Building houses, living in garages. State AG talks housing crisis with Modesto residents
At a community discussion Monday night on the statewide housing crisis, a Modesto resident shared that she knows people who — unable to afford anything more — rent and live in the garages of others’ houses.
Housing access is a human right, but is sold as a commodity, California State Attorney General Rob Bonta told about 20 residents and activists at the King-Kennedy Memorial Center in southwest Modesto.
The event, organized by the community advocacy organization Faith in the Valley, allowed attendees to tell Bonta about their experiences with the housing crisis and provide suggestions for what needs to be done to boost affordable housing options throughout the county.
“Everybody deserves (housing), everybody needs it, and we need to do better,” Bonta said. “We need to produce probably 2 million units, 3 million units across the state to get to the point where there are enough affordable housing units for everyone to live in. We need to protect our tenants, to make sure they’re not evicted from their housing.”
In November, Bonta launched the Housing Strike Force within the state Department of Justice and announced a series of tenant roundtables across the state to hear about local housing issues. His team, out of the Office of Community Awareness, Response and Engagement, is working across the state to assist tenants and residents with housing issues and help raise awareness of their rights. The office launched a Housing Portal to that effect in early November.
Monday’s meet-and-greet was not part of the roundtable series.
Stanislaus County, like much of the country, has been affected by the nationwide housing stock shortage. Some estimate that the county alone is short 10,000 housing units — most of them affordable. A report issued this summer showed that countywide, about 15,000 households struggle to find an affordable place to live.
In both Modesto and Stanislaus, housing development is a slow process, and getting a new plot of land ready for building can take years — in some cases decades. Meanwhile, the local housing market is just now mellowing out following a rocky year and a half where the pandemic sent prices skyrocketing.
Additionally, an influx of new buyers from other regions of California — often the Bay Area — in search of more affordable housing has started to price out local residents who can’t afford to bid on houses above their asking price.
These issues all compound and contribute to the county’s housing crisis, residents told Bonta on Monday.
Dire straits call for desperate solutions
In some cases, the lack of quality affordable housing has led to desperate solutions.
Maria Pulido, a promotora from Modesto, told Bonta and the group in Spanish that she and her family live with their in-laws but have been trying to buy their own home for years. Every time they search, they can’t find anything in their price range, and homes are getting more expensive.
Pulido said she has acquaintances who have gone a step further; they are forced to rent garage space in neighbors’ houses and live there without proper heat or electricity. Fearful of local authorities discovering their living situation, they can’t advocate on their own behalf as tenants.
Many of her family members and friends work in construction and often commute long hours to sites in the Bay Area, Pulido added. When they get back to their families late at night, they don’t have their own home to return to, despite spending all day building other people’s future houses.
“It’s sad to see our community, the Latino community, working hard in jobs like construction and farm work, that are really physically exhausting,” she said through a translator. “Our people are going out and building housing in areas like the Bay Area and yet we’re coming back home and we can’t afford to pay our rent in Stanislaus.”
Leon Callen, a minister at Christian Love Baptist Church, emphasized the housing issue starts at a local level, with a lack of inventory and affordable options. Even without the influx of new residents, Modesto and Stanislaus are in a housing shortage, he said, and it’s up to cities to focus on building more units and providing residents with housing they can call their own.
“Everybody needs housing,” he said. “It builds the community. I don’t understand how cities don’t understand that housing helps create a more cohesive community where people who own a home obviously become more protective of that area. We have to protect the people.”
Perfecto Muñoz, executive director of the West Modesto Community Collaborative, said the key to solving the housing crisis in Stanislaus and Modesto is to get the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors to tackle the issue head-on and prioritize it in their agendas.
Bonta said he and his office work to make sure all cities across California do their part to provide affordable housing and meet their requirements for housing production.
“Nobody needs to do everything, but everybody needs to do something,” Bonta said. “This is a shared responsibility for our state. We’re going to make sure everyone is doing their duty.”
This story was produced with financial support from the Stanislaus Community Foundation, along with the GroundTruth Project’s Report for America initiative. The Modesto Bee maintains full editorial control of this work.
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This story was originally published December 15, 2021 at 12:00 AM.
