Page 3 - Sonoma County Gazette January 2016

Silo Thinking
More Senior Housing Needed
We must stop being intransigent silo thinkers and instead begin to look at our community as a living system. The front-page article “Space to Breathe” is a perfect example of the unintended consequences of single-issue politics.
In the same issue there was a brief report on the Farmworkers’ Health Survey. Unfortunately little of the results were included but in summary the majority of farmworker families exist on starvation incomes without adequate healthcare and in appalling housing. Those thousands of protected vineyards require one worker for every five acres of grapes. If you have been following any of the housing discussions in our various cities it is clear that the NIMBY push back is adamant and ubiquitous. Most homeowners are perfectly fine keeping their urban growth boundaries just as there are, and resist denser development, thank you very much. The high cost of housing has resulted in many of the homes that were once occupied by our workforce being converted to weekend party crash pads. Where are these families to live?
I would love to support the Greenbelt Alliance but I cannot do so unless they take the initiative and add provisions for farmworker housing within the community separators. Such housing could become the model for the uber-green homes that we will need to build as we face the looming environmental issues that confront us.
Jay Beckwith
CORRECTION: In the December edition of the Gazette we published a letter written by Rene’ de Monchy but mistakenly printed the letter-writer as Ray Holly. We apologize both to Ray and to René for the error. On the same subject Alain Serkissian checks in as follows...
I read and enjoy your paper regularly and I thought you and your readers would be interested in knowing what happened at the board of supervisors meeting on November 10, 2015 in regards to expanding our senior assisted living home in Santa Rosa. The supervisors voted 4 out of 5 against a project presented before them for the expansion of a 6 bed Residential Care Facility for the Elderly into a 12 bed residential community. This vote was a big surprise based on the needs of this county.
Who wouldn’t favor a ballot measure to “renew and expand protections from sprawl” or to “Expand the existing community separators to cover broader landscape”? The problem is that one persons sprawl is another person’s home. Where one sees protected farms, others may see chemical intensive agroindustry.
I thought I should clarify in this letter the outraged feelings it produced by giving you a little explanation based on facts:
The Board of Supervisors with our own Supervisor Shirley Zane spearheaded the initiative (published on the front page article of the PD in May 2015) adopted a vision for Sonoma County called “Aging Together Sonoma County” where there has been an emphasis on the needs of the elderly in Sonoma County and in response to the rapid growth of a that portion of our population demonstrated as follows:
Sonoma County has 500,000.00 citizens, out of which, today we have 20% (100,000.00) 65 and older (census, ombudsman and AAA ). This number will become 25% (125,000.00) within the next 15 years. TODAY, we only have roughly 4,700.00 beds available in Sonoma County for seniors (4.5% ), between Skilled Nursing Facility beds (1,700 beds in SNF) and Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly beds (3,100 in RCFE). These numbers show the incredible ascending lodging crisis and the lack of options that our elderly face!
In addition, Ken Porter wrote in a PD article from May 2015 that, “ elected leaders set the stage for making Sonoma County a national model for how to care for and interact with its aging population...” He goes on to indicate that “ it will be a challenge in the years ahead to find stable housing for our seniors to live “...and “ both social isolation and loneliness are associated with a higher risk of mortality in older adults”. Even French actress Juliette Binoche stated in an
LETTERS cont’d on page 4
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