 30
percent of their income on housing.
The Housing Element, drafted by the city’s Community Development Department, was last revised in 2006, and the report doesn’t mention the effects of the recent foreclosure crisis on the housing situation.
Much has changed since then, according to City Councilwoman Hilda Zacarias. The housing market has dropped, yet rentals haven’t been impacted in the same way.
“You have folks who are losing their homes and then having to find rentals at rates almost equal what they were paying in mortgages, which is really just a sad situation,” she said.
While the city was a leader in inviting development during the boom years, Zacarias said, it could have focused more on providing housing for people of all income levels.
“We still have many families who are living together to save on housing costs, and that’s certainly unhealthy, especially in terms of the development of children,” Zacarias said. “I would say that the city has a long way to go.”
After consideration by the council, tentatively scheduled for Dec. 1, the updated Housing Element will head to the state level for a compliance review. The city’s housing goals are determined by the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments, which issues the requirements through its Regional Housing Needs Assessment, derived from state housing mandates.
The state mandate requires the city to plan enough parcels of land for high-density building, which could be used for low-income housing, but doesn’t define what the land has to be used for.
It’s the responsibility of the city to make the land available, not to build the housing, according to City Planner Brian Smith. Making the homes a reality is up to private developers.
Smith said the city’s housing plan goes beyond Regional Housing Needs Assessment’s minimum standards, which already take into account the city’s workforce and income levels.
“Our element is supposed to react to those goals. We feel we did that,” Smith said. “We always hope to do more, but we feel that the Housing Element we’re promoting does meet state law.”
While Zacarias supports the city’s position that it isn’t a developer, she said the city could be more aggressive in directing grants and resources to the community to deal with the problem.
“We could all be doing more,” she explained. “We know that when the economy takes a dive like it has been, the best strategy is to stay with the basics as much as possible. Now is probably not the time that we think would be a good time to invest in affordable housing projects, even though now you can see the need is even greater.”
Zacarias said the city would continue to invest in nonprofit groups like Good Samaritan and People’s Self-Help Housing to create more low-income housing.
Good Samaritan operates the only overnight emergency homeless shelter in Santa Maria, where the numbers of people taking refuge are rising, according to the shelter’s case manager, Stacy Goldsmith.
Goldsmith said she’s seen the increase especially among homeowners driven to foreclosure. Not all of her clients are out of work—some labor at low-wage jobs on the assembly line, or as field workers and telemarketers.
“You can have one of the parents working, or even both, but the pay of the jobs together or separate are so low that they can’t afford an apartment,” Goldsmith said. “You see a lot of individuals these days spending 75 to 80 percent of their income on rent and utilities.”
Goldsmith said the city’s current availability of low-income housing isn’t enough to support its population.
“The very few affordable housing that we do have is completely full or there’s a huge waiting list,” she said. “Within that waiting time is when our clients become homeless and they’re on the streets.”
The shelter is running close to its full capacity of 91 beds. A stay is limited to 90 days, Goldsmith said, and about 45 percent of her clients eventually find some sort of housing.
“A lot of families will bind together to go live in a place,” Goldsmith said. “Even if it’s not families, it’s friends, anybody you can get who has an income that you can combine with who wants to move out.”
Once families get into subsidized housing, she said, they tend to stay long term, so waiting lists can run into the thousands.
“The affordable housing list will open for a little bit, and then it will close because it gets full again,” she said. “I have families who have been on the waiting list for three or four years.”
While she feels “blessed” that some effort has been made by the city to rectify the situation, Goldsmith said more could be done.
“It’s helped a great deal of families, but we still have multiple families struggling, especially with the recession and the price of everything going up,” she said. “It most affects our children because we want them to be in a stable living environment.
“If they could build 200 more, I’d be happy with it,” she added. “Any little bit we can get, there’s no complaint.”
SBCAN’s Brasket acknowledged the city is limited in what it can do with a private market, but suggested the creation of a housing task force and a program providing developers with incentives to build low-income housing.
“I know that the city of Santa Maria is not in the business of building affordable housing, but they should be in the business of looking at the needs of the community and raising plans to do as much as they can to provide for those needs,” Brasket said. “They need to recognize that the business-as-usual way they’ve been doing in the past to try to encourage it hasn’t been working.” m
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 12-19, 2009.
