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Affordable Housing

3/6/2018

I often speak at public meetings about the state of affordable housing in our region. In both our rural and larger towns, we’re seeing many of the same challenges as large urban areas:

The cost of housing requires a large percentage of many people’s household incomes. Many people in our region can only get part-time, low paid, and/or seasonal work that leaves very little room for living expenses after housing costs.
There is not enough low cost housing units in our region, so even when we have public agencies helping people with housing, they often cannot find affordable apartments or houses in any nearby community.
Transportation is a huge challenge for rural areas and prevents people from being able live too far from work if they do not have their own car.

What is the federal role in affordable housing, and how can we make improvements?

The federal government has a housing subsidy program, called Section 8, that provides housing vouchers that can be associated with a renter or with a particular housing unit. In our region of California, like many other places, the program is not working very well. There are also federal financial incentive programs to encourage development of affordable housing, but in many rural areas, we are not seeing any new housing development, much less affordable housing development, so these programs do not have much impact on our communities. In the end, much of our less-expensive housing units are old, dilapidated, and may contain hazardous building materials or mold that is not healthy for tenants.

I think we can develop innovative programs that can help coordinate federal, state, and local programs and laws to improve affordable housing.

Support existing incentives and develop more financial incentives like tax credits and deductions for property management and rehabilitation of older affordable housing, including removing hazardous building materials. In the process, we also need to support and encourage more people to become responsible landlords.
Support, defend, and improve the Community Reinvestment Act that applies to banks and ensures financing for low income housing.
Provide communities, through social service and community development agencies, with technology tools to support a wide range of tenants and landlords in transparency, accountability, and problem-solving so that we have a better path from homelessness into temporary housing and long-term housing while helping both tenants and landlords comply with legal requirements and financial responsibility.
Focus on increasing the voucher values for Section 8 housing to expand the universe of housing units that can participate in the program and work much more proactively to increase the number of dedicated Section 8 units in every community across our region.
Expand our rural transportation capacity by coordinating county senior transportation and regional bus/van networks so that they can run more often and connect up to each other to more effectively support people going to work or appointments throughout the day.

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Forest Lands and Watersheds

8/4/2017

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This week I spent several days with representatives from the Maidu community, government agencies, non-profits, and academia in Genesee Valley, Plumas County. We camped in a beautiful stand of trees during the hottest day of the year and got drenched in a thunderstorm and talked and laughed and learned together. It was an honor to be invited to participate in this gathering.

I learned so much that it’s hard to capture in a short article.

Defining healthy forests can be thought of as starting with wildlife refugia - where intact old areas of growth still exist, and then expanding outwards to encourage recovery of forest ecosystems by managing succession of different tree species. But the small plants are also so important! I learned about huckleberries and other edible plants that used to be abundant in this area of the Northern Sierra and consumed by the Maidu.
The divisions and connections between urban and rural are not so simple, and we need to move beyond this kind of dividing line to focus on the role of the mountain watersheds in California’s future and success, regardless of where the water from our region eventually goes.
Managing a forested landscape can combine multiple objectives, like fire resilience, wildlife support, lumber production, or restoration to a different mix of tree species. Bob Beckwith is gradually returning his property in Genesee to an oak-silver pine woodland using a lot of labor to thin out the fast growing pines, carefully choosing weather conditions for prescribed burns, and providing refugia for wildlife by leaving dead standing oak trees in place. He’d like to see the Forest Service use more prescribed burns on the ridge above his property to remove excess biomass.
Communication is enormously important in both planning and monitoring the effects of projects that treat forest areas to make them more fire resilient. Forest collaboration groups do the very hard work of figuring out what works at the ground level, from project to project, with the hope that we can identify broad sources of funding to expand these smaller projects across all of California’s upper watersheds. Furthermore, the language we use to describe ecosystems and watersheds can shape our thinking about these places.
I also got a chance to hear lots of details about the Sierra Institute’s work on developing a pilot scale project using biomass to generate electricity and heat. I have a lot of thoughts about that to share in a future article.

We talked and talked and talked about future projects that balance fire resistance with timber production and ecosystem restoration. These kinds of meetings are critical to California’s future, and we need to talk a lot more about how to best model the way and scale up projects to cover our entire forest landscape.

For more information about Genesee Valley and forest planning, visit these websites:

http://www.geneseefireplan.org/news.html

http://www.plumasaudubon.org/genesee-valley.html

http://www.frlt.org/conserve-land/success-stories/heart-k-ranch

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Affordable Housing

Forest Lands and Watersheds

Marty Walters

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