The housing element workshop was conducted in the Board of Supervisors chamber for the Tuesday afternoon session. It was an opportunity to hear several of the voices of those that helped develop the various policies and plans for the support of needed affordable housing in Lake County and other special needs groups such as seniors, veterans, disabled or farm workers, etc.
To the dismay of at least one supervisor, “paper” plans are ultimately limited by reality. The state wants to encourage significant acreage dedicated to the development of relatively large high density housing and in-fill planning.
The reality is that for the immediate needs of the population of low-income families, land by itself does not provide housing.
It is of course tempting to look to the supervisors to fix everything.
While they can do everything in their power to offer advantages to those seeking to develop affordable housing, Habitat for Humanity, for one, the board is not in the business of acting as developers itself. One example discussed of how the county can offer assistance to nonprofits, would be to earmark buildable, tax default properties for development by Habitat for Humanity projects.
Since 16 of 17 Habitat built homes were completed in Clearlake, none in Lakeport, looking for appropriate properties on this side of the lake was attractive to all.
Producing a housing element is a little like working for two separate bosses. On the one hand, there are the needs of the people, real turn-key needs, “now needs.” And on the on the other hand, there are state mandates that may not be in touch with the scale of our rural community. Yet the wheels of government and practical funding issues can begin to falter if the document is not completed to the satisfaction of State Housing Development.
The housing element is part of the General Plan and is more of a guideline than a distinct and irrevocable set of steps.
The implementation is the proposed doing that would reflect the talking of the document, however the phrase “based on available staff resources” crops up, pointing to again, the limitations of the concrete world of time and money.
To some degree, it becomes a political Hallmark Card with beautiful sentiments and intentions but the lack of exact plans and realistic dates for bringing forth real-time solutions seems to elude everyone in the room.
I for one, wish more emphasis would exist in the use and reuse of existing developments and freedom from restrictive zoning so as to provide many varied opportunities for needed affordable housing, while the bias seems to be more for setting up new developments. Good-hearted people all, but all frustrated at the gap between dreaming and turn-key reality.
Veronica Fisher
El Dorado Motel, Lakeport
