affordable housing
Time to Prioritize the Issue?
Affordable housing is essential to maintaining St. Helena's inclusivity and vibrancy. As rising costs make it difficult for essential workers to live here, our community's diversity and stability are at risk. Ensuring affordable housing allows everyone, from young families to seniors, to continue calling St. Helena home. This strengthens our local workforce, fosters a more inclusive community, enhances the overall quality of life, and contributes to the social cohesion of our town. At the same time, affordable housing is a complex issue involving economic, regulatory, political, and social challenges. Addressing it requires coordinated efforts across government, private developers, and community organizations, making it one of the most difficult problems to solve effectively.
St. Helena is required to plan and zone for 256 new housing units by 2031 according to its RHNA allocation. The requirement is about ensuring that the city has zoned enough land and created a Housing Element that allows for these units to be built. To be clear, it is not a requirement that the units must be built by the city or that they will necessarily be completed by that time. This may be why it can feel like "there is no movement" on the issue.
Affordable Housing is not one of the city's eight strategic goals. The council has thoughtfully selected these goals and the staff's diligent work in operationalizing them into over 200 objectives is commendable. At the same time, with affordable housing grouped under the broader "Improve the Quality of Life" goal, it tends to be overshadowed by other initiatives and does not receive the focused attention it requires to genuinely make progress on the issue. To effectively address this urgent community need, affordable housing would need to be elevated within the city’s strategic goals, with clear, measurable targets for the number of units to be built equitably in various parts of the city, ensuring that all neighborhoods benefit from increased housing options and that no single area bears a disproportionate share of new developments.
Partnerships are the name of the game when it comes to making affordable housing a reality. The city and county have many strong partners such as Our Town St. Helena, Napa Valley Community Foundation, and Napa County Housing Authority. Affordable housing success will depend on further leveraging these partnerships to expand affordable housing projects, secure additional funding, and advocate for policy changes that support sustainable development.
I am particularly interested in exploring federal and state grants that can help fund affordable housing initiatives, leveraging local, state, and federal resources to address our community's housing needs. Examples of current and upcoming opportunities include: The US Department of Housing and Urban Development's FY24 Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing grant opportunity and Round 9 of California's Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program that funds affordable housing and transportation projects close to jobs, schools, and other daily destinations to help California meet both its climate and equity goals. By leveraging these grant opportunities, St. Helena can secure funding to meet its affordable housing targets, ensuring that progress is not only planned but also realized.