Wednesday, September 29, 2010

HAG Endorses Haenel, Jacobi and Gorin for Santa Rosa City Council

The Sonoma County Housing Advocacy Group (“HAG”) seeks to promote affordable housing and housing for persons with special needs such as farmworkers, seniors, persons with disabilities and the homeleess. Occasionally we make endorsements in local elections when we candidates who are extremely well qualified and who support our affordable housing goals.

In this year’s election for the Santa Rosa City Council, we are pleased to endorse Larry Haenel, Veronica Jacobi and Mayor Susan Gorin.

As a member of the Santa Rosa School Board for the past six years, Larry Haenel has been a strong and effective voice for excellence and equity in the City’s schools. He taught at Montgomery High School for 32 years where he was chair of the English Department, and he continues to mentor student teachers for Dominican University. He is a regular volunteer peer counselor at the Family Service Agency. He’s a real estate agent and understands the complexities of affordable housing development.

Veronica Jacobi has been a consistent and strong voice for affordable housing on the Santa Rosa City Council for the past four years. Her passion is protecting the environment for the people of Santa Rosa and for future generations. She understands that an essential component of environmental protection is social equity - affordable housing, shelters, transitional housing and programs to ensure that Santa Rosa addresses the needs of all its residents, regardless of their economic status.

Susan Gorin has been the City’s Mayor for the past two years, and has been an effective leader of the City Council. She has generally supported affordable housing efforts. As Mayor, she has consistently sought to find common ground with other members of the City Council, and to build consensus among competing interest groups in the City. We believe she deserves a second term of office, and HAG heartily endorses her candidacy.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Santa Rosa Budget Cuts Threaten Homeless Services

To: Mayor Susan Gorin and Members of the Santa Rosa City Council
September 13, 2010

The City Council agenda for Tuesday (tomorrow) includes a proposal for reduced homeless shelter funding for 2010-2011. It's hard to figure out what's going on from the agenda materials, but the City appears to be reducing funding by about $40,000. We heard about this a couple months ago and learned that Catholic Charities, the shelter operator, was planning to close the Homeless Services Center on Morgan Street, supposedly in response to the City's funding cut. We learned later that the City will receive an an additional $15k in Federal CDGB funding for homeless services for the coming year, and Catholic Charities is getting about $1.3 million in "Homeless Prevention and Rehousing Program" funding - that's exactly what their Homeless Services Center does and does well. But the fate of the Homeless Services Center is still unclear.

The Homeless Services Center provides essential and even lifesaving services for homeless persons. These include showers, hearty breakfasts, job counseling and placement, mail boxes, guidance with social services, drug/alcohol counseling, occasional legal assistance, transitional housing, health care and respite beds for homeless who are seriously ill but not so ill that they have to be hospitalized.
We met recently with Larry Lakes, Director of Catholic Charities. He was cordial but vague about their plans, saying that they were considering moving the Center from Morgan Street to Samuel Jones Hall out on Fulton Avenue, but would probably keep Morgan Street as a "drop off and pick up" site, with actual "services" provided out at the Samuel Jones Hall on Fulton Avenue.

When asked why, he said 1) the "consolidation" would save money; and 2) some neighbors were opposed to the Homeless Services Center at its current location, although it’s been there for more than 20 years. But Fulton Avenue is a long way from downtown, where hundreds of homeless people spend their days (and nights). Mr. Lakes insisted that it would not be a problem for homeless persons to get out to Samuel Jones, and said Catholic Charities would provide shuttle bus service. He didn't explain how Catholic Charities could afford to buy/maintain a shuttle bus and pay a driver, but were having difficulty finding $25,000 to offset the amount of the city's proposed cut.

Funding is available to continue the services provided at the Homeless Services Center at its current location - from the business community that depends on the Center staff to help address problems in the downtown area when they arise; from other non-profits that have historically supported homeless services like the Community Foundation; and from various state/federal programs such as the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Resettlement Act ("HPRP") which is providing $1.3 million to Catholic Charities for 2010 and 2011. We're not aware of any efforts by Catholic Charities to seek additional funding to offset the $25,000 cut by the City. If funding is not the problem, why would the City Council be so callous and uncaring as to allow the Homeless Services Center to shut down on Morgan Street? The City closed the 40+ bed downtown shelter on Brookwood last year. Samuel Jones has been filled to capacity all summer. One homeless client of mine says he thinks the "progressive" City Council wants to curry favor with the NIMBY's who've been trying to force the Center to leave the Morgan Street location for years.
According to HUD, homelessness across the country has been increasing at an annual rate of over 10%. The annual homeless count showed an even greater increase in Sonoma County. Cutbacks in mental health services, high unemployment, foreclosures, and large numbers of veterans returning from the war(s) mean the numbers will continue to increase.

We hope the City will reconsider cutting the $25,000 from its homeless services budget so that Catholic Charities won’t have a convenient reason to shut down the Center, and we hope Catholic Charities will look a little harder for ways to offset any cuts the City has to make. Other cities, including Rohnert Park, have tapped their redevelopment funds to support homeless programs during the current budget crisis. Santa Rosa's spending millions on the AT&T building; millions on developing the Railroad Square area; millions on a cosmetic reconfiguration of Courthouse Sqare and more millions on "upgrading" the Coddingtown Mall. Surely they can find a measly $25,000 to provide essential services at the Homeless Services Center for another year. A few NIMBY votes shouldn’t be a factor in this. Surely the City and its largest charitable organization can find a way here.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Letter to Santa Rosa re Density Bonus Ordinance

The City of Santa Rosa's updating its density bonus ordinance, supposedly to comply with state requirements set out in Government Code Sec. 65915. That section says, in a nutshell, that a developer who includes some affordable units in its residential development is entitled to a density bonus and various "concessions and incentives" to help recoup the cost of providing the affordable units. It's a great program to generate some affordable housing at no cost to taxpayers, while helping to integrate new developments with families of different incomes, etc. But the draft that the City's looking at adopting makes it really difficult or impossible for developers to get a density bonus or to qualify for concessions and incentives. Why? What are they thinking? Click here to see a letter that HAG recently sent to the City about the proposed ordinance.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Urbanist Thinking at Burning Man

From Planetizen
By Nate Berg, Staff writer 9/5/10

It's already disappearing. The temporary city that forms during the annual Burning Man event is fading away, as the tens of thousands of people who traveled out to live in the desert of northwestern Nevada for the past week have filed out of the void and returned back to the rest of the world. The event's organizers and volunteers are still erasing the traces of the event, from demolishing structures to removing fencing to picking up trash. Within another week or so, the entire city will have disappeared.

It's an interesting way for a city to exist -- just a few weeks at a time, once a year. But it's been working for Burning Man and Black Rock City, the name of that temporary city that forms and disbands almost as soon as it comes to full life. On top of what's already a unique experiment in citymaking, the theme of this year's event was Metropolis, which spurred the tens of thousands of people and artists who make up the city to think a little more about how their "party in the desert" is actually a little city and community (the fourth largest city in Nevada during its run), and how it relates to their world beyond the desert.

51,515 people had driven themselves into the far-off Black Rock Desert for the event by midnight last Friday, a new attendance record for the event, which has taken place every year in one form or another since 1986. The population has steadily increased over the years, a reality that has gradually turned the artist/anarchist/bohemian event into a temporary but perennial small-scale city. The Metropolis theme offered an interesting chance for attendees to think a little more about Burning Man's cityness, and the event's relation to real life in the "default world". Yeah, it's a party in the desert, but it's also an event that takes very seriously the community and civic experience it creates.

This year's theme was definitely an appropriate one for the event, and it inspired many city- and architecture-based art works and installations.

[See http://www.planetizen.com/node/45856 for some interesting photo's]

The art is a major part of the event, and its breadth and detail is almost overwhelming. It's visual saturation that makes grasping the entirety of the event almost impossible. That some of the art at this year's event was related to cities was interesting, but that recognition of the event as a city is not something unique to 2010. How Burning Man functions as a city, and how that function evolved, is what makes Burning Man so interesting to me. It's a topic I'll be exploring in much further detail in a future article, and something touched upon in various places, including this piece from the January 2009 issue of Architect Magazine, more recently by Greg Scruggs writing on this year's event for Next American City, the Burning Man organization's own Metropol blog series, and in this blog post from The Architect's Newspaper looking at some of the architecture-related artworks on display this year.

It was an especially interesting year to be at Burning Man because of the theme. Conversations with half-naked people about infill in the camping areas and pedestrian-scaled design were an unexpected departure from the typical desert camp conversation. Whether it's this year's theme that got those conversations going is hard to say. The event itself is becoming a metropolis, and it seems that people are increasingly drawing that conclusion and a connection to the cities they regularly experience. The good thing about this year's Metropolis theme is that the urbanist discourse on Burning Man -- and its impact on actual cities and communities beyond the event -- is likely to continue.

Nate Berg is a contributing editor for Planetizen and freelance journalist.