A vision for building the housing we need at prices we can afford means thinking smaller.

Santa Clara County and Orange County were once thriving agricultural communities, with fruit trees instead of sprawling single-family homes.

Since people need places to live, it is understandable that orchards might give way to housing in the face of population and economic growth. What doesn’t make sense in 2025 is that communities sacrifice their prime agricultural lands for an outdated housing model that isn’t solving the housing crisis. It is forcing people into congested highways, on new roads that are allegedly built to reduce this very problem, all while increasing bigger environmental problems (climate change).

Had development in Santa Clara and Orange counties been smaller, denser and higher, it could have conserved our precious farmlands.

In Monterey County, we still have a choice. We can grow up (vertically). We can build smaller and more affordably. We don’t have to create massive sprawl on Monterey County’s precious lands.

We need to make it easy to build up, not out.

California is more than 3.5 million homes behind where it needs to be to get housing prices in line with wages. So how do we build more affordable homes sustainably? How do we build without eating up farmland and natural lands? How do we avoid the 1970s sprawl that created traffic jams and air pollution, without lower housing prices?

We need to make it easy to build up, not out.

The City of Gonzales is on the cusp of approving a massive Santa Clara Valley-type sprawling development known as Vista Lucia. If approached thoughtfully, this development offers the potential to build up, to build smart, and to build what is needed. Pembrook Development, the developer, City of Gonzales, Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), and Monterey County should choose a vision for growth that looks forward, not backward.

As currently proposed, the Vista Lucia Specific Plan includes 3,500 residential units on 770 acres of prime farmland that the vast majority of nearby households and workers cannot afford. Gonzales’ household median income is $74,000 and its workforce is primarily low wage. A fiscal analysis shows that none of Gonzales’ moderate- or lower-income families would be able to purchase any of the Vista Lucia units as the project is now planned. That’s a lot of people shut out of a development that claims to benefit Gonzales.

Monterey County’s 2014 Memorandum of Agreement with Gonzales calls for the City to avoid urban sprawl, postpone conversion of agricultural land and maintain a positive jobs-housing balance. As proposed, Vista Lucia violates that agreement.

The choice is clear and simple. The developer, residents and local decision-makers can easily avoid the mistakes of California’s developers in the 1970s and simultaneously protect farmworkers’ jobs, farmland, open space and natural resources. We can build the housing local working families need and can afford.

LAURA DAVIS is deputy director and MICHAEL DELAPA is executive director of LandWatch Monterey County.