Rural Laws: April, 2002 - Number #1

San Joaquin Valley Housing. Overcrowding is usually considered an urban, not a rural problem. The Los Angeles Times on February 4, 2002 profiled Lost Hills, California, an unincorporated city of 2,000 about 40 miles northwest of Bakersfield, the place with the highest density in the 2000 census- 5.6 persons per housing unit. In many cases, several families, or an extended farm worker family, live in one housing unit.

A typical one-bedroom trailer home in Lost Hills rents for $300 a month, and a three-bedroom trailer home rents for up to $430. Water is expensive, so most houses and trailers do not have landscaping. There are few services in town, and the nearest law enforcement is 20 miles away in Buttonwillow.

Parajaro, near Watsonville, is 15 percent more dense that it was 1990. The mayor of Greenfield, another Salinas valley city of 13,000, says that even if the housing stock were increased by two or three times, there would still be people living in garages.

Firebaugh, a city in Fresno county, received a $400,000 grant from the state Housing and Community Development Department to improve its water system and preserve 125 jobs at a tomato processing plant.

Napa Housing. Napa county has approved several measures, including a $10 an acre assessment on grape growers, to provide more housing for farm workers, especially those in the Napa Valley for the harvest. Napa has 40,000 acres of grapes, and the state-approved assessment district permits a tax of up to $10 an acre to generate funds for farm worker housing, including operating camps. Grape growers who present proof that they house their own workers would be exempted from the tax.

Napa county voters on March 5, 2002 approved Measure L, 71-29 percent, which would amend the Napa County General Plan to allow agricultural landowners to split off sections of two acres or more for the purpose of constructing farm worker housing. Measure L modifies Napa County's Agricultural Lands Preservation Initiative, also known as Measure J, which voters approved November 6, 1990. Measure J specifies that voters must decide whether they want to change the minimum parcel size in the county's general plan, which established 40 acres as the minimum parcel size for housing in county areas designated as agricultural resource, and 160 acres as the minimum parcel size in the county areas designated as agriculture, watershed and open space. Since 1993, there have been seven ballot measures on land use, with three approved and four rejected.

Napa County has four camps for farm workers that provide 177 beds. They operate at a loss- their budget in 2001 was $593,404, and the shortfall of $230,539 was covered by wine industry donations. Napa County's planning commission approved 300 more beds to house farm workers, the equivalent of five additional 60-bed camps.

A 60-bed camp, to be built with recycled materials and with soccer fields and community gardens, is planned for eight acres of land donated by vintner Joseph Phelps. Tom Shelton, president of Joseph Phelps Vineyards, said: "If we want these professional field workers to return year after year, then we better take care of them and provide them with suitable housing." The median price of existing houses sold in Napa County during the first nine months of 2001 was $350,000.

There is experimental housing for migrants being built around the US. Design Corps, whose executive director is Bryan Bell Jr, has built farm worker housing in Adams County, Pennsylvania, and Sampson County, North Carolina and has projects planned for South Carolina and Virginia. Design Corps developed a prefabricated metal building with baked-on paint, intended to house five or six people in 720 square feet. About 14 feet wide, the unit has two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom and a kitchen. With construction costs subsidized by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the cost to farmers of the first 13 units has been about $45,000 per unit.

A film by UCLA professor John T. Caldwell, Rancho California (Por Favor), documents conditions in migrant camps near Carlsbad, San Marcos, Escondido and Vista in north San Diego county. Caldwell, who narrates the film, tells of his search for "examples of self-representation" in the relationship between camp inhabitants and surrounding residents.

San Diego. Northern San Diego county has a reputation for some of the worse farm worker housing in the state, in part due to high land costs and the tendency of growers to lease land before it is converted for urban uses. Hundreds of workers live in canyons and on vacant lots. Near Fallbrook, Ecumenical Migrant Outreach is building "Superadobe housing," using $400 worth of soil, strands of barbed wire for support, material to make sandbags, and a small amount of lime or cement. The sandbags are stacked in layers eight feet high, narrowing at the top to form a self-supporting dome, similar to an igloo, with the barbed wire used to hold the structure in place.

Architect Nader Khalili of the Cal-Earth Institute (www.calearth.org), promotes the concept as emergency shelter for poor and war-ravaged countries around the world. Grower Harry Singh & Sons built a dorm in 1990 in Oceanside for 328 workers at a cost of $2.5 million.

Ventura. Ventura County, with 10 cities and a $1-billion-a-year agricultural industry based on 100,000 irrigated acres, is surveying its farm workers to determine their housing needs and to decide whether more affordable housing is needed. Estimates of the number of farm workers range from 15,000 to 34,000, with a median estimate of 22,000. Voters in 1998 approved tight restrictions on development of cropland and open space in 1998, the so-called SOAR initiatives.

The UFW claims 27,000 members around the state, including 1,000 in Ventura county.

In 2002, the median cost of a house in Ventura county was $300,000, and the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $1,261 a month. The Housing Opportunities Made Easier (HOME) program evaluates housing projects, and supported the Ahmanson Ranch project, a plan to build 3,050 new homes, including 774 for low- to moderate-income residents. Biotechnology firm Amgen, with 5,400 employees, is the county's largest private employer.

The leading crops in Ventura County are lemons and strawberries, each contributing about 20 percent to total farm sales. Boskovich Farms has 7,000 acres in Ventura County that produce 20 varieties of vegetables, including green onions, spinach, cilantro and celery; Boskovich also has operations in Arizona and Mexico. Santa Paula-based Limoneira Company, with 3,000 acres of avocados and citrus, closed its 1930s-era orange packinghouse near the town in 2001 and shifted packing operations to the Fillmore-Piru Citrus plant in Piru. Dearorff-Jackson Co., grows strawberries, lettuce, celery and cauliflower on 900 acres.

Pacific Earth Resources (2,000 acres) and Southland Sod Farms (1,200 acres) have helped to make Ventura county the sod capital of California- there are 12,000 acres of sod in the state, and they generated $124 million in revenues.

Ventura County has problems with crime, especially theft of crops. About a third of California's 58 counties have law enforcement personnel dedicated to solving and preventing agricultural crimes; the Farm Bureau offers rewards of up to $1,000 to tipsters who turn in thieves.

Coachella. The Coachella Valley, between the Little San Bernardino Mountains to the north and the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa ranges to the south, is home to 330,000 people spread across nine cities, including Palm Springs. A developer has proposed the Joshua Hills development, which would include a university, a technology center, 7,000 housing units, three hotels, two country clubs, 12 golf courses, shops and restaurants and 15,000 employees.

Renewal Communities. Orange Cove and Parlier, two of California's poorest cities, were among 12 US rural communities selected by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be "renewal communities." This status allows employers hiring workers in Orange Cove and Parlier to receive tax credits of up to $1,500 a worker, and up to $2,400 a worker hired from groups with traditionally high unemployment rates or other special needs.

Orange Cove's population, about 8,500, is 90 percent Hispanic, and half of its workers are employed as seasonal agricultural laborers or packing-shed workers. Unemployment averages about 30 percent, and 43 percent of residents are considered poor. Parlier, about 16 miles west of Orange Cove, has a population of about 11,700 that is 97 percent Hispanic. Its unemployment rate is 33 percent and 40 percent of its residents are poor.

Hispanic political power in the San Joaquin Valley is increasing. Hispanics are about 45 percent of residents in Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties, and 15 to 20 percent of voters. Al Villa won a seat on the Fresno City Council in 1970, the first Hispanic elected in Fresno, and Armando Rodriguez was elected to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors in 1971.

In 2002, six of California's 52 US representatives are Hispanic, as are seven of 40 state senators and 20 of 80 Assembly members. Cruz Bustamante of Fresno is the state's lieutenant governor, which makes him the highest-ranking elected Hispanic official in the United States.

The San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, an arm of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, has opposed the construction of additional dairies in the San Joaquin Valley, arguing that they add to pollution. In response, US Representative Cal Dooley (D-CA) asked for an investigation of California Rural Legal Assistance Inc, and its relationship to the Center. CRLA has its headquarters in San Francisco and has 20 field offices around the state.

The San Joaquin Valley, a 275-mile-long stretch of land that runs down the center of the state roughly from Sacramento to Bakersfield, needs to eliminate 300 tons of nitrous oxide pollution a day to meet federal clean-air standards. The three-million resident, eight-county San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District sued the State Air Resources Board (ARB) in February 2002 to get the ARB to order the Bay area to do more to limit pollution, some of which is carried eastward into the San Joaquin Valley by prevailing winds.

Methamphetamine has become "the No. 1 drug problem in rural America," according to Asa Hutchinson, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. California and Washington are the leading meth producers.

Ben Fox, "Volunteers testing new solution to California's housing shortage for migrants," AP, April 1, 2002. Catherine Saillant, "Housing for Farm Workers Under Review," Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2002. Elizabeth Mullener, "Migrant housing is N.O. native's specialty," Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 18, 2002. Pamela J. Podger, "Migrants' housing on Napa ballot," San Francisco Chronicle, February 19, 2002. Patricia Leigh Brown, "Oklahomans Try to Save Their California Culture," New York Times, February 5, 2002. Timothy Egan, "Meth Building Its Hell's Kitchen in Rural America," New York Times, February 6, 2002. John Johnson, "Crowded living in California's Open Spaces," Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2002. Nathan Crabbe, "Cap placed on beds for migrant farmworkers," Napa Register, January 17, 2002. Gregory, James N. 1999. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. Oxford University Press.