Napa’s Big Squeeze

ST. HELENA, Calif. —  Msgr. John Brenkle opened the door at the rectory here one recent morning to pick up the newspaper and almost tripped over a man sleeping on the doorstep with the welcome mat pulled over his shoulders for warmth. Brenkle suggested that the Mexican farmhand go around to the back of the church where the others were sleeping. Maybe you can find a blanket, the priest said.

This time of year the grapes hang heavy in Napa Valley, and the Mexicans come to pick them. No one knows exactly how many, but there are always more bodies than beds, and many of them come to the St. Helena Catholic Church, which charges $20 a week for food and a spot on the porch outside the parish meeting hall.

Some nights 60 men have slept at the church, the last stop before bedding down in a car, under a bridge or in a field. “Some people are upset with me because we’ve done this,” says Brenkle. “But then I get checks from people all the time for the farm workers.”

That ambivalence goes to the heart of the wine country’s conundrum: Napa Valley needs farmhands to pick grapes and cellar workers to make wine, but the valley has become so expensive that fewer and fewer of those who work here can afford to live here.

That’s also true for those who work in restaurants and hotels, of course, but it is the harvest season when Mexican farmhands flock to the valley that really highlights the contrast between those who pick the grapes and those who sip the wine, between those who earn roughly $100 a day for eight hours of work in the fields and those who line up at the Opus One winery and pay $25 for a dribble of precious Cabernet Sauvignon. A fight involving one of the valley’s last unions also underscores the disparities here.

“We have a tremendous housing shortage already,” says Margaret Duckhorn, president of the Napa Valley Vintners Assn. and owner of Duckhorn Wine Co. in St. Helena, a pretty town of 5,900 people that sits astride Highway 29, the valley’s main artery and the pilgrimage path that devotees of the grape follow from one enological temple to the next.

“Land has become so expensive,” Duckhorn says, “that it’s crowding out our own kids from being able to afford to live here, and our employees have to commute from other places.”

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People have had trouble finding affordable housing in the valley at least since Robert Louis Stevenson came here on his honeymoon in 1880 and wound up living in an abandoned mining cabin on Mt. St. Helena, which rises above the town of Calistoga at the northern edge of Napa Valley.

Over the years it has gotten worse. In 1968, Napa County enacted a strict zoning code to preserve the valley’s agricultural identity and stave off the kind of development that turned much of Southern California into an endless sea of subdivisions and had already given the city of Napa, at the bottom of the valley, more than its share of strip malls.

To build any dwelling in Napa Valley’s agriculture preserve, one would need 40 acres of land. And since land can cost $100,000 an acre, not too many people want to build farm worker housing on property that expensive. A two-bedroom apartment averages about $1,100 a month, and vacancy rates are less than 1%.

Last year about 6,000 farm workers were employed in the valley at the peak of crush in September and October. By December that number was down to 3,500, according to state employment figures. Napa County runs four camps for farm workers, with a total of 176 beds. Private camps provide an additional 108 beds. The shortage got so bad last year that the county constructed a tent city on a hillside on the valley’s eastern flank.

Recently the situation has become a hot local issue. In 1999, the Napa Valley Wine Auction, which since 1981 has been raising money for health care in the area, added affordable housing to its list of charities. In 2000, the auction raised $7.8 million and gave $453,000 to housing programs, and valley growers and vintners collected $135,000 for farm worker housing through a voluntary assessment, to maintain both existing beds and to create new ones.

Legislation to make the assessment mandatory is being pushed by Assemblywoman Patricia Wiggins (D-Santa Rosa) in AB 1550, which would tax growers and winemakers up to $10 an acre, reaping as much as $380,000 annually.

And the county Board of Supervisors is considering an ordinance that would allow an exemption to the ag preserve rule so that temporary farm worker housing could be put on small plots of land.

“We should be providing housing,” says John Heymann, a member of the county’s Farmworker Housing Oversight Committee and the CEO at MKF, a wine business consulting firm in St. Helena. “This is the backbone of the industry. It’s hard work, and anyone who works that hard deserves to be treated well. Napa is an affluent community. We should be able to find a solution, but it’s a difficult problem to solve.”

It’s also difficult to know just how big the problem is, which is why UC Davis professor Phil Martin is conducting a survey for the county to find out how many farm workers are living in Napa during the harvest and where they are sleeping. “There’s a housing problem for everyone who works in Napa, and it gets worse as you go down the wage scale,” says Martin, who teaches in the department of agricultural and resource economics at Davis. “The hardest thing to understand is that building 400 more beds isn’t going to solve the farm worker housing problem. The list of people who want to get in may actually get longer. It all depends on the price you charge. At zero price, you could fill 10,000 beds. At 50 bucks a night, you already have enough beds. Raise the price and they could be empty. That’s not the kind of answer people want to hear, but that’s how the world works.”

And farm worker housing isn’t the only labor problem in the seemingly placid valley. Most of the summer Mexican Americans have been picketing outside Charles Krug Winery on the edge of St. Helena. In early July, after talks with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union deadlocked, the winery locked out 43 workers who blend grapes and bottle wine, earning between $8 and $16 an hour. Krug, which is the oldest winery in Napa, is also the last union operation in Napa, where once 500 workers were represented.

“Some of us see this as a plantation town,” says Lauren Coodley, a professor of history, at Napa Valley College who helped organize a fund-raiser for the locked out workers, most of whom are getting by on $120 a week from the union. “In order to have the wealth, you need a subservient class. If all the Mexican workers ever decided to stop working, this valley would come to a halt.”

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In 1980, the U.S. Census counted just over 8,600 Latinos in Napa County, but by 1998 the California Department of Finance estimated there were 22,322. In less than two decades the Latino population doubled, now accounting for about a fifth of the county’s 123,000 residents. Most of the Latinos work in the service sector, which accounts for about a third of the county’s jobs.

Farm work, on the other hand, makes up less than 10% of the jobs in the valley. These days, the wine business is as much about tourism as it is about agriculture.

Many of the Mexicans working here, like Agripino Hurtado, 44, who grew up in a small town in Michoacan, Mexico, shuttle back and forth between the valley and their homeland. Hurtado always knew that he would go to Napa Valley to work one day. It was just what the men in his village did.

Hurtado’s father had been working in Napa seasonally since the 1950s. When Hurtado grew old enough to work, he too went north to pick fruit. He married and had three children, who stayed in Mexico with a grandmother, while Hurtado and his wife journeyed to Napa every year. Twice a year he would visit his family.

Eventually, Hurtado found a full-time job at Duckhorn. Today he is the cellar master at the winery. He owns a house in the city of Napa and has finally moved his children from Mexico. “In Mexico it’s hard to live,” he says. “Here everybody has houses and cars. There life is difficult.”

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The Calistoga Farmworker Center opens for business every year on Jan. 2. This year 30 people showed up that first day for beds. By the middle of February, the remaining 30 beds were filled. The men sleep three to a room and get three meals a day. They pay $10 a day, although the actual cost of running the camp is about $18 per person, the difference made up by the vintners’ assessment.

The center closes in December, so the men find someplace else to sleep for four weeks or go back to Mexico. Many of them return in the new year. One has been staying there for 15 years.

Angel Calderon is the camp manager. He came to Napa in 1980 from Mexico, working as a dishwasher and cook in various tony restaurants until last year when he took over running the camp from Isaac Perez, who had been in charge for years.

“I found 120 people living here, in the trailer and the bathroom, everywhere,” Calderon says. “Perez just opened the door and said, ‘Come in.’ It was out of control. He was crying. He was under a lot of stress. He didn’t turn anyone away. It was a crisis.”

Some of the unregistered guests were relocated to a tent city that was set up on county land on a hillside along the Silverado Trail for the duration of the harvest. This year the tent city was replaced by a yurt village, in which the county spent $130,000 to put up seasonal housing manufactured by the Nesting Bird Yurt Co., an Oregon company that sells dwellings made from modern materials but based on the ancient Central Asia design. The dozen yurts house 40 men.

Those looking for beds fall into two broad categories: farm workers who spend the better part of the year in the Napa Valley and return occasionally to Mexico, usually around the holidays, and those who flock to the valley just for harvest. This is the time of year that camp manager Calderon dreads. “The hardest part of the job is to send people away,” he says. “I see six or seven people in a van, and they look tired. They’ve traveled from Southern California or Oregon. They’ve been sleeping in the van for a week. It’s really hard to say, ‘We don’t have a place.’ I’ve sent away 160 people easily this year. This morning eight people came.”

If there is a bed available, Calderon needs to see a green card, a driver’s license or some sort of photo ID and proof of employment. He makes photo copies and files the documents away. “Don’t ask me if they are good papers or homemade,” he says. “To me they all look good.”

Next year the county is hoping to open a 60-bed camp along the Silverado Trail on land provided by the Joseph Phelps Vineyards. But no one expects it to be enough. “It’s admittedly a small step,” says consultant Heymann.

One of those who sleeps on the porch at the Catholic church is Martin Alvarez. Early this summer Alvarez, 35, left his family in Michoacan to spend four months picking grapes in Napa Valley. He didn’t have any trouble finding work, but finding a place to sleep was another matter. He wound up at the Catholic church, where he gets up every morning at 5, goes to work in vineyards during the day, comes back to the church for supper and then goes off to a night job as a construction worker. Seven days a week. “It’s only work and sleep,” he says.

Every week or two, Alvarez buys a $5 phone card and calls his wife. He saves most of what he makes, spending $19 at a local store to wire $100 to Mexico. Alvarez held on to $2,500, which he used to purchase a 1981 Toyota truck that he will drive home after the harvest. Alvarez plans to go home in November, after four months of solid work.

Next year he says he will return to Napa Valley, where as hard as life can be, it is still a better place to earn money than any other place he has found.

“A lot of people don’t come back,” he says. “I’d like to stay here. It’s better than Mexico.”