California will do anything to protect immigrants — except build them housing
Over the past several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Californians have taken to the streets to protest the Trump administration's increasingly authoritarian efforts to deport the state's undocumented population.
There's a moral imperative behind these protests; the vast majority of the people being targeted by federal agents are law-abiding workers with no criminal records. There's a practical one, too: This state cannot function without its migrant workers, particularly our agricultural sector.
It isn't just that undocumented workers will accept lower wages than their American counterparts. Farming is hard, skilled labor. Absent changes to federal immigration policy that would allow and incentivize more migrants to come here legally, California doesn't have the trained workforce it needs to feed itself and the nation. (We accounted for 41% of the country's vegetable sales in 2022.)
And so, Californians and our politicians have rightly gone to battle with President Donald Trump.
Yet as supportive as this editorial board is of these efforts, we'd be remiss if we didn't call something out:
This state needs to become as passionate about housing our essential workers as it is about fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It's been just over two and a half years since the deadly shootings in Half Moon Bay put the Dickensian living conditions of California's farmworkers — the vast majority of whom are undocumented — on the national radar. For decades, California had allowed its migrant workers to live in overcrowded, mold-filled housing with bacteria-ridden drinking water. That's if it housed them at all.
What's changed? Not nearly enough, according to San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller, whose district includes the site of the 2023 massacre.
Building housing on farmland in his district has proven to be a logistical challenge amid drainage issues, sewage concerns and access to drinkable water. Yet trying to build worker housing off-site hits an even more intractable roadblock.
'The coastal community is, by a large majority, supportive of farmworkers,' he said. 'The opposition you run into is around density.'
San Mateo County is hardly unique in this regard. In Marin County, for instance, an effort to build housing for the workers, many undocumented, being displaced by the closure of ranches in the Point Reyes National Seashore has been met with a lawsuit by NIMBY groups.
This is, of course, unacceptable. And yet, state and local rules still too often empower obstructionism.
Mueller said the arduous progress San Mateo County has made in building farmworker housing was mostly achieved using emergency powers that streamlined the usual permitting processes.
'The state was wonderful in getting our project moving,' Mueller said. 'We just need to do that at scale across the state.'
We're nowhere close.
In 2024, California lawmakers passed a measure to exempt farmworker housing up to 150 units from review under the California Environmental Quality Act. However, this streamlining applied to only two counties: Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. A bill in the state Legislature, AB457 from Assembly Member Esmerelda Soria, D-Merced, would expand those streamlining measures to Fresno, Madera and Merced counties.
Over 40% of the state's land is used for agriculture. We're never going to get anywhere with a drip-drop of county-by-county CEQA carve-outs.
Assembly Member Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, told the editorial board he'd be supportive of an effort to expand CEQA streamlining to his district and perhaps even statewide.
But even that wouldn't be enough, Mueller said.
For many Bay Area farming communities, the California Coastal Commission has its own separate and arduous permitting process. Without streamlining bills to cover this and CEQA, little progress will be made.
And now an even greater challenge comes from the Trump administration.
Farmworker-specific housing makes easy pickings for federal raids. Mueller says he fears his efforts to build new farmworker housing may have inadvertently 'put a target on the back' of the people he's spent years trying to help.
This fear isn't theoretical. Gov. Gavin Newsom's office recently issued a press release saying that federal deportation authorities requested and received the addresses and immigration status of Medi-Cal recipients after the state expanded health insurance benefits to low-income undocumented workers.
Tailored government efforts for the undocumented risk creating a paper trail that puts them in danger.
'It is clear that we must reassess our programs to ensure we are doing all we can to protect the personal information of our community,' incoming state Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, told the editorial board.
We don't have the answer to this quandary on the health care front. But California can do something for migrant workers as it relates to housing — something Limón and too many other California politicians have been reluctant to do.
Make it easier to build.
AB457 is an admission from legislators that CEQA creates onerous and unnecessary impediments to development. Yet housing streamlining bills such as SB79 from San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, which would exempt developments near transit from CEQA review, provided they comply with local affordable housing mandates and other criteria, are receiving immense political pushback.
Undocumented renters in California have virtually the same rights as everyone else in the private rental market under the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act. And landlords are prohibited from disclosing, or typically even asking about, immigration status.
But without an adequate housing supply, those protections go to waste.
Can most undocumented workers afford to buy a shiny new condo? Almost certainly not. But they could potentially move into older units that open up when other renters decide to buy. And they certainly could benefit from the development of new mother-in-law units — such as those that might have been built had cities like San Diego not just rolled back their accessory dwelling unit laws in the face of community opposition.
If California is willing to fight the federal government to keep its undocumented residents here, it should also be willing to fight to ensure they don't live in squalor.
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