Updating a city housing element is not just an academic exercise—it’s about creating real homes for real people in our community.

They are on the edge of homelessness, or already there. They call us, many times older women from the Monterey Peninsula, hoping that the Weekly can help their situation somehow. Pam Marino here, and over the last several years I have spoken to many of these callers. Their stories have a familiar ring: they lost a job/health/relationship, money is running out and their rent/mortgage is unsustainable. 

Their stories jibe with the results of the most comprehensive study on homelessness in California by the UC San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, released on June 20. The most common reason  for becoming homeless cited by those surveyed was loss of income. Researchers found California’s unhoused population is getting older and consists mostly of marginalized groups of people. 

A few days after the UCSF study was released, the National Low Income Housing Coalition released its annual Out of Reach Report, “The High Cost of Housing.” Santa Cruz was cited as the most expensive place to live in the country, with Monterey County at number four. According to the report, in order to afford a one-bedroom apartment here in our county at a fair market rent of $2,194 a month, you’d have to work 109 hours a week at a minimum wage job.

On Tuesday I attended the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership Housing Summit, which coincided with the release of the organization’s most recent report on housing policy, and the comments made by a panelist hit home for me, especially in light of these recent reports. 

The panel was discussing the impact of increased density of housing units and preserving community character, to which Rafa Sonnenfeld of the housing advocacy group YIMBY replied with this: “Community character means two different things to me. One is the changes to the community we’ve been talking about, but it’s also about the changes to people in the community,” Sonnenfeld said. “If you’re not changing the physical nature of your community, the people in your community might be displaced even faster.”

Exactly! What we’ve been witnessing over the last years is members of our community—especially the most vulnerable and marginalized—being displaced faster and faster due to a lack of affordable housing. 

Sonnenfeld continued: “We oftentimes miss the mark when we think about how to preserve what makes our communities unique: the artists, the restaurants,” he said, adding that small businesses struggle to retain employees. “Those struggles will continue if we’re not thinking about what we can do to house those employees, and that means changing the physical nature of our communities.”

So how do we increase housing production? MBEP’s report, “Practical Housing Policy: Increasing Supply and Affordability,” spells out well-researched recommendations. They include things like streamlining the permitting process, allowing municipal planners to approve projects based on pre-set standards (meaning fewer planning commission and city council meetings where opponents might delay, stop or shrink projects), increasing densities and increasing funding sources for affordable housing, among others.

The report comes at a time when all cities and counties in the region are working furiously to meet a state deadline for amending their housing elements by December. Every municipality must plan for an increased number of housing units between now and 2031—a total of 20,300 across Monterey County.

Gabriel Sanders, MBEP’s director of housing and community development, reminded Tuesday’s audience of over 100 people (made up of a few elected officials, municipal planners, developers, architects and homeless advocates from Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties) of an important perspective to keep in mind throughout the process.

“This is a serious exercise we’re doing, this is not just a paper exercise,” Sanders said. “These are not just numbers, these are homes, and those homes they’re not just boxes, that’s where people will live and we have to keep that in mind too.”