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The U.S. Census demographically describes West Marin as a community of about 10,000 mostly white people. But there is a hidden population of roughly 2,500 low-wage workers living silently in substandard conditions, in trailers and barns, suffering from poor health due to mold and lack of heat, drinking tainted water and using port-o-lets.
These findings were revealed in a yearlong study, released at a community meeting Thursday. It was sponsored by the Marin Community Foundation, the County of Marin and the West Marin Fund. Beginning in 2023, a bilingual research team interviewed 150 people, representing the housing situations of over 363 family members, who live in or work in West Marin.
They found that 81% of those interviewed were born in Mexico, most from the state of Jalisco. Their families lived in West Marin an average of 20 years, and half of them worked in agriculture. Half of them also did not have documented legal immigration status.
“Marin is one of the smallest counties in the state of California. It’s one of the wealthiest counties in the state of California; and almost always, for decades, it has been the most segregated county in the state of California,” said Rhea Suh, president and CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, to the nonprofit organizations and civic leaders in the room. “I wonder why that’s acceptable. I wonder why, despite the fact we have known that for decades, despite the fact that there have been articles about that, and there has been shame put upon us about that. Why has nothing changed?” Suh said. “How do we get past the challenge of actually having to bear witness to the suffering, the indignity, the injustice that we know, that we knew even about before the report?”
Suh called for collaboration between nonprofits and stakeholders.
“We need more money. We need more people. We need more ears and hearts in this room,” she said.
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First: Rhea Suh, President and CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, poses tough questions about affordable housing at a community meeting. Last: Cassandra Benjamin, a housing advocate who lead a worker housing study in West Marin, addresses a meeting of nonprofits and community groups on Sept. 5, 2024 (Ruth Dusseault / Bay City News)
“We really didn’t understand the depth of the poor conditions that our rental units are in,” said Cassandra Benjamin, a housing advocate hired to run the study. “Or how underground the rental economy is. It’s not like in a city where you can just find a unit online and look at it and it’s been inspected. Our housing stock out here is very rural. It’s very ad hoc, and most of the people we talked to are spending more than 50% of their income on housing.”
The researchers also conducted in-depth interviews with 68 Latino workers, representing 281 family members, as well as 17 agricultural organizations. Average household incomes for 72% of respondents was under $60,000, and 85% of them spent more than a third of that income on housing. The study found that 71% of those surveyed lived on a ranch and 41% lived in housing provided by their employer. There are about 350 farming and ranching operations in West Marin, including oyster farms, with a lot of the land dedicated to dairy.”In this area, the most important relationship between housing and the industry is in the dairy business,” said Vince Trotter with the UC Extension Service, which provides technical guidance to farmers and ranchers.
“You need people to be able to tend to animals at all hours, when they are sick or calving or need to be milked. But it creates all kinds of power dynamics where your housing is contingent on your job. If you lose your job, you lose your housing. So how much can I say about my housing if potentially that it threatens my job? How much do I say about my work?”
“We don’t feel like we are part of the community, because a community doesn’t allow a part of it to suffer in this way.”
Alma Sanchez, farmworker
Farming in Marin is not a big moneymaker, said Trotter, and lack of worker housing is a big part of the economic burden. Trotter points to one of the recommendations in the study, which is to bring in nonprofits that help mitigate and leverage those relationships.
“It’s hard because the owners don’t have the finances to fix up these properties, “said Benjamin. “When people are offering rental housing, many of them are ranch owners, they’re old agricultural properties. Sometimes they aren’t even doing agriculture anymore, but they have the old buildings they’re renting out, which sometimes is a critical part of their business.”
“I have been exposed to housing in deplorable situations, filled with moldy carpets, buildings that emit fiber glass and rust, not to mention the water,” said Alma Sanchez, one of the interviewers on the study team. She said the most profound effect is the anxiety and depression of her community, as they take care of cows at all hours of the night, work with little sleep and have little time for their families.
“Adults are ignoring their own respiratory issues because they’re much more focused on the health of their children, who are also being affected,” said Sanchez. “We don’t feel like we are part of the community, because a community doesn’t allow a part of it to suffer in this way.”
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The report proposed several solutions which were discussed at Thursday’s gathering. The first goal was to help the Latinx community learn about tenant rights and better represent themselves, which is difficult in unincorporated West Marin.
“Latino neighbors have been hiding in shadows for far too long,” said Nayeli Bernal, the research director on the project. “Nobody takes the time to educate our people.”
At the meeting, Benjamin called for nonprofit housing developers to build small-scale multi-family units. She asked existing owners of second homes in West Marin to rent to locals . She mentioned examples of lease-to-local programs in Lake Tahoe and Taos, New Mexico that encourage owners of second homes to lease to locals part of the year.
Urgent need for housing solutions
Streamlining code changes and permitting processes was another solution.
“It’s no surprise to anyone that there just isn’t enough housing in West Marin,” said Agnes Cho, who worked on the study. “A lot of the rental housing that we do have is unpermitted and they’re under the table per se.”
She said this condition makes people live out of sight.
“Nobody is looking to build something with hundreds of units or Starbucks or anything else,” said Benjamin. “There’s been a lot of good environmental and agricultural protection here, but you can have housing too. For example, in our housing element they identified sites owned by the Tamala School District where you could get around 20 to 30 units, and the county owns a property in Nicasio.”
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Benjamin said there is room for people to add accessory dwelling units to their homes or build two- to four-unit apartments on their land. She mentioned a state housing bond initiative in the upcoming election called Proposition 5, which would allow local and regional governments to run their own affordable housing programs, the way school districts fund themselves.
“Land trusts are the only ones brave enough to build something out in the middle of nowhere,” Benjamin said. “Community Land Trust of West Marin is partnering with Eden Housing, so they have 30 to 50 units. But most of the land trust projects are one to eight units.”
Marin County Executive Derek Johnson called on the landowners to open their minds to sharing space with the workforce that makes West Marin happen, referring to the value of the region’s scenic landscape.
“Sometimes sacred cows make the best burgers,” Johnson said.
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