Summit Seeks Blueprint for New Farmworker Housing

Farmers, housing advocates and community leaders pledged Thursday to build on momentum surrounding the creation of new farmworker housing in Ventura County, saying the issue is critical to the stability of the county’s oldest and most prominent industry.

More than 300 people gathered in Santa Paula for the county’s first Farm Worker Housing Summit, a call to elected leaders and others to improve the crowded and sometimes dangerous housing conditions that low-paid farmworkers often are forced to endure.

Following a series of panel discussions, those in attendance called for the creation of task forces in each city to address farmworker housing needs and for elected bodies to review regulations that could be standing in the way of building such housing.

“I’m blown away -- this is just the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a decade or so of working in this county,” Oxnard poverty law attorney Barbara Macri-Ortiz told a standing-room-only audience at the Santa Paula Community Center. Macri-Ortiz has been at the center of several legal battles to force the construction of low-cost housing countywide.

“It really is a question of political will, and we’re in the process of getting the will here,” Macri-Ortiz added. “You show us the will, and we’ll show you the way.”

The issue has won attention in recent years as skyrocketing housing prices and soaring rents have made it tough on workers in all sectors to find affordable places to live.

Schoolteachers, biotech workers and corporate professionals all have felt the squeeze of a housing market in which the average rent is $1,300 a month and the median home price hit $414,000 by the end of 2003.

But the housing crunch has been especially hard on low-wage farmworkers, who earn on average less than $17,000 a year.

But in what many are calling an unprecedented spirit of cooperation, a campaign is underway to bring some relief to the county’s agricultural workforce.

The attention comes after years of arm-twisting by affordable-housing advocates -- lawsuits by legal aid attorneys over the years have prompted commitments to housing.

But it also has been spurred by a growing belief that, in order to keep farmers in business -- which Ventura County voters have said they want to do through the adoption of farmland preservation measures -- steps must be taken to house those who work the county’s $1-billion-a-year harvest.

“I think there has been a change in attitudes,” said fourth-generation Moorpark-area farmer David Schwabauer, president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “This is tremendous. I think there’s more awareness than there has ever been, and that’s really a good sign.”

Housing advocates from around the state were on hand Thursday to showcase model farmworker housing projects and prove that they can be built.

Peter Dreier, executive director of the Napa Valley Housing Authority, said his organization oversees more than 200 housing units built for workers in that grape-growing region.

Those projects include a 60-bed facility constructed last year after voters loosened zoning restrictions allowing landowners to section off small swaths of land to build housing.

Napa County growers also have agreed to tax themselves up to $10 an acre per year to cover the cost of operating the authority’s farmworker housing projects.

“The answer to your problem is in this room,” Dreier told attendees. “It takes a lot of dedication, a lot of hard work. But it can be done.”

Perhaps nowhere in California is more being done to solve the farmworker housing crisis than in Ventura County.

Saticoy-based Cabrillo Economic Development Corp. showcased a trio of housing projects currently in the pipeline for farmworker families, including a 24-unit apartment complex in downtown Oxnard scheduled to receive its first tenants March 1.

That $5.9-million project, known as the Meta Street Apartments, represents the first large-scale farmworker housing built in the county in a decade.

Federal assistance will ensure that no family pays more than 30% of its income toward rent. The complex also will feature an innovative effort to explore the link between housing quality and farmworker health, providing medical assistance and other services to more than 100 residents.

“This is the face of farmworker housing for us in this county,” said Jesse Ornelas, senior project manager with Cabrillo Economic Development Corp. “We have been trying to put together projects that have dignity ... and that will look this way 10 to 15 years from now.”