Valley Center Need

Regarding your Feb. 26 article “Growth Debate Divides Rural Valley Center,” what keeps getting lost in the visiting and revisiting of Valley Center’s “growth debate” are the housing needs of farm workers on whose backs the area’s rural character is preserved. Conditions under which laborers who cultivate and harvest citrus and avocados live are appalling, yet remain unaddressed.

A recent field study on homeless in Valley Center, done by San Diego State social work students in cooperation with county Planning Department staff, showed that at least 87% of a representative sample interviewed were either homeless or lived in badly substandard housing. This figure is all the more distressing when one considers that: 1) 77% had been in Valley Center for over six months, with the bulk of those needing adequate housing having resided there between 1 and 15 years, and 2) the overwhelming majority worked five or more days per week and were willing to pay rent of up to $400 a month. Not surprisingly, three-quarters of the interviewees worked in agriculture.

To say there is a critical need to house poor but very productive members of that community is, then, a vast understatement. Despite this, the Valley Center Planning Group has been bent on a highly exclusionary land-use plan which would make no provision whatsoever for lower-income people--opting instead for single-family, detached dwellings on “estate-size” parcels. Such a stance is, of course, tantamount to the construction of a moat around Valley Center’s perimeter to keep out all but the prosperous resident.

If “slow-growthers” want to show that they are not the elitists developers say they are, and if developers want to show that their much touted concern over affordable housing is not just so much campaign rhetoric, farm worker housing in Valley Center is the issue around which both sides should come together. Otherwise, a pox on both their houses, so to speak . . .

CLAUDIA E. SMITH

Oceanside