Buoyed by a sizable war chest, Democrat Adam Schiff spent heavily to propel himself and his desired opponent — former baseball star Steve Garvey, a Republican — into the November election for California’s U.S. Senate seat.
The matchup has likely guaranteed Schiff’s November victory, since no Republican has won a California statewide race in almost 20 years. Some Democrats rejoiced at the outcome, hoping it could free up more campaign cash to support Democrats in swing districts and states.
Progressives, however, are not happy.
Schiff’s boost for Garvey drew a sharp rebuke from some progressive groups, who argued his tactics elbowed out Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee — both popular among progressive voters — and could both encourage GOP turnout and dampen turnout among young voters of color to hurt Democrats in key congressional and legislative races in November.
“Adam Schiff’s selfishness may have just helped MAGA extremists win control of the same House of Representatives that oversees the presidential Electoral College count,“ said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which endorsed Porter.
Green on Wednesday called on Schiff to give millions of dollars to congressional candidates in battleground districts “that he just left out to dry.”
And Schiff’s defense of Israel in the Gaza war — at odds with progressives pushing for a permanent ceasefire — could discourage some Democrats from voting in the race, some warned.
“If Adam Schiff does not move towards a more progressive position on issues, especially with ceasefire, … he’s gonna run the real risk that base voters may sit it out this go around,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the grassroots advocacy group Our Revolution, which supported Lee.
Asked for comment, Schiff’s campaign pointed to a Fox11 News interview Wednesday in which Schiff was asked to respond to the criticism that his strategies could make it more difficult for Democrats to retake control of Congress.
“There’s only one Democrat who buys that argument,” Schiff said, referring to Porter, “who would think that one Democrat spending millions against another Democrat to beat each other up was a good idea for the party instead of being able to use those resources to elect other Democrats.”
Schiff also doubled down on his opposition to a permanent ceasefire, arguing it would “permanently entrench the terrorist organization like Hamas governing Gaza.”
The outrage from some progressives is a reality Schiff will have to face within his own party as he works to consolidate the Democratic vote for the November election.
While he has consistently placed first in polls among Democratic voters overall, Schiff was mostly popular among older, whiter homeowners, while Porter had more support among younger voters and those who identified as progressive Democrats, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll last week.
But could the splinter with progressives hurt Schiff’s chances of winning in November?
Unlikely, said Democratic strategist Garry South, who voted for Schiff.
“If progressive voters sit out the Senate race when the opponent to Adam Schiff is Steve Garvey, a guy who voted for Donald Trump twice, (you) might have to question their motivation,” he said.
The Gaza concern
Chants for a ceasefire in Gaza broke out minutes into Schiff’s victory speech Tuesday night, bringing the celebration in Los Angeles to a brief halt.
“Let Gaza Live!” Pro-ceasefire protesters scattered in the crowd repeatedly yelled, some holding their fists high.
It’s a signal that progressives in California are growing more frustrated with some Democratic officials’ reluctance to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza as civiliancasualties rise. During the California Democratic Party convention last November, Lee — the only one in the race to call for a permanent ceasefire at the time — won the plurality vote from party delegates, as pro-ceasefire protesters chanted her name.
Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland addresses delegates at the Democratic Party convention in Sacramento on Nov. 17, 2023. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters
Schiff has been in lockstep with the White House on the issue, on Tuesday backing a call for a temporary ceasefire backed by President Joe Biden, Politico reported. Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday called for an “immediate ceasefire” for at least six weeks as the administration continued to negotiate with Israel on a deal.
Biden has faced backlash from progressive voters for his stance on the Israel-Hamas war. In a February poll, 46% of the Democrats said they were dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the situation. In states including Minnesota and Michigan, droves of voters voted “uncommitted” to express their frustration with Biden’s stance on the Gaza war as he faces a sure rematch with Trump in November. In a similar protest, California leaders with the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Democratic voters to leave the presidential race blank.
Geevarghese argued that a temporary ceasefire is not enough, and that Biden’s shift toward a temporary ceasefire was merely “rhetoric.”
“The base is angry and disgusted with the conduct of foreign policy by the U.S. government, and wants to see concrete action,” he said.
“I see both the administration and Adam Schiff recognizing there’s deep voter discontent, but not necessarily fully responding to it in a way that would win back the trust of key parts of the Democratic base and motivate them.”
‘Ongoing struggle’
But efforts to elevate Porter or Lee into the November election still fell short — a result most progressive groups blamed on Schiff’s strategy.
“Ultimately, the more than $11 million scheme that Schiff and his allies invested in to keep progressive women off the ballot proved insurmountable in a low voter turnout election in California,” reads a statement from Power PAC, a progressive group supporting Lee.
But South shrugged off the criticism, arguing it is “fair game” in a top-two primary for a candidate to target any of their opponents, regardless of party affiliation.
“I know there’s all kinds of tut-tutting about the supposed cynicism of Schiff boosting Steve Garvey, but the fact of the matter is neither of the two so-called ‘progressive’ candidates, Barbara Lee or Katie Porter, had the resources to do much of anything,” he said. “This wasn’t dirty pool.”
Porter would disagree. In her Tuesday night speech, she argued she was boxed out by “special interests and the ultra wealthy” that spent millions of dollars in the race. But she also adopted a similar tactic, airing ads to boost Republican candidate Eric Early, although at a much smaller scale than Schiff.
“Like we’ve seen in this campaign, they spend millions to defeat someone who will dilute their influence and disrupt the status quo,” she said in a campaign statement Wednesday.
Lee congratulated Schiff in a Wednesday statement, touting her “grassroots” campaign for “progressive change” while acknowledging a lackluster fundraising effort.
“Despite being heavily outspent by my opponents, our values never wavered,” she said.
Lee — who has represented the Oakland area in Congress since 1998 — has never had to build a national network of donors, South noted. And while Porter’s aggressive style may have worked in questioning witnesses during congressional hearings, it may not have resonated with voters and donors, South said.
The two candidates’ failure to advance out of the primary shows an “ongoing struggle” for progressives to break through, Geevarghese said.
“It is a problem that the progressive movement got splintered in California,” he said. “There is an establishment Democratic bloc that does have the reins on power. Whether it’s through the party, and then through their candidates, it’s challenging for our movement to be able to break through.”
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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
Some of the state’s most powerful legislators want Big Landlord out of California’s single family neighborhoods.
The Legislature will consider at least three bills this year to keep so-called institutional investors from gobbling up too many of the state’s widely coveted single-family homes.
Apartment buildings have long been an asset of interest for big investment companies, but the Big Money-owned single family rental is a 21st Century invention. During the Great Recession new companies began cobbling together rental empires out of the nation’s glut of foreclosed single-family homes.
Defenders of the business model applaud the role it played in propping up local housing markets and quickly filling homes that would have otherwise sat vacant and derelict. Critics liken these investors to financial vultures depriving would-be homeowners of a shot at the American Dream while hoarding the profits of the last decade’s run-up in national home prices and rents.
That debate ratcheted up again during the pandemic when millions of white collar renters, suddenly freed from the office, sought out more space further from the country’s urban cores. Today’s high interest rates have slowed that boom, but most analysts predict that the industry is here to stay, absent new restrictions.
California may be the first to enact some.
“Who are we fighting for? Are we fighting for the corporate interests?” San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward, chair of the Assembly’s housing committee and author of one of the three bills, said on the Assembly floor last month. “Or are we fighting for Californians, for their dream of homeownership?”
For all the debate, open questions about the industry’s size and its effect on the state’s affordability crisis abound. That’s in part because publicly available data about rental properties is scarce — something some state lawmakers have tried, but failed, to remedy in the past.
As lawmakers gear up to take on corporate landlords, here are seven things to know:
1. What would these bills actually do?
Assembly Bill 2584, written by Assemblymember Alex Lee, a Milpitas Democrat, would ban an institutional investor from buying or investing in additional single family home properties and then renting them out.
Senate Bill 1212, by Senate Housing Committee Chair Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley Democrat, would go a step further. It would ban institutional investors from “purchasing, acquiring, or leasing” a single-family home or duplex for any reason.
Assembly Bill 1333, authored by Ward, would ban developers from selling homes in bulk to big investors. This is aimed at increasingly popular “build-to-rent” projects, in which developers build single-family subdivisions with the specific aim of selling them to single-family rental companies. This bill is backed by the state’s association of REALTORs, who have an interest in banning bundled sales that cut their members out of the buying and selling process.
2. What are “institutional investors” anyway?
It depends on whom you ask. Even the three bills described above use different definitions.
Lee’s bill uses the size of a company’s investment portfolio as the cut-off, deeming any “business entity” with at least 1,000 single family homes on its books as “institutional.” That would apply to just four companies who own a total of 17,300 homes, according to estimates compiled by the California Research Bureau, which conducts research at the request of state lawmakers.
Skinner’s proposed ban would apply to a broader category of investor: Any managed fund, including private equity funds, and real estate investment trusts , which are publicly traded companies that invest in real estate.
Ward’s bill uses Lee’s 1,000-property cut off, but also specifically calls out those trusts in his bill language.
3. Do corporate landlords own a lot of homes?
Businesses that own at least 1,000 single family homes own roughly 446,000 properties nationwide, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute, though the report’s authors concede that the “data and definitions are somewhat fuzzy.”
Nearly half a million homes is a big number on its face. It’s more than the total number of homes in San Francisco. But compared to the housing stock as a whole, it’s less than half a percent. Even looking at just single-family rentals, the vast majority of which are owned by small and medium-sized landlords, the Urban Institute’s “large institutional” share makes up around 3%.
“I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market,” said Daryl Fairweather, economist with the real estate listing website RedFin. “People want to blame someone for high home prices and it’s easy to blame investors just because they’re, like, an opaque group of people…Really, the problem is just the lack of supply of housing.”
The industry’s critics counter that nationwide figures mask clustering in particular regions — and within regions, in particular cities, or even neighborhoods. They also say that the industry is growing.
That’s a sizable chunk, but again, the devil is in the definition. RedFin labeled an investor as any buyer with one of a number of tell-tale corporate signifiers in its name, such as “LLC” or “trust.” That would likely include a lot of “mom and pop” landlords, who have opted to put their properties into corporate structures to shield themselves from legal liability.
4. What about in California?
Lists of top single-family rental markets vary, but Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Jacksonville, Florida regularly come out on top. California does not appear to be a destination of choice for the nation’s largest investors. Less than 2% of single-family homes are owned by investors with 10 properties or more, statewide, according to the California Research Bureau.
What institutional investor-friendly markets have in common: Rapidly growing populations and relatively low real estate prices compared to rents.
“That does not describe California at all,” said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute.
When big investors do show up in California it’s disproportionately in the state’s quickly growing, still relatively affordable regions: the Inland Empire, the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento suburbs. The county with the highest share of single family homes owned by big investors is Fresno at 5.9%, according to the California Research Bureau.
Fresno is a bit of an unusual case, in that the largest single owner there, JD Home Rentals, is a local outfit whose portfolio of some 2,000 homes are clustered in that region.
Statewide, the largest single corporate owner is also the country’s biggest. Invitation Homes kicked off the corporate single-family rental rental trend when it started buying up distressed houses, rehabbing them and putting them on the rental market in 2012. Originally funded by the private equity giant Blackstone, the company has since become its own publicly traded company. The company owns 84,567 homes, of which 11,862 are in California, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
5. Do corporate landlords cause rents to go up?
There are plenty of anecdotes of big investors sweeping into a neighborhood, only for rent hikes to follow. Do big investors cause rents to rise or do rising rents attract big landlords? When researchers have tried to disentangle those two trends, they’ve produced mixed results.
One national overview found that rising rents in a city reliably preceded an increase in single-family investor activity three months later. But they didn’t find that the reverse was true, implying that investors chase after rising rents, but don’t cause them.
“I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market.”
— Daryl Fairweather, economist, RedFin
But another study found that single-family areas with higher concentrations of corporate ownership did, in fact, see modestly higher rents than comparable neighborhoods. These companies were able to exploit their relative control over a neighborhood’s housing stock to extract higher than fair-market rent from tenants, the researchers found. But the researchers also found a second explanation behind the rental run-up: By beefing up security across a slew of properties in the same area, they were able to lower crime rates and “enhance neighborhood quality.”
Many larger landlords also use rent-setting algorithms designed to squeeze the highest rent possible from new tenants. Defenders of the industry say those programs simply allow landlords to find an area’s market rent, though renters, prosecutors and federal regulators have argued that, at least in the apartment rental industry, it has amounted to illegal price-fixing.
6. Do big buyers take homeownership opportunities away from first-time buyers?
Every house that’s bought by a major investor and converted into a rental is one fewer opportunity for a would-be first-time buyer. That zero-sum trade off is particularly acute in places where few new homes are being built. A study out of Atlanta found that an influx of institutional investment in a neighborhood predicted a decline in the area’s homeownership rate. In contrast, a study in the Netherlands found that the reverse was true: When cities banned investors from converting homes into rentals, the number of first-time buyers shot up.
Defenders of the industry offer a counterpoint: So what? In places where home prices are out of reach for the average person, putting more single-family houses on the rental market gives more people the opportunity to enjoy some of the trappings of the American Dream — a yard, a garage, maybe a better school district — even if they can’t afford a down payment. The fact that major investors specialize in buying up homes in need of repair means they are often “competing for separate types of products” than first-time buyers anyway, said Goodman.
There’s also some evidence to suggest that allowing more rentals in single-family neighborhoods, no matter who the landlord is, makes those neighborhoods more economically and racially diverse. Case in point: The study of the Dutch corporate landlord ban also found a decline in the number of rentals, an overall rise in rents and an influx of older, richer and whiter residents in the neighborhoods in which those restrictions went into effect.
It’s unclear how relevant that all is in California. “We sell 99% of our homes to individuals,” said Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association, a trade group representing the state’s home builders. For most first-time homebuyers in California, “it’s not like you are competing with a big institutional player, other than a rich, single person from the Bay Area.”
7. Are corporate landlords bad landlords?
It depends on what you mean by “bad.”
Large institutional landlords appear more likely to run by-the-book, standardized operations. There are upsides to the corporate touch: Large corporations are more likely to operate 24/7 property management hotlines and have plumbers and electricians on retainer. Studies have also found that when filling a vacant unit, corporate landlords are more likely to use impersonal tenant screening systems, which are free of explicit (if not necessarily implicit) racial bias.
The downside: Corporate landlords can be ruthlessly efficient, with an emphasis on “ruthless.” One study, for example, found that they are significantly more likely than small landlords to file eviction notices as soon as they are legally allowed to.
And even companies with in-house legal teams might not always follow the law. In January, Invitation Homes paid $3.7 million in fines and restitution for hiking the rent on nearly 2,000 tenants in excess of what state law allows. In 2021, JD Home Rentals settled a class action lawsuit over habitability complaints.
“Relationships are much more formal when it’s Invitation Homes as opposed to the guy next door and there are pros and cons to that,” said Goodman, the Urban Institute economist. As an example, she noted that her adult daughter had a landlord who used to accept pizza as amends for a tardy rent check.
“You can’t send Invitation Homes a pizza,” she said.
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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
We are saddened to announce that our beloved GG, Ione Franz, passed
away peacefully holding her husband’s hand on February 24, 2024.
Ione was born
February 26, 1936, to Joe and Mary Leonardo. She grew up in Ferndale
with her siblings Mary, Evelyn, Joe and Frank. In 1953 she was
crowned Queen of The Holy Ghost Portuguese Celebration. Ione
graduated from Ferndale High School in 1954 and spent her life in the
field of bookkeeping. On July 17, 1970, she married the love of her
life Lee Franz, and they were happily married for 53 years.
Ione was known
for her amazing sense of humor, love of Wildcats Football games with
her cowbell in hand, volunteering at The Ferndale Museum, going to
her great-grandkids school and sporting events, anything that
involved spending time with her family and most of all … she loved
to SHOP!!
Ione is survived
by her husband Lee Franz, children Sandy Hosley, Debbie Hosley,
Steven Hosley and daughter-in-law Claudia Hosley. Grandchildren,
Rendy Hosley, Janessa Campbell (Kyle), Hollie Kostick (Wes), Keri
Hosley, Dennis Hosley JR. (Kelly) and Lee Hosley.
Great-grandchildren, Avery Ione and Darian Campbell, Kelsey and
Donovan Atkinson, Dalton and Sullivan Hosley, as well as many more
loved ones.
Ione was
proceeded in death by her mother Mary, father Joe, brothers Joe and
Frank, sister Mary and her son Dennis Hosley.
While we mourn
the loss of our beloved GG’s passing, we take comfort in knowing
that she has been reunited with her friends and loved ones up above.
We will carry her memory in our hearts for a lifetime.
Matthew 5:4 –
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Services will be
held on March 15 at 3 p.m., at Sanders Funeral Home, 1835 E St. Eureka. In lieu of flowers, we request donations to be made to the Cancer
Society or St. Jude’s Hospital.
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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Ione Franz’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here.
On March 6, 2024, at approximately 9:20 am., Eureka Police Department (EPD) officers
responded to the 700 block of 5th Street for the report of a bank robbery that had just
occurred. The reporting party stated a male subject entered the bank, passed the teller
a note stating he had a weapon and this was a robbery. The teller complied with the
suspect and the suspect fled the bank on foot with an undisclosed amount of cash.
While officers were searching the vicinity for the suspect, EPD’s Communications
Center received information that that suspect was being detained inside the courthouse
on the 5th Street side. Upon officer’s arrival, they met with a Humboldt County Sheriff’s
Deputy who had detained the suspect at the security check point. EPD Detectives
responded to the scene and took over the investigation.
The suspect was identified as 58-year-old Jonathan Hening of Eureka. The investigation
revealed that after committing the robbery, Hening began to regret his actions, entered
the courthouse and surrendered himself to the security personnel at the checkpoint.
All the cash from the robbery was recovered on Hening’s person at the time of his
arrest and no weapon was found.
Hening was placed under arrest and booked at the Humboldt County Correctional
Facility on a robbery charge.
Conceptual rendering of the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal. | Photo: Harbor District.
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Private energy company Crowley Wind Services’s exclusive right to negotiate [ERTN] with the Port of Humboldt Bay – a partnership announced with great fanfare 16 months ago – will expire at the end of the month without the anticipated agreement enlisting Crowley to develop and operate a heavy-lift marine terminal on the Samoa Peninsula, the Outpost has learned.
Representatives for both Crowley and the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District say they remain confident about the future of the port development project, especially given the $426 million Department of Transportation grant announced in January, but the dissolution of a formal agreement between the two parties makes it unclear what level of involvement, if any, Crowley will have in that project.
“Crowley continues to support the Harbor District’s goal of an offshore wind terminal at Humboldt Bay that is sustainable for the long-term,” the company’s corporate communications director, David DeCamp, said in an emailed statement. “While the exclusive right to negotiate an agreement will expire in March, the evaluation and due diligence produced valuable planning insight into the next steps of a terminal project.”
The proposed Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal project aims to convert the Harbor District’s 86-acre Marine Terminal II property —formerly home to the Samoa pulp mill — into a state-of-the-art industrial site for manufacturing, assembling and exporting the massive blades, towers, rotors and other components of offshore wind farms along the West Coast. With a tentative completion date currently scheduled for 2030, the facility would be the second-largest wind terminal in the United States, according to the Harbor District. Now, however, it’s not clear who will build it.
Rob Holmlund, the Harbor District’s director of development, said there’s always a degree of uncertainty in negotiations of this magnitude, and he’s not concerned about the ERTN with Crowley expiring.
“It could ultimately end up being good for everyone, including Crowley,” he said. “They’ve been really valuable to the project. … It’s just, multi-hundred-million-dollar projects are complicated, and sometimes things don’t end up exactly the way you envisioned. But it doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. So our relationship is evolving into a different thing, likely, but that’s not bad.”
Holmlund said the Harbor District may wind up issuing a new request for qualifications (RFQ) in the coming months in hopes of recruiting another company capable of building and operating the marine terminal.
“With that federal grant and the progress that we’ve made and all of the hard work we’ve put into it with stakeholders and Tribes, I think we feel very confident that we would get additional proposals and find a different operator partner, maybe somebody to join with Crowley,” Holmlund said.
Crowley Wind Services’ tenure on the North Coast hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. Late last summer the company abruptly parted ways with Vice President Jeff Andreini amid allegations that executives never directly addressed. Parent company Crowley Maritime, meanwhile, got embroiled in controversy over allegations of sexual assault and sex trafficking elsewhere in the corporation, and executives did discuss those matters in a sit-down conversation with the Outpost’s Izzy Vanderheiden.
In an opinion piece published by the Times-Standard, Yurok Tribal Chairman Joe James said the allegations pointed to “a rotten company culture” at Crowley, and he urged the Harbor District to reconsider its partnership given the ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) crisis.
In the near term, Crowley plans to retain the satellite office it opened in Eureka’s Carson Block building last year, with DeCamp explaining, “It serves as our office to support the future development of wind services in the region, state and the U.S. West Coast.”
Among the challenges now facing the Harbor District is the task of securing more than $400 million in private sector funds to match the massive federal grant announced six weeks ago. Per the terms of that grant, the Harbor District has roughly two and a half years — until September 2026 — to cobble together those funds.
Crowley previously agreed to help the Harbor District in that endeavor, but even if they depart from the project entirely, Holmlund said he’s confident that the district can secure the necessary matching funds from other sources, including private investors, another corporate operator and potentially the State of California, where legislators have proposed a $1 billion bond act to help pay for port expansions to support the nascent offshore wind industry.
“Our project is critical to the state and federal governments reaching renewable energy goals, so we’re confident that we’re going to find a way to get the match one way or the other,” Holmlund said, adding that the district has until 2029 to obligate the funds from the $426 million federal grant.
In the meantime, the Harbor District is using a $10.45 million grant from the California Energy Commission and an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Marine Administration (MARAD) to complete technical studies, preliminary design and pre-permitting work.
“We’re making really good progress with special studies, design and permitting,” Holmlund said. He also noted that the district continues to hold regular meetings with the seven local Tribal governments, neighborhood groups and environmental organizations.
After more than four hours of deliberation, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved the county’s long-anticipated Short-Term Rental (STR) Ordinance.
The ordinance establishes a permitting process for individuals and entities operating STRs (dwelling units that are rented to guests for 30 consecutive days or less, through services such as Airbnb or Vrbo) within unincorporated areas of the county. The new rules put a cap on the total number of STRs in unincorporated Humboldt and impose additional restrictions on STRs located in more populous areas where housing availability is limited.
Once the ordinance takes effect at the beginning of April, existing STR operators can send in their permit applications for consideration. However, STR operators in the coastal zone will have to wait until the ordinance is certified by the California Coastal Commission, likely in the next month or so. Existing operators without unresolved property violations will be given first priority.
The main point of contention during Tuesday’s meeting revolved around how many STRs should be allowed to operate in a given area to balance the needs of property owners, tenants and neighbors.
The Humboldt County Planning Commission encountered the same issue during its deliberations on the subject and agreed to a two percent cap on the total number of STR units in the “Greater Humboldt Bay Area” – including the Community Plan Areas (CPA) for Arcata, Blue Lake, Carlotta, Eureka, Fieldbrook, Fortuna, Freshwater, Glendale, Hydesville, Jacoby Creek, McKinleyville, Rio Dell, Trinidad and Westhaven – where housing is already scarce. The commission also set a five percent cap on STRs in all other CPAs, with the exception of the inland portion of Shelter Cove “where the standard does not apply” due to specific zoning rules.
During the board’s last discussion on the matter, Fifth District Supervisor Steve Madrone advocated for both Big Lagoon and Willow Creek to be included in the two percent cap.
Speaking during public comment, Shannon Hughes, a member of the Willow Creek Community Services District (CSD) board of directors, urged the board to look into the matter further to get “a full scope of the opinion out in Willow Creek.”
“[W]hat we lack in Willow Creek is the affordable housing,” she said. “The [STR] houses that would become vacant are probably not going to be the types of rentals that people in Willow Creek – with an average income of around $50,000 [per year] – would be able to afford. We do lack affordable housing, and I will definitely repeat that, but we also lack lodging.”
Willow Creek resident Riley Morrison felt similarly, noting that many of the STRs in the area are second homes and wouldn’t be available for rent otherwise. “The problem exists not because of the shortage of available housing, but because of the shortage of available, affordable housing,” he said. “The wage gap and socioeconomic divide in our community is truly at the forefront.”
Following public comment, Madrone spoke in favor of moving forward with the two percent cap on STRs in Willow Creek but acknowledged that it was a divided issue.
“I suspect if we polled the whole community we probably see a similar split,” he said. “There’s not going to be a consensus on one side or the other. I mean, my preference would actually be to apply this cap to every CSD area, as I stated earlier, but that may be a heavy lift for this board to consider. At this point, I’m willing to go ahead and let the Willow Creek thing pan out into the future.”
The board nixed the Willow Creek alternative but agreed to include the Big Lagoon Park Subdivision and the Big Lagoon Estates Subdivision, along Roundhouse Creek Road, in the Trinidad CPA.
Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson said he would be willing to support the cap in Willow Creek, noting, “I don’t know what the future is going to bring.”
“We could do five percent caps in those various zones, just as a holding spot so we [can] have somebody come back and evaluate,” he said. “Right now it’s no cap, and I think … that’s a weird precedent for us to have countywide. Maybe everything outside these zones … we could just do countywide a two percent cap and then let the concentrations happen where the concentrations happen.”
Wilson went on to say that not having a cap in certain communities implies that the county has “absolutely no concern that there’s going to be any sort of impacts in relation to housing” in the future and suggested that the board implement a five or ten percent countywide cap. “Even if we had a liberal cap, that would be better than no cap at all.”
Second District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell argued that a cap – especially one as low as two or five percent – was not necessary in some of the county’s more rural communities.
“If you had [gone] to the community meetings in the other areas, Supervisor Wilson, you may know why the [cap] adjustment came [about],” she said. “Two percent is not ‘liberal’ by any means. In your space maybe, not in mine. … [T]hose areas outside are barely hanging on by a thread right now.”
Fourth District Supervisor Natalie Arroyo said she could understand where Wilson was coming from “in theory,” but said she could also understand Bushnell’s point that STRs provide critical income for some rural property owners. “I’d love for us to find a way that that works for all our communities.”
After a bit of tense back and forth between board members, the board agreed to implement a five percent countywide cap on STRs with a provision that would allow residents outside of CPAs to apply for a special permit even if the cap was exceeded.
Earlier in the meeting, the board explored the possibility of allowing permit transfers but ultimately decided to go with the Planning Commission’s original recommendation to not allow transfers.
The board also agreed to add language to accommodate units that are rented out for a portion of the year. Under the ordinance, properties “rented on a short-term basis for 60 consecutive days or fewer” are considered part-time and are not subject to the cap.
The board unanimously approved the ordinance 5-0.
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Other notable bits from the meeting:
The board selected McKinleyville resident Lorna McFarlane to fill the at-large vacancy on the Humboldt County Planning Commission, which was recently vacated by Commissioner Brian Mitchell. McFarlane currently works as a senior environmental scientist with Caltrans’ Climate Change Adaptation Branch and has extensive experience in environmental management and climate change science. Her two-year appointment was unanimously approved by the board.
The board received a presentation from Humboldt County Public Health Officer Dr. Candy Stockton on the last two years of local drug poisoning and fentanyl-related deaths. Accidental overdose deaths went down slightly between 2022 and 2023, from 83 to 79, according to Stockton.
Representatives of the Health and Social Policy Institute (HASPI) presented the Board of Supervisors with the California Public Health Leadership Award in recognition of the board’s leadership in adopting a Comprehensive Tobacco Retailer License Ordinance in July of 2023. The award is the first of its kind to be given to a northern California government entity.
On Wednesday, March 6 at 2:49 a.m., the Arcata Fire District
was dispatched to a residential structure fire on Murray Road.
Multiple reports came in that a 2-story residential structure was well-involved in fire. The
first engine arrived and found a two-story structure 75% involved.
Due to the volume of fire and partial collapse of the compromised structure, firefighters
engaged in exterior operations utilizing large hose streams of water and the deck gun.
Fuel loading contributed to the long burn time of the fire.
The building was vacant and boarded-up prior to the fire. No civilians or firefighters were
injured during this incident, but the structure was a complete loss. The cause of the fire
is under investigation.
The Arcata Fire District would like to thank Fieldbrook Volunteer Fire, Westhaven
Volunteer Fire, Blue Lake Volunteer Fire, Humboldt Bay Fire and Calfire for responding,
and Samoa Fire District for covering our stations during our involvement in this incident.
