“In every single meeting, no matter who convened it, we were shining a light on a preexisting problem,” says Jen Klose, who was then serving as Santa Rosa School Board President and who now serves as Executive Director of Generation Housing (Gen H), a grassroots housing advocacy group that was seeded after the fires.
Of course, the housing crisis is the inherited, inevitable result of historical decisions and systemic issues that are far bigger than greedy landlords. Sonoma County was built on an idyllic, agrarian, suburban vision, not a more densely populated urban one.
As such, even as the population boomed in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when about half of all housing stock in the county was built, the zoning vastly favored single-family homes. This has resulted in a county with 135,000 single-structure units compared to just under 15,000 du-, tri-, and quadplexes and under 11,000 structures that house 5 to 19 units, according to an extensive report released by Gen H this past spring.
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