Heart and Home is a column by Josh Ishimatsu
Housing affordability impacts so many aspects of our lives and the high price of housing in our region hurts us in ways that are big and obvious (our homelessness crisis, for example) but also in lots of smaller ways we don’t always understand as being related to housing.
Top of mind and somewhat selfishly, I’ve been thinking about this in terms of staffing for our organization. Hiring and retaining good people is essential to any firm, but it is especially important for a small nonprofit like ourselves. We have been lucky to have been able to hire great staff. Our difficulty is more in our ability to retain people. Losing one person in a small organization can be like losing an entire department or division for a larger organization. Staff turnover just hits different for a small org.
Staffing for a nonprofit organization is not something that we typically think of as related to housing affordability. Staffing is usually more about stuff like salary, benefits, hours of work, work culture, chances for advancement, etc. But, I know from conversations with former and current staff that housing costs weigh heavily on all of these considerations. Even for the longest tenured staff people at SV@Home, they still think about the price of housing and whether their housing costs will force them to change jobs or move out of the area.
For younger staff, it’s even more difficult. We have one staff person (a relatively recent hire) who is currently looking for a new place – and having a hard time. We have another staff person who recently moved into an ADU in Berryessa (Hooray for ADUs!). Both of these people are the type of people who we should all want to be able to attract to and keep in this region – smart, driven, well-educated, with marketable technical skills. Nice, good people who have ties to the area, who have reason to want to stay here.
Our ability to retain our awesome staff is directly related to the high cost of housing in the area. And the irony of this situation in that we are an affordable housing advocacy organization is not lost upon us. Our effectiveness is hampered by the very issue that we seek to address.
Expanding outward and generalizing from our experience as an employer, for our regional economy to thrive, we want to attract and retain good people to work in our County. For our economy to function, we need a full diversity of types of work, not just well-paid tech workers. The bottom line is that, for our economy to thrive, we need more housing of all types, especially affordable housing.
And more than just a thriving economy, we want a fun place to live with good food, lively events, enriching activities and places to go – a healthy place to raise families or to grow older in. For all of these things, we want a region that has artists and teachers and nurses and chefs and line cooks and wait staff and firefighters and childcare providers and homecare providers and maintenance workers and so many other people who are currently struggling to find and afford housing in our Valley. Who are struggling to keep their housing if they have it.
If we want good things, we need to be able to house the people who make those good things happen. If we want good things, we need more affordable housing.