The resolve to build affordable housing redoubles after the pandemic lays bare the crisis.

It’s the chart worth a thousand words, the one by the Monterey County Health Department that shows the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases by ethnicity. The bar indicating Latino patients towers over all other groups. As of July 21, the department is reporting that out of 3,379 confirmed patients, 2,585 are Latinos, or 76.5 percent. Latinos make up around 60 percent of the county’s population. A similar chart shows that 906 patients work in agriculture, the most-represented occupation.

Despite efforts to reduce the spread of Covid-19 in the fields and other agricultural facilities, the case numbers continue to increase, with the lack of housing emerging as a top factor. As one doctor, Natividad CEO Gary Gray, told the Natividad Board of Trustees on July 10, until housing gets addressed, he expects more Covid-19 cases.

The need served as the backdrop to a unanimous vote by the Monterey County Board of Supervisors on July 21 to create a $1.2 million housing trust fund to help finance more affordable housing in the coming years.

“As we move through Covid, it shows more and more the need for housing in our community,” Supervisor Chris Lopez said. “It’s those overcrowded housing situations that are fueling the spread in our community.”

The board approved the creation of the Regional Housing Trust Fund, which sets up the county to receive matching funds from the California Department of Housing and Community Development Permanent Local Housing Allocation program. In creating the regional fund, the supervisors approved an increase of nearly $649,000 to this year’s housing budget. The Monterey Bay Economic Partnership gave $370,000, plus three cities contributed: Salinas, $200,000; Pacific Grove, $118,757; Gonzales, $71,655. Additional funds will come later from other cities, including King City and Monterey.

The fund will be used to support building units for people whose income is 60 percent or less of the area’s median income. (For a family of four, that’s just under $50,000 a year.) The main goal is to aid nonprofit developers in building affordable multi-family housing units.

Lopez announced the creation of the fund at MBEP’s Salinas Valley Virtual Housing Fair on July 16, where U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, State Sen. Anna Caballero, and Assemblymember Robert Rivas all said they’re pushing for as much new housing as they can. Panetta is lobbying the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create more farmworker housing and rental subsidies for families. Caballero introduced SB 1385, which would allow empty big box stores to be replaced by mixed-use “villages.” Rivas outlined how he’s been part of an effort to get $25 million added to the state’s Project Roomkey, specifically for farmworkers and their families. That program has been housing homeless people during the pandemic in hotels and is now being expanded to purchase properties as permanent housing.

“We can social distance on the job as best we can, but when these families go home they are living in crucially overcrowded conditions,” Rivas said. “They can’t shelter in place, they can’t follow these CDC guidelines of quarantining, and that’s a big, big problem.”