Deja Vu All Over Again

In July of 2002, the Mendocino Institute published a paper titled: Mendocino Coast: The Crisis in Affordable Housing. The Mendocino Institute was organized 2 years earlier as a not-for-profit research and educational center to focus on several projects, one of which was working with The Mendocino Coast Community Coordinating Council (MC4) to create a needs assessment of affordable housing on the North Coast. 

The paper starts with a comment by Supervisor David Colfax (Fifth District), speaking at an MC4 event on affordable housing, in which he describes the housing situation on the coast as an emergency.  What made it an emergency? The paper details widespread homelessness, substandard housing, the short supply of subsidized housing, senior housing that's at or near capacity, endless requests for working class rentals, and the gap between wages and what it costs to rent or own a home. And these were just some of the issues they describe; the list was extensive and disheartening.

Local lore is that the housing problem started when Georgia Pacific closed their mill; I was surprised to see this paper was published a few months before the last mill workers were let go (the mill closed in September of 2002).  

It's 17 years later and it's still an emergency with no solution in sight.

Read the complete paper here: mendocinoinstitute.org/AffordHousing.html