Housing Strain Unravels Community Ties

Sally Castro’s eyes glisten with tears when she describes how tough it was to uproot her family and move from Santa Ana, a city she loved.

Four hundred miles north, Aaron Pasch tells of the frustrating five-year house search he and his wife endured before giving up and moving. Now he has a two-hour commute to his job as a Santa Cruz County paramedic.

David Buckmaster never would have resigned as mayor of San Carlos had he been able to find an affordable place in that small Bay Area city.

“Normal people with normal incomes,” he says, “can’t come here anymore.”

In Stockton, a family with thousands of dollars to spend lives for weeks in a shelter for the homeless before finding an available apartment. The vacancy rate, even in that unassuming town, is a stunning 1%.

In San Luis Obispo, college students take classes in interviewing with landlords. Many rent by the bed instead of the room.

And in the farm town of Los Banos, fully a third of the residents rise before dawn for a bumper-to-bumper commute to the Silicon Valley--nearly 100 miles--because living closer would cost so much more.

In recent years California’s economy has created jobs and big tax surpluses. But it also has displaced people and businesses across the state, disrupting more lives in more far-flung regions than ever before. Even signs of a possible slowdown are unlikely to bring immediate relief to the state’s pent-up pressure for affordable housing.

Growing numbers of Californians, among them teachers and secretaries, professors and paramedics, cops and carpenters--the middle-income glue of any community--are finding themselves squeezed out.

The costs--to them, to their employers and to society--are measured in a steady erosion of the quality of their lives: from constant worries about rent hikes to tedious hours on the road; from the need to leave a satisfying job to the dawning realization that owning a home is just not possible.

“We are the strength of the community,” Dori Glasco, a Santa Cruz renter, wrote in an anguished letter to that city’s Sentinel newspaper last month. “What will the community do when we are forced to leave?”

Those struggling no longer are just the poorest, the farm laborers and hotel workers. To be sure, those folks still suffer most. Where a family could once afford at least a cheap apartment in a transitional area, now they are doubling up, or bunking 10 to a motel room along places like “the Strip” in Salinas.

Nor are the cities affected only those next to the very tightest markets--San Francisco and, lately, San Jose. Communities now feeling the pinch include Watsonville, Napa, Hollister and others long considered too far from the major job centers to be practical for commuters.

One Family Resorts to Living at Shelter

Even in once reasonably priced towns like Stockton, refugees from the exorbitant housing values of the Bay Area are driving up the asking prices. That hurts people like Pam Anderson and Rich Deurloo.

A couple with two children, Anderson and Deurloo had to stay at a shelter for the homeless in Stockton for six months, even though they had managed to scrape together $7,000 to spend on an apartment.

Once a junior buyer at a fiber-optics company in the Bay Area, Anderson laments the changes in Stockton. “This place used to be very affordable,” she says. No more.

Many families earning decent wages say their experiences are making a mockery of the very term “affordable housing.”

Dave Herndon, 40, pulls in $80,000 a year as a fire captain for Santa Cruz County. But after losing a house to divorce five years ago, just as prices shot up, and then having two rentals sold from under him, he is now living in a trailer home with his four kids.

He hopes to save enough soon to build a house on a lot he owns, but worries that the escalating market will push him out of town.

“If there’s nothing in sight for under $400,000, it doesn’t matter what you make,” Herndon says.

Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, says a significant shift is underway: “What’s new is that it is now in the vast middle class of California that we are piling up the losses. And not all of them are measurable.”

Two years ago, Dean Wilson, 53, an accountant renting in San Jose, was watching television when a “Roseanne” rerun came on. The TV parents were forced to tell their children they had no college money for them. Neither did Wilson. And as long as he stayed in San Jose, he never would. So he packed up his family and moved to a five-bedroom house in Los Banos, which he bought for $150,000.

“I make pretty good money, but I can’t afford to buy [in San Jose],” he says.

Jalel Rejeb is swimming against the same tide.

Rejeb’s office at San Jose State University is crammed with computers, books and academic paraphernalia, like that of any professor. For the moment, though, it also holds his microwave oven, home computer and boxes of clothing.

An assistant electrical engineering professor who moved to San Jose this summer from Alabama, Rejeb, 36, has been stunned by the prices and unable to find an apartment he feels he can afford.

And with his housing problem unresolved, he has delayed his wedding, which was set for early in the spring. “We just have to wait,” he says.

There are several reasons for the crunch, the experts say.

Population Growth Outstrips Construction

Housing construction, especially in desirable areas with rigid growth control policies, has not kept pace with the population or the expanding job market. In the 1980s, for instance, 4,300 housing units were built in Santa Barbara. In the ‘90s, only 922 went up. Statewide, roughly half as many units were built in the ‘90s as in each of the previous two decades; meanwhile, the state added nearly four jobs for each new house.

Intensifying the problem since Proposition 13 sharply limited property taxes 22 years ago, California cities have found they can raise more money for services by favoring commercial rather than residential development.

Now, after a decade of underbuilding by as many as 100,000 homes a year, “we’re in a hole that it’ll be really hard to dig out of,” says Cathy Creswell, acting deputy director of policy development at the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

So for the millions of people who don’t own homes--estimated to be nearly half of all Californians--and for those who have to move because of job changes or growing families, the economic realities are brutal:

* Only 30% of California households can afford to buy the median-priced homes in the areas where they live, October figures from the California Assn. of Realtors show.

* Almost three-fourths of renters statewide spend more than 30%--the recommended maximum--of their incomes on rent. Nearly a quarter of those--a million households--pay more than half, the California Budget Project said in a May report on the housing crisis.

* More and more people are leaving home earlier each day and commuting farther. On at least one crowded corridor, California 152, which connects the Central Valley with the Silicon Valley, fatal accidents have inched up this year with the volume, the California Highway Patrol says.

But the numbers can’t capture all the human toll: Longer hours of child care. Missed school events. Separations from friends and family.

And the exhaustion that Martha Mackey, 54, feels at the end of the day. Mackey, an administrative assistant at the UC Irvine College of Medicine in the city of Orange, commutes to her job each day--by car, train, bus and finally on foot--from her home in the Riverside County town of Wildomar.

Each evening, after the nearly four-hour round-trip commute, “I just drop,” she says.

Many of the strains are subtle. Yet sooner or later, Stephen Levy says, as a family’s favorite teacher is forced to quit, or a paramedic needed at an emergency gets stuck on his commute to work, those costs “will affect all of us.”

Dreams of Owning a Home Slip Away

David Buckmaster doesn’t want to leave San Carlos, the San Francisco peninsula town where he grew up. And many in the city of 30,000 wish he could stay.

Buckmaster is a 28-year-old with five years’ experience on the City Council, who served the last year as mayor. He and his wife, Kim, are doing well, by most measures. He is the manager of strategic partnerships for an Internet insurance company, and she is a first-grade teacher in a nearby school district.

But for several years, as house prices spiraled upward, they watched their dream of owning a home in San Carlos--any home--slip further away. “We were saving $1,000 a month, but we just couldn’t keep up,” David Buckmaster says.

This fall, when his company decided to move to Sacramento, partly because the price of housing had made it tough to attract and keep employees in San Carlos, the young couple gulped and decided to go too.

“We’re going to miss living in a town where we know everybody--and everybody knows us so well,” Buckmaster says wistfully.

Matthew Gaetano and Julie Hoffman, both in their mid-20s, live just down the peninsula in Mountain View, between the districts where they teach--Santa Clara and Union City across the bay.

Together they make nearly $100,000 a year, but they pay enough in housing that they can barely make ends meet. They recently moved out of a pleasant apartment in Palo Alto after their rent was raised 20% in a single month--from $1,375 to $1,650--and then hiked $200 more a month later.

Now, after giving away furniture and many of their clothes so they could fit into a smaller apartment, they pay $1,300 for a cramped unit in Mountain View.

Given their housing travails, traffic and other stresses of life in the area, they plan to move next summer--they don’t know where, but it will be out of the Bay Area, no matter what.

“It’s gotten really depressing. Instead of paying off our college loans, we’re taking steps backward,” Gaetano says.

Town Sees Mass Exodus at 4:30 a.m.

Police and fire departments generally want their employees to live close by; when extra help is needed in emergencies, it’s needed in a hurry.

So for many years, the Santa Cruz County Fire Department required its employees to live within 20 minutes of the station house. Last year, with the restriction forcing its new paramedics and firefighters to look for housing only in communities that number among the state’s most expensive, the department extended the radius to 40 miles.

But it made a further exception for Aaron Pasch. For five years, the veteran paramedic had rented a house in Santa Cruz and searched for a place his family could afford to purchase near his job in Aptos. Finally, in frustration, he appealed to the department, which allowed the family to move to Paso Robles, near San Luis Obispo--131 miles south.

Pasch works 24-hour shifts 10 times a month, often with an extra shift or two tacked on in overtime. Then, fighting fatigue, he gets on the road for the two-hour drive back home.

In between, he misses the chance to see his wife and two young children, who used to drop by the station when he worked overtime.

“What can you do?” Pasch says. “It was either the commute or taking a second job.”

Just how many are forcing themselves to make an extraordinary commute is clear each weekday morning before dawn on the western side of Los Banos, an old farm town on the way to Fresno. Even at that hour, the line of cars stretches into the distance toward San Jose and the job engines to the northwest.

“At 4:30 it’s a mass exodus,” Mayor Michael Amabile says. “All you see is red taillights.”

Los Banos is the newest bedroom community for the Silicon Valley. Housing projects ring the perimeter, once nothing but flat agricultural land. Home prices rose as much as $30,000 a month this fall.

And each weekday at 4:30 a.m., the gas stations and convenience stores along Highway 152 are jammed with Geo Metros, the fuel-stingy commuter car so popular in town that people call them “Los Banos Cadillacs.”

Nadine Mendoza travels from the community of Riverbank north of Modesto to Gilroy, 100 miles southwest. Her commute is two hours each way--that is, if she gets up as planned at 2:45 a.m. and leaves just before 4 a.m.

The effects of the squeeze are spreading to businesses, too: driving up retail lease costs; pushing even big companies to relocate to find housing that their employees can afford; and propelling cities, businesses and school districts into a search for solutions.

The Paseo Nuevo Mall in Santa Barbara has lost several local businesses--a jeweler, a cookie maker and a stamp store--since leases spiked in 1998.

Shop owners Don and Marge Schroth had to move their candle store to a side street when the price went up, they say. They had spent seven years and $70,000 in their spot at the mall, but they couldn’t stay.

For “little mom-and-pop shops,” Don Schroth says, “forget it.”

Housing pressures also make it tough for businesses or government bodies in the tighter markets to recruit or keep their workers, especially younger ones who want to buy their first homes, employers say.

“Housing is always the issue,” Santa Cruz schools Supt. Roy Nelson says. Last summer, for instance, three teachers happily accepted offers of jobs in the district but reneged as soon as they looked for homes. Increasingly, others depart after a few years, convinced they will never be able to purchase homes there.

“We’re becoming a training ground,” Nelson says.

Other employers, including Plantronics, an international telecommunications company headquartered in Santa Cruz, say they lose as many as 30% of prospective employees because of housing pressures.

Perhaps the most telling impacts, though, are on the individuals and families who are struggling with tough decisions--or on those, like Sally and Joe Castro, who have already made them.

The Castros purchased their first home 12 years ago in Santa Ana, the community where both grew up. They loved the comforting familiarity of life there, close to family, to friends and to their jobs, his repairing water meters for the city and hers processing claims for Allstate insurance.

Their daughter was born the same year and their son three years later. The price of housing was rising, so the Castros waited for it to drop before trying for a bigger house.

In 1997, though, with the kids still sharing a room, they started a house search. They couldn’t find anything they liked, and decided to wait.

When they finally looked again this summer, “we were devastated,” Sally Castro says. “The prices in Orange County had blown us out of the water.”

Eventually, in Riverside, the Castros found a place they liked and could afford. Sally has managed to transfer to a local Allstate office, but Joe has joined the crush of commuters fighting its way into Orange County each weekday over the 91 Freeway and other horribly crowded roads.

There are other losses as well. The Castros miss the neighbors who helped the kids with homework and became like family members, and they miss Joe’s parents, now 78 and 73, who were there, five minutes away, to help out and be helped.

Sally glances at a photograph, and her eyes fill. It’s of four handprints, with all four names and the date--11-21-92--written underneath, set fast in the concrete of their old house, and the community they had to leave.

“We miss it,” she says softly.

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Roads Well Traveled

An affordable house inland often bears an additional cost: a long commute to and from work. In Northern California, Martin Wuest uses his CB radio to keep abreast of road conditions. In Southern California, Martha Mackey depends on four modes of transportation--including her feet.

*

From Los Banos to San Jose

3:50 a.m. Wuest leaves home. When he reaches Wal-Mart at the western edge of town he gets on his CB radio and talks with fellow members of the “Wild Bunch” CB commuter caravan to learn what traffic conditions are like.

4:45 a.m. He reaches U.S. 101 and heads north.

5:06 a.m. When he arrives at San Jose, the most direct route to work is via U.S. 101. But if that’s jammed he uses Interstate 680.

5:20 a.m. If he picks U.S. 101, he exits at Brokaw Road; if he picks I-680, he exits at Hostetter Road. He arrives at his office at Pericom, a maker of semiconductors. Distance one way: 86 miles. Total time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; if he leaves later in the morning, the drive can last 2 hours, 30 minutes.

*

From Wildomar to Orange

5:50 a.m. Mackey leaves home. She drives north up Interstate 15, then heads east on California 91. She exits at La Sierra to get to the Metrolink train station in Riverside.

6:35 a.m. She boards the train and heads west, arriving at the Metrolink station in Orange at about 7:15.

7:20 a.m. She takes an Orange County Transportation Authority shuttle bus to the corner of City Drive and Chapman Avenue in Orange and steps off.

7:40 a.m. She goes the rest of the way on foot, walking half a mile to her job with the UC Irvine College of Medicine in Orange. Distance one way: 50 miles. Total time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

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California Housing Snapshot

As the economy pushes up home prices, many middle-class Californians are being driven from their communities because they can no longer afford to buy or rent. The index below shows the percentage of households that can afford to buy median-priced homes in the area where they live.

Source: California Assn. of Realtors