Affordable Housing without the Sprawl

Here's a letter I just sent our local daily, the Press Democrat, responding to their article on a new push for residential homebuilding.

It's true that affordable housing is in short supply locally. However, the stock response many are calling for, i.e. to keep building sprawling new subdivisions and condo complexes, will inevitably skew toward the more affluent and continue to erode the County's environmental quality.

Looking around Santa Rosa, I note an abundance of larger homes, built a half-century ago for big families and now housing one or two retirees. The smart solution to affordable housing at this point would be to identify and address all the hurdles that stand in the way of splitting these big suburban houses into two or three units that can be rented or sold separately. It will take a comprehensive re-think of zoning, building codes, bank lending protocols, tax incentives, and more. Daunting, sure, but these are all just policy obstacles, which means all we really have to do is get some key people to change their minds. 

Look at the Victorian-era houses in old neighborhoods, originally single family homes that were split up nearly a century ago into multiple units to accommodate smaller, less affluent households during the Depression. It's time to re-visit that kind of adaptive thinking about truly affordable housing.